Five prime components of brand design

1. Target Audience: A target audience is a group of people identified as being likely customers of a business. The target audience may be dictated by age, gender, income, location, interests or a myriad of other factors. Depending upon what you sell, your target audience might be a niche or broader. As a marketer, understanding your target audience is vital.
2. Brand Essence: Brand essence is the core characteristic that defines a brand. It is an intangible attribute that separates your brand from your competition’s brand by your audience. It is emotional and based on feelings. Brand essence is intangible for your audience, unique to your brand and, most importantly, reliable.
3. Brand Promise: a brand is a source of a promise to the consumer. It promises relevant differentiated benefits. Everything, as an organization does, should be focused on enhancing delivery against its brand’s promise. The ideal powerful benefit has the following three qualities: 1) It is extremely important to the target customer; 2) Your organization is uniquely suited to deliver it, and 3) Competitors are not currently addressing it.
4. Brand Archetype: There’s just something about the brands we connect with. We have an affinity with them that’s hard to put your finger on. It’s as if we know them. In some cases, it’s as if we love them. It’s generally the brand archetype. The most loved brands connect with their audience on a deeper level than most brands. brand archetype goes a level deeper, to identify the primary quality of motivation that underlies the brand’s view of the world and its behaviour.
5. Brand Personality: Not all brands have a personality, or at least a strong, distinctive personality. However, those brands that do have personality have a significant advantage; they are more likely to stand out from the crowd and have a message. Brand personality is a set of human characteristics that are attributed to a brand name. A brand personality is something to which the consumer can relate; an effective brand increases its brand equity by having a consistent set of traits that a specific consumer segment enjoys.

Reference: Brad Vanauken (2015). Brand Aid: A Quick Reference Guide to Solving your Branding Problems and Strengthening your Market Position, second edition, American Market Association: New York