Mastering Your Organisation’s Identity: The Essential Guide to Modern Branding

Developing a professional club branding strategy is essential for increasing visibility and driving growth. This guide explores how to define your association brand identity by focusing on brand personality and using colour theory for brands to evoke the right emotions. We discuss the importance of descriptive logos and the "rule of three" for choosing a cohesive colour palette. By creating a punchy tagline and maintaining brand consistency across all digital platforms, your organisation can build a trustworthy and instantly recognisable presence.

A great brand can be an incredible asset to a company. If I say, “Just Do It,” or “Finger Licking Good,” you know exactly what companies I’m talking about. The logos below are nothing more than differently coloured basic shapes, yet I’m sure you’ll know exactly which companies they are for. 

This company doesn’t even need to put its whole logo on a billboard for it to be instantly recognisable. 

A good brand is worth its weight in gold. It allows your organisation to be instantly recognisable, from a simple logo or a few words, and clearly communicates to the public exactly what you offer. Establishing a cohesive, clear brand identity is incredibly important for any membership organisation, as it goes a long way toward increasing visibility, building recognition, and driving membership growth.

So, today, let’s look at the essential steps you can take to properly brand your club or association, ensuring you have the strong identity needed to thrive for years to come.

In this article, we will cover the following topics:

• Brand Personality
• Brand Logo And Colour Scheme
• Brand Name And Tagline
• Maintaining brand consistency 

Defining Your Organisation's Personality

Every successful business or organisation has a distinct personality, a unique tone of voice that dictates how it communicates with its audience and members. Regardless of your organisation’s mission, establishing this unique tone is critical to connecting with the right people.

You need to work out if your organisation is serious or funny, how formal you want to be when communicating with members, and whether you are in a professional environment or a casual one. These are the types of questions you will need to answer to develop a cohesive brand for your organisation.   

The elements of a membership organisation's brand personality include characteristics such as:  

• Tone Of Voice 
• Communication Style
• Values
• Attitude
• Behaviour
• Overall Image

Your personality should reflect your purpose and mission and help create an emotional connection with your audience. Your personality should feel authentic, unique, and consistent across all communications. It's important to note that a brand personality is not just a superficial image but should align with the brand's core values and beliefs.

Brand Personality In Action

Your branding and personality must be more than just a superficial style; they should influence everything your organisation does. This includes the tone of your emails to members, your advertising campaigns, your website design, and much, much more.

Take, for example, the contrasting brands of Jack Daniel's Whiskey and Johnnie Walker Scotch Whisky. While both companies offer a broadly similar product and compete in a similar price range, their branding and resulting personalities are vastly different.

On the left are two of Jack Daniel’s recent Instagram posts, and on the right are two of Johnnie Walker’s.

You can instantly see how each company aims for a very different market through a distinct personality. For instance, the Jack Daniel’s images evoke words like rugged, Western, gritty, tattooed, and casual. In contrast, the Johnnie Walker visuals suggest words like glamorous, chic, gourmet, and artisanal.

This applies to all parts of their business as well. The Jack Daniel’s website uses lots of black, bold text and images, and more casual, familiar language. While Johnnie Walker uses a desaturated gold with smaller amounts of black, a more sleek design and the language that’s a little more refined. 

As a membership organisation, you also need a unique personality and tone of voice when talking to your members. This personality will influence the way you. 

How To Design An Effective Club Logo And Colour Scheme

As I mentioned at the start of this article, having a great instantly recognisable logo is super important, as it allows people to instantly know who you are and what you offer. So, let’s look at what makes a logo great so you can ensure yours is, too.

A study done by Harvard Business Review also found that “descriptive” logos outperform “non-descriptive” logos. Descriptive logos make brands appear more trustworthy, “increase consumers’ willingness to buy from brands,” and result in higher opinions of the brand. 

A descriptive logo is a logo that visually represents what the brand offers. For example, Hungry Jack’s has a descriptive logo, as their logo is a burger. 

A good example of why a descriptive logo is important can be found in the logos of two sports teams called the Sharks. Below are the logos for the San Jose Sharks and the Cronulla Sharks. 

The logo for the San Jose Sharks tells the viewer everything we need to know about them. We know what they are called, where they are from and what sport they play. The Cronulla Sharks’ logo, on the other hand, doesn’t tell us everything we need to know. If you weren’t Australian or didn’t follow the NRL, that could just as easily be a logo for a surf club or a lawn bowls club; there is no context there. 

Colour Theory & The Psychology Of Colour

While the heading colour theory and the psychology of colour sounds like the university course that the most annoying person you know won't shut up about, it will be super useful here.

A few years ago, Adobe researched the most commonly used colours in brand logos by looking into the 100 most popular brands. In this research, they found some interesting things. 

Blue is the most commonly used brand colour, followed closely by red, and then black or greyscale in third place. They also found that 95% of brands use only one or two colours in their logo. Adobe reports that only 41% of brands use text in their logo, and only 9% include the brand name. 

A good logo goes beyond just having two colours and a few words; the colours themselves are incredibly important. It is generally accepted that different colours invoke different emotions in people. By working out which colours provoke which emotions, you can start working out which colours best represent your brand.

Look at these logos I already talked about. What colours do they use and what emotions do you think they are trying to provoke? 

Apple tends to use either a black/greyscale logo or a plain white one; these colours are tied to simplicity, sophistication and security. General Electric uses blue and white, trust, competence, honesty and clarity. Red Bull uses red and yellow for excitement, strength, energy, and happiness. You can understand why these brands would want to invoke those emotions. 

Think about some of the most popular brands you know. What colours do they use, how many different colours do they use, and what emotions do you think they are trying to evoke? 

Using the colours that best represent your brand is a great way to effectively communicate what you want your club to stand for. Take the three identical logos below; simply changing the colours used in them vastly changes what sort of brand you imagine they represent.

Colour Theory Rule Of Threes 

The rule of threes in colour theory is a straightforward way to develop the colours for your club branding. The rule of three states that the most dominant colour should be a Primary colour, i.e. red, blue and yellow. The second most used colour should be a secondary colour, i.e. green, orange and violet, and the third most used colour should be a tertiary colour, i.e. amber, teal, magenta, etc. 

 

When applying this rule to the design of your club's logo, you should keep in mind that, as I already mentioned, most logos only use one or two colours in their logo, so you may want to skip the tertiary colour altogether. 

 

Also, this is just a colour theory recommendation, not a hard and fast rule. This is just a little tip if you need help developing a colour scheme that works for your club's branding. 

 

Here is an example of an excellent fishing logo that I have deliberately ruined by not using the rule of three-colour theory. It's not good; this logo should go straight into the bin. 

 

Here is the same logo recoloured to use the rule of three. This is a lot better; you could see this logo being used by a fishing club today. It follows the rule of threes: blue is its primary colour, green is secondary, and blue-green is its tertiary colour. It uses lots of blue and some green, which in this context invokes the feeling of water, nature and peace. 

However, there’s no need to stop there. Adjusting the tones and brightness of the colours used can give us a much nicer version while still sticking with the rule of threes. 

I think this version with the more subdued colours looks much nicer than the above one. It still has all the right colours and invokes the right emotions, but does so in a slightly nicer way. 

Of course, you could cut out the tertiary colour altogether if you wanted to. Personally, the tertiary colour here is such an unsaturated shade of aqua that I wouldn’t bother removing it. However, it does still look nice without it. 

How To Create A Great Tagline

A tagline is a crucial part of a strong brand. It is your organisation's shorthand for everything you represent to your members. Writing a good tagline can be tricky; condensing so much information into a few words isn’t easy, but it’s very important. 

Your tagline is a one-sentence summary that demonstrates your core values and personality. It needs to be punchy, but it also needs to be functional. In a digital-first world, your tagline must be short enough to fit clearly under your logo on a mobile phone screen without becoming unreadable. It should also be powerful enough to act as a key selling point. 

The key to a good tagline is highlighting what you offer, your values, or your goals. Here are some great examples:

• Member Jungle: Making Membership Easy
• L’OREAL: Because You’re Worth It
• Mastercard: There are some things Money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s Mastercard. 
• Red Bull: Red Bull Gives You Wings
• Nike: Just Do It

All these taglines do a great job of instantly conveying what the company does and its unique selling point. Your membership organisation’s tagline needs to quickly communicate what you offer to your members. 

The good news is that most clubs and associations aren’t in as competitive fields as businesses. If someone is looking for a fishing club in their local area, they are going to have limited options, which means you can use your tagline to help get across some of your brand personality, rather than having to sell too hard.  

For example, I have added a name and logo to that fictional fishing club logo I was talking about in the colour section. 

The tagline "Catch Fish, Drink Whisky" gets across what the club does, the club's personality, and the club's tone of voice. From that alone, you can get a pretty good idea of what the club will be like.

Maintaining Brand Consistency Across Your Digital Presence

As you saw in the example of the fishing club logo, using a consistent font and colour palette is what makes the brand feel professional. Building a consistent identity is essential; there is no point in developing a great brand if it looks different every time a member interacts with you. To build a truly effective brand, you need to stick to your primary and secondary colours and use only one or two specific fonts for every single piece of communication.

The issue for a lot of clubs and associations isn’t a lack of effort; it’s that they are being hamstrung by fragmented digital systems.  If you are using separate tools for your website, your event ticketing, and your email marketing, you are forced to upload your logo and set your colour scheme multiple times. This makes it incredibly easy for mistakes to slip in, and if you ever decide to update your logo or refresh your colours, you have to hunt down and change it in every single system manually.

This is where an all-in-one system like Member Jungle gives your organisation a massive advantage. Instead of managing five different platforms, Member Jungle automatically enforces your brand consistency. You simply upload your logo and set your brand colours once, and the system instantly applies them across your entire ecosystem; from your website and mobile app to your event pages and digital membership cards. This ensures that every time a member interacts with you, they see a unified, professional brand without you having to lift a finger.

What Else You Need To Know About Branding Your Membership Organisation

You just need to have a good long think about who your membership organisation is and what it stands for, and then create a brand that accurately and effectively represents that. 

To find out how to keep your brand consistent across all of your digital presence in order to make it more effective, check out How to Maintain Brand Consistency Across Your Digital Channels.

If you want to know more about customising your organisation’s Member Jungle website, please read Customise Your Member Jungle Website To Suit Your Club's Voice & Tone.