Creating a healthy company: The Vega brand and the value of identity
Creating your own company from scratch can be an exciting process – but it’s also a huge challenge, particularly in today’s heavily-crowded marketplace.
If you want to make sure your voice is heard above all the noise created by competitors who are offering similar products to yours, then you’re going to need to think carefully about how you enter the industry. This means developing not just an exceptional unique selling point, but also an eye-catching logo, a heart-warming story, and a strong brand purpose.
The problem is, in their rush to start making money as quickly as possible, a lot of budding companies forget about the importance of building a strong brand. That means that by the time they start growing in their sector, the only way they can differentiate themselves is by selling the cheapest product on the market – regardless of whether it generates a profit or not.
In an age where differentiation is crucial to long-term success, we’re celebrating companies that started life the right way. These are companies that came prepared with a strong set of brand values, a vision of their target customer, and an identity that helped them to earn the loyalty of people in their niche.
Today, we’ll be getting to the bottom of some of the elements that guarantee a better chance of success, with the help of Vega – a company devoted to delivering natural, plant-based supplements to the fitness world. It’s hardly a startup brand, but something about Vega still feels fresh, and new to market.
Vega branding: What is Vega, anyway?
One of the biggest mistakes that companies make when they start experimenting with product ideas and service solutions, is that they overlook the value of a truly memorable brand. Perhaps the main reason for this is that the average entrepreneur considers a “brand” to be nothing more than a business name and logo.
While your visual and verbal identity are key elements of what makes your brand identity so compelling to your target audience, the truth is that an overall “brand” is so much more than one or two distinct factors. Instead, a company brand refers to the overall reputation of your company. That means that if you want to create a healthy company, you need to get to the bottom of your brand values.
The Vega brand is effective because its entire story is based on a strict set of principles. On the Vega branding website, you’ll find a complete insight into why the company was born, and what the people within the organisation are doing to keep the venture on track towards a pre-set company vision.
For instance, Vega suggests that the reason their company exists is they believe that today’s customers shouldn’t have to choose between health and convenience. By offering a range of clean, effective plant-based products, Vega feel that they can connect with a consumer base that’s interested in improving their wellbeing, but might not have a lot of time to deal with complex recipes and long sessions at the gym.
It’s this solid understanding of their user persona that has made it so easy for the Vega to pinpoint the key values that their customers care about most. After all, when you’re developing a new brand, you need to appeal to the interests of a specific demographic, or risk jumping into too much of a competitive world.
Vega brand values: A promise for good health
Part of developing a strong, healthy brand means finding points of affinity that you can build with your target audience. This is something that Vega has done exceptionally well, by outlining the company’s guiding principles on their website. Because they directly tell their customers what they’re all about, Vega hopes to connect with their audience on a deeper level.
At the same time, the organisation uses its unique tone of voice to show its human, and friendly side, telling clients that they’re there to support them every step of the way. The Vega brand values include:
- Convenience: They want to make getting healthier easier for their customers – and who wouldn’t be attracted to that idea? Vega’s brand purpose is all about making sure that people don’t have to choose between eating more plant-based foods and trying to pack more into their already-hectic schedule. While the company offers recipes for you to browse through if you feel like being creative in the kitchen, it also provides a range of products for fast, reliable nutrition.
- Nutritious: The Vega brand refuses to create anything that isn’t nutritionally dense and brimming with wonderful things straight from the plant kingdom. Their products include fruits, whole grains, vegetables, and plenty of other things that you know you’re supposed to eat more of, but might not have a chance to pack into your diet most days.
- Ethics: The Vega brand also develop affinity with their customers by looking at things from an ethical point of view. They draw attention to their environmental efforts on their website and point out that they use completely gluten-free products, suitable for vegetarians, and free from GMOs.
- Authenticity: Perhaps one of the most important characteristics any health-based brand can have, Vega is devoted to showing their authentic side. The company consistently pulls focus to their use of natural, plant-based ingredients in all their marketing messages, and you can also check out the “expert panel” on their website for more information if you’re looking for additional reasons to trust the Vega brand.
Vega marketing: Natural nutrition and the Vega brand voice
Here at Fabrik, we know that if our customers want to create a healthy company, before they conduct brand and website audits, or start planning logo designs, they need to think about who they want to reach with their efforts.
Not only does understanding your target market make it easier to understand if you have a product and USP that’s going to appeal to the right people, but it also ensures that you can begin to build a brand voice that resonates with your audience too.
The Vega brand voice is interesting, because it blends a friendly, supportive tone, with an essence of authority and expertise. The Vega branding and marketing team clearly want customers to know that they have the knowledge to give them a health product that they can trust, without coming off as clinical and impersonal.
If you head to the Vega brand blog, for instance, you’ll see plenty of fantastic posts written by experts from the health and nutrition field. Using MPH and RHN professionals to write their blogs lends the Vega marketing personality an extra touch of authority, which can be essential in the nutritional industry.
Of course, just because their messages are interspersed with hints that you’re working with a devoted, and knowledgeable team, doesn’t mean that Vega has forgotten that they need to connect with their customers too.
The language that the company uses is fun, engaging, and vivid – all characteristics that seem to blend perfectly with their colourful visual identity. Additionally, because the Vega branding team want their customers to feel as though they understand them, they focus on telling clients that you can use the Vega product at your own pace, in your own time.
The Vega brand even has a millennial appeal about it, which is perfect in an age where younger customers are starting to feel more concerned about their health. The @VegaTeam_UK Twitter page is brimming with visual, emoji-filled updates and helpful recipes designed to engage a younger demographic.
Vega is so devoted to its identity, that it’s even developed its own term to refer to the culture the company has built. The word they’ve created “Vegatopia” combines their own business name with the word “Utopia” to highlight the fact that Vega believes they’re not just selling a product, they’re selling an idealised vision of the future.
The heart of a healthy company: The Vega brand identity
The Vega health brand has built its company around a unique vision of what health and fitness should look like in the future. By appealing to two of the main concerns that today’s consumers care about: convenience and health, Vega has become a popular name for the fitness industry.
The supportive, modern, and authoritative tone of voice in Vega’s marketing materials is even more alluring because it’s supplemented by a strong visual identity. For instance, Vega’s Instagram page is packed full of pictures of beautiful recipes crafted using Vega ideals. They’ve even created their own hashtag to add extra power to their social presence: #FuelYourFeelGood.
Of course, the Vega brand identity isn’t limited to social media. It’s easy to see what the company stands for by looking at other visual elements in their portfolio, such as their logo, and their product packaging.
The Vega logo is simple, clean, and modern – just like the brand itself. It uses sans-serif font in a bold format to draw the attention of a millennial audience with an interest in fitness and wellbeing. The typography itself is simple and easy to consume, which makes the nutritional brand infinitely more appealing. What’s more, the bright green leaf-shaped flourish on the left-hand side of the “V” pulls focus to the company’s natural qualities.
Vega’s uses the same distinctive colours and fonts across its product packaging, accompanied by corresponding images to help explain what each packet contains. The vibrant green colour is a common occurrence in all the Vega marketing materials, as well as the company’s website.
Vega: A lesson in healthy branding
Designing a powerful health and fitness brand can be a particularly challenging experience. After all, you need to convince your customers not only that your product is worth their money, but that your brand can be trusted too. When people choose to take a supplement provided by Vega, they’re literally putting their health into the hands of another, unknown entity.
The Vega marketing and branding team has tried to make the decision a little simpler for their target audience, by building the company’s identity into something that easily displays characteristics of professionalism, friendliness, and authority. There’s something about the Vega brand, from its fun Twitter posts to its bright colours, that make it easy to trust.
Even the decision to post blogs written by industry experts was a carefully-chosen branding decision intended to give more weight to the Vega marketing mix.
If you can learn how to make the purchasing decision easier for your customers, build trust among your target market, and position yourself as an authority in the industry with both your visual and verbal efforts, then you too can become a healthy company that flourishes, like Vega.
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Our co-founder, Steve Harvey, is also a regular contributor to Brand Fabrik, a flagship publication covering topics relevant to anyone in branding, marketing and graphic design. Steve shares his enthusiasm for brand naming through his articles and demonstrates his knowledge and expertise in the naming process.
