Building a stellar branding doesn’t happen overnight and certainly involves a lot more than just creating a logo and creating brand images. Branding requires serious marketing to create a personality and brand consistency across all of your messages across platforms and channels.
What is Branding?
In the narrowest sense of the word, branding is:
Branding is your company; it reflects the values, culture, and aesthetics of your business, as well as the attributes embedded in your products. A remarkable branding image makes a memorable first impression. Branding efforts work to influence how consumers perceive your business and what they make about the products you think. Brands are remarkable for their attributes, what we know about the brand from the first-hand experience, and what we hear about the brand, making it difficult to change attitudes toward your brand if they don’t. Not help support your market’s performance. To quote Jeff Bezos, “your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” Understanding your brand is a critical and constantly evolving part of building a successful business.
The personality of your brand
Like people, brands have personalities shaped by their marketing efforts, including messages, spokespersons, and other marketing efforts. For example, Godiva has a sexy, rich brand personality, based on associations with Lady Godiva and the gold used in the packaging.
What is the personality of your business?
Are you the edgy, fun company that leaves cheeky Twitter comments on competitors’ feeds, like Wendy’s, or does it represent the ultimate in professionalism?
Determining your business’s personality is an important part of branding and something you should determine before starting branding if you are interested in building a great brand.
Consider a branding agency.
Branding agencies are committed to developing and bringing out the qualities that characterize your company. They specialize in helping you discover and bring your business story to life and then use that story to create a coherent identity.
Focus
Start the branding process by concentrating on how you want consumers to see your brand. Make a list of values and a list of strengths that set you apart from your competitors. Remember to include words and emotional feelings on this list.
These indicate which direction you want to take in terms of logo, appearance, and messaging. Compiling a list of keywords can help you determine what’s most important to you and your customers.
Ask yourself questions to get you started. Imagine the following situation:
Who is your ideal client?
How do you want customers to feel when they visit your website or store or see your content?
What’s the first thing you want customers to think about when they visit your website?
What sets your company apart from the competition?
What would a customer lose if they didn’t use your business?
What would a customer gain from using your business?
What other brands would your brand be friends with?
After answering these questions, try narrowing down to five words that define your business. (e.g., humor, passion, honesty, colorful, creative or elegant, cutting edge, accessibility, clarity, cunning) Keep these words every step of the way when creating your logo, website, presence on social networks, messaging, advertising, and content, anything that represents your business.
Get a professional logo
While you can save a bit of money by having your unemployed brother, who has taken some community school graphic design courses in community college to mock up a logo for you. Consider giving investments in a professional company to give your business a look that it deserves. An impressive image remains in the consumer’s mind. Brands like Nike and Apple use logos that are immediately recognizable because they are clean and simple, but unique and pleasing to the eye. Other brands like Starbucks have more stylized illustrations than their logos. Newer, less well-known brands might consider creating a joint brand in their logo, like this one from Carvel, where they have cobranding with a much more recognizable brand, Cinnabon.
Marketing your brand
OK – You have your color scheme, your striking logo, a mission, a story, and a personality. Now you have to bring it out! Consider all the options available today to gain visibility.
Watch what’s the latest.
Imagine making a video that goes viral, not because you paid a ton of money to have it on everyone’s iPhones, but because it affected an entire generation or segment of consumers. Sometimes this happens by accident, like with TikTok’s recent video below) which gave Oceanspray a lot of free exposure, but a big company should still be on the lookout for how to make it happen for them- even. Stay on top of trends across all platforms.
Remember: don’t just stay active in marketing your brand and keep it updated and evolving as consumer attitudes change. Your logo and name don’t have to change, but rearranging things to stay relevant can spark massive growth in your business!
