A lot of business owners, especially new small-business owners gearing up to launch for the first time, understand that they need a logo. A logo is definitely essential to communicating your brand to your audience, but if you only have that one component of your identity, that can lead to your marketing, communication, and other branded materials falling short of what they can truly be capable of.

One of the best analogies I’ve seen is the iceberg: a small portion of it is visible above water, but the majority of it is submerged and invisible below the surface. Your visual identity and your brand are similar to the iceberg–you and your audience see a small part of the brand (the visual identity), but the majority of what your brand is about isn’t actually visible.