What Is the Difference Between Branding and Visual Identity?
Branding and visual identity are overlapping areas, but the perspective is completely different - and most people conflate them.
Visual identity takes the perspective of the organisation itself. It asks: who are we, what values do we hold, what do we want to communicate? It works inside out. You start from your own story and manifest it outward.
Branding is the opposite direction. It is outside in. It asks: how are we currently perceived? How do we want to be perceived? Where do we sit in the market relative to others?
In Dutch there is a useful distinction: identiteit (identity) and imago (image). Identity is who you are. Image is how you are seen. Branding is largely about closing the gap between the two; and building something in the market that reflects what you actually stand for.
This is why branding always starts with positioning, never with aesthetics.
You Already Have a Brand - The Question Is Whether It Is Defined
Every company has an identity, whether they have defined it or not. And every company is being perceived as something, whether they have intended it or not.
The question is not if you have a brand. The question is whether yours is doing anything useful.
A defined visual identity, one with a clear purpose, values, and story behind it, gives everyone in your organisation something to build from. It makes your marketing more coherent, your sales conversations more confident, and your content more consistent. Without it, every touchpoint becomes a guess.
As Mark Mulder, our Creative Director, puts it: if you have a very defined vision, purpose, and clear values, then you can build a truly effective and cohesive story out of that. That story helps everyone understand what you do, why you sell what you sell, and how what you sell is different from what others sell.
Clarity of identity is a competitive advantage. And most companies do not have it.
When Should a Company Invest in Branding?
Ideally from the beginning, but realistically, most companies are not ready at day one. You often do not have the resources. And sometimes you do not yet have a clear enough picture of who you are. You need real interactions with the market before you can position yourself relative to it.
In practice, the starting point is often a website. To build one, you need a position, a logo, and copy. The process begins there whether you plan it or not.
But if you want to do it properly, you have to go deeper. That means asking: who are we, what is our drive, what is our purpose, and where do we want to be in five or ten years?
There is a useful metaphor here. Imagine climbing a ladder as fast as you can, only to realise the ladder is against the wrong wall. Taking time to define where you actually want to go is never wasted.
Doesn’t Canva Do This?
The tools are more accessible. That does not mean the work is the same.
When we start a branding process at sixtynine, we do not start with a colour palette. We start by asking: tell me who you are. Tell me your drive, your purpose, why you do what you do. Not just what you sell, but why you want to sell it.
This is the best principle of branding. It is almost psychological. You are really diving into a company, touching on things that its founders often do not have articulate answers to yet.
You see this often, with words like professional and innovative. But those words are placeholders. The real conversation needs to happen underneath them - to get to something specific, authentic.
A logo made in Canva in an hour is the output of a process that has not happened yet.
What a Rebrand Actually Means
When clients come to us asking for a rebrand, they are usually not happy with how their brand is perceived. Sometimes it feels purely aesthetic: the brand looks old-fashioned, or it was built ten years ago and does not work on social media. But it is never only aesthetic.
If it is purely a visual update, that is a restyling. Not a rebrand.
A real rebrand means: my brand values (or my future brand values) are no longer aligned with how I am currently perceived. And since branding is always about positioning, the work is not about picking new colours. It is about clarifying where you sit in the market and making sure your visual and verbal identity reflects that.
What Is Positioning and Why Does It Matter?
Positioning means understanding where you sit in the market relative to others, and making sure that position is a consequence of who you actually are and what you are good at.
Positioning is always a balance between who I am and what I am good at, versus where the opportunities are. You need both.
Why Repositioning Is Hard
When someone comes wanting to reposition after a decade in business, they already know something is off. They come in wanting to change. The challenge is getting them to let go of their history (or at least become very aware that the history belongs to the past).
People want to change. But when that change becomes radical - when it really means throwing things away - it gets hard. Habits, accumulated attachments, years of built identity.
Getting someone to truly accept and embrace the consequences of choosing to rebrand is the hardest part of the work. Not the design or the naming. The commitment to truly let go of habits, accumulated attachments, and years of built identity.
Because a half-committed rebrand is often worse than no rebrand. Different stories start to mix. It becomes confusing, the market does not know how to read you. And you have spent considerable money getting to a worse position than where you started.
Genre: The Framework Most Branding Conversations Miss
Every market has what Mark calls a genre - a set of conventions and visual rules that audiences recognise. Like film genres: horror has a certain look, certain rules, certain expectations. So do industries.
A cultural organisation operates in a genre that allows for poetic, abstract, unconventional approaches. Insurance operates in a genre that is far more conservative. A tech startup has different conventions than a law firm.
This matters enormously for positioning. You always have to operate within the genre enough for your audience to recognise what you are. But if you stay entirely within it, you are invisible. You are just another version of the thing they have already seen.
The goal is to be recognisably in the genre, but distinct within it.
Aesthetics Are Not the Same as Brand Strategy
Aesthetics matter. But they are not the core.
Good branding always balances two things: the emotional: I like this, this feels right - and the meaningful: what does this communicate in this specific market?
This is where clients most often go wrong. They start selecting based on personal taste. They like a certain colour, they do not like a typeface because it looks like a festival, they want to keep an element from an old logo they have an attachment to. These are aesthetic preferences. They are not brand strategy.
The right question is not: which of these do I like most? The right question is: which of these positions us best and fits our vision for the next five to ten years?
Those are very different questions. And only one of them leads to a brand that works.
How We Approach Brand Identity at sixtynine
When we take on a brand project, we do not start with moodboards. We start with questions.
Who are you? What do you want to be known for? What is the drive behind what you do? Where are you positioned today and where do you want to be? What genre are you operating in, and where is the opportunity to be distinct within it?
From there, we build outward. Identity first. Visual expression second. And always with one eye on how this lands in the market - because branding is not what you say about yourself. It is what people understand about you after the interaction.
The can-do mentality we are known for also applies here. We move. We make things real. We do not spend six months in workshops and then hand over a PDF. We build, test, iterate, and build again. Because a brand is not a finished thing. It is a living position that has to grow with the company.