Branding

What Is A Brand?

A brand is the identity and story of a company that makes it stand out from competitors that sell similar products or services. The goal of branding is to earn space in the minds of the target audience and become their preferred option for doing business.

Brands are an effective way for companies to communicate their vision. A brand clarifies what a company stands for and why. A brand also refers to the overall experience a person has when interacting with a business – as a shopper, customer, or social media follower. 

  What is Branding?

Branding is the process of creating the brand identity of a company. This process also delivers materials that support the brand, like a logo, tagline, visual design, or tone of voice.

Branding is in social media captions, billboard color palettes, and the materials brands use for their packaging. Companies that create strong brands know that their brand identity needs to live everywhere. They know their names extend far beyond the label and can entice consumers to choose their products out of a lineup of options.

Key Takeaways

• A brand is an intangible marketing or business concept that helps people identify a company, product, or individual.
• People often confuse brands with things like logos, slogans, or other recognizable marks, which are marketing tools that help promote goods and services.
• Brands are considered to be among a company’s most important and valuable assets.
• Companies can protect their brands by registering trademarks.
• types of brands include corporate, personal, product, and service brands.

Understanding Brands

As mentioned above, a brand is an intangible asset that helps people identify a specific company and its products. This is especially true when companies need to set themselves apart from others who provide similar products on the market, including generic brands. Advil is a common brand of ibuprofen, which the company uses to distinguish itself from generic forms of the drug available in drugstores. This is referred to as brand equity.

People often confuse logos, slogans, or other recognizable marks owned by companies with their brands. While these terms are often used interchangeably, they are distinct. The former are marketing tools that companies often use to promote and market their products and services. When used together, these tools create a brand identity. Successfully marketing can help keep a company’s brand front and center in people’s minds. This can spell the difference between someone choosing your brand over your competitor’s. 

A brand is considered to be one of the most valuable and important assets for a company. In fact, many companies are often referred to by their brand, which means they are often inseparable, becoming one and the same, Coca-Cola is a great example, where the popular soft drink became synonymous with the company itself. This means it carries a tremendous monetary value, affecting both the bottom line and, for public companies, shareholder value.

History of Brands

Brands have long been used to set products apart over the course of history. The idea of branding may go as far back as 2000 B.C., where merchants used it to sell their wares in different markets. At that time, it was commonly used as a technique to denote ownership of a product or a piece of property.

Branding has been used throughout the ages. In the 13th century, Italians began putting watermarks on their paper as a form of branding. The term brand also refers to the unique marks burned into the hides of cattle to distinguish the animals of one owner from those of another.

But one of the most popular uses was in rural America. You’ve probably heard of the term branding, which was used by cattle ranchers, who used to brand their livestock as a form of identification. Brands started taking off after companies started packaging their goods in the 19th century to distinguish themselves from other companies.

Special Considerations

Brands aren’t just for corporate use. In fact, they are now also commonly used by individuals, especially in the age of reality television and social media. For instance, the Kardashian family has, collectively and as individuals, used its name to successfully launch media and modeling careers, spinoff shows, cosmetics, perfumes, and clothing lines.

Types of Brands

The type of brand used depends on the particular entity using it. The following are some of the most common forms of brands:

• Corporate Brands: Corporate branding is a way for companies to market themselves in order to give themselves an edge against their competition. They make a series of important decisions in order to accomplish this, such as pricing, mission, target market, and values.
• Personal Brands: As mentioned above, branding isn’t just for companies anymore. People use tools like social media to build their own personas, thereby boosting their brands. This includes regular social media posts, sharing images and videos, and conducting meet-and-greets.
• Product Brands: This type of branding, which is also known as merchandise branding, involves marketing one particular product. Branding a product requires market research and choosing the proper target market.
• Service Brands: This kind of branding applies to services, which often requires some creativity, as you can’t actually show services in a physical way.

Creating a Brand

When a company settles on a brand to be its public image, it must first determine its brand identity, or how it wants to be viewed. For instance, a company logo often incorporates a company’s message, slogan, or product. The goal is to make the brand memorable and appealing to the consumer.

The company usually consults a design firm, team, or logo design software to come up with ideas for the visual aspects of a brand, such as a logo or a symbol. A successful brand accurately portrays the message or feeling the company wants to get across. This results in brand awareness, or the recognition of the brand’s existence of the brand’s existence and what it offers. On the other hand, an ineffective brand often results from miscommunication.

Once a brand has created positive sentiment among its target audience, the firm is said to have built brand equity. Some firms with brand equity and very recognizable product brands include Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Ferrari, Apple, and Meta (formerly Facebook).

If done right, a brand results in an increase in sales not just for the specific product being sold by the same company. A good brand engenders trust in the consumer, and, after having a good experience with one product, the consumer is more likely to try another product related to the same brand. As noted above, this phenomenon is often referred to as brand loyalty.

The Importance of Branding

Your brand is arguably one of your organization’s most important assets. It gives your organization an identity, makes your business memorable, encourages consumers to buy from you, supports your marketing and advertising, and brings your employees pride.

Other benefits of Branding include:

1. Influencing purchasing decisions: Branding can be the deciding factor for consumers when they make a purchase decision. In fact, a 2021 Razorfish study found that 82% of surveyed consumers buy from brands that stand for a greater mission or purpose. Around 67% say the brands they buy from make them a better person.
2. Creates an identity for your business: A brand extends beyond a company’s product or service. Branding gives your business an identity. It gives consumers something to related to and connect with beyond the product or service they’re actually purchasing.
3. Helps customers remember your business: Branding makes your business memorable. It’s the face of your company and helps consumers distinguish your business across every medium.
4. Boost advertising and marketing: Branding supports your marketing and advertising efforts. It helps your promotion pack that extra punch with added recognition and impact.
5. Builds employee support: Branding brings your employees pride. When you brand your company, you’re not only giving your business identity, you’re also creating a reputable, highly-regarded workplace. Strong branding brings in strong employees.

Brand Guide Strategy

A brand strategy guide is a document that outlines the key elements of a company’s brand and how they should be communicated to the target audience. It helps ensure that all branding efforts are consistent and aligned with the company’s overall goals and values.

Here are some key components that a brand strategy guide should include:

1. Brand Identity: This includes the company’s logo, tagline, color scheme, and typography. These elements should be consistent across all marketing materials and channels.

2. Target Audience: Define the ideal customer for your brand, including their demographics, interests, and needs. This will help guide your messaging and content creation.

3. Brand Positioning: Determine how your brand stands out from competitors and how it is perceived in the market. This will guide your messaging and help you communicate your unique value proposition.

4. Brand Voice and Tone: Define the tone and personality of your brand’s communication. This will guide the style and language used in all messaging and content.

5. Messaging: Develop key messages that communicate the brand’s unique value proposition, benefits, and features. These should be consistent across all marketing channels.

6. Content Strategy: Define the types of content that will be used to communicate the brand message, including blog posts, social media content, videos, and other marketing materials.

7. Brand Guidelines: Establish guidelines for how the brand should be represented across all marketing materials and channels, including logo usage, typography, and color scheme.

8. Brand Experience: Define the overall customer experience and how it aligns with the brand’s values and goals. This includes everything from website design to customer service interactions.

Three things to remember in Brand Marketing

Brand marketing can be overwhelming, both for new and established brands. The following are three things marketers should remember when it comes to brand marketing.

• Remember branding and marketing are different: A company’s brand is its personality – marketing is how the company shares that personality with consumers.
• Spend time on research or measurement: Without due diligence to know how a brand’s peers are positioned, it’s difficult to differentiate the brand. And without proper marketing attribution, it’s challenging to know if a brand moved the needle or not. Spending time on both research and measurement will help define strategy and success for your brand.
• Show brand attributes (instead of telling): A company may want to position its brand as trustworthy – but it shouldn’t say that it’s a trustworthy brand. Instead, it should show trustworthiness through reliable products and customer service.

Branding VS Marketing

While it’s easy to combine branding and marketing into one discipline, they’re quite distinct. It’s also common to hear branding and marketing compared in terms of priorities. The truth is, they are both essential to a successful business and must work in harmony for a business to grow. 

Put simply, branding is the identity of a company, and marketing includes the tactics and strategies which communicate that vision.

Benefits of Building A strong Brand

Investing in your brand identity isn’t just for fun, it has many real world benefits that can help your company grow and succeed at scale.

Benefits of a strong brand include:

• Increased sales
• Customer loyalty and recognition
• Helping create a clear and inspiring mission or purpose company wide
• Helping create a strong company culture where your employees love what they do
• Attracting top-quality talent to help grow your business even further
• Developing strong brand equity helping you stand out from your competition

Again, building a strong brand does take time, but the effort is well worth the reward.

The Importance of Branding in E-Commerce

Branding is a complex process that requires careful planning and calculated approach. Ideally, you should have your branding strategy worked out before you launch your online store to avoid working backwards to try to aligned your store with customer expectations. A strong brand is easy to relate to and draws on values that resonate well with the target audience. For an E-Commerce shop, a strong brand can also be a safety net protecting a business from having to compete on price.

So how do you go about building a brand for an online shop? Here are the key steps in E-Commerce branding:

• Understanding your customers: To communicate effectively, you have to identify the elements that influence your target customers and focus on leveraging them. What do they like? What motivates and attracts them? What do they like about your brand?
• Define your brand persona: A brand persona is the personality of your business in which you will deliver customer experiences. It will be strongly influenced by the insights you manage to gather about your target customers. What tone of voice will suit this audience? What type of language will have the greatest effect? What images will attract their attention?
• Crystalize your brand promise: What is the ultimate promise you’re making to your customers? How will your products/services make their life better? How are you going to deliver this promise? 66% of consumers think transparency is one of a brand’s most attractive qualities.
• Perfect your visual assets: Online shoppers don’t have the luxury of touching and feeling the products they buy, so the visual experience is extremely important. A brand’s visual assets are all the front facing elements, such as the website design, fonts and typography, color palette, logo, and ad designs as well as the packaging and unboxing experience you create. It’s a powerful branding tool that reaches its peak when all the different moving parts are consistent and work harmoniously. Research shows that having a memorable signature color will increase the chance of customers recognizing your brand by 80%.
• Refine customer experience: Although you have little control over how your customers will ultimately feel about your brand, you should do your best to make sure every interaction and touch point you have with your customers is aligned with your brand promise and follows your brand guidelines. 69% of consumers say that the most important thing brands can do to improve their experience is “knowing them”. This will encompass everything from your return policies to shipping arrangements to email marketing communications and more.
• Remember to give back: Something as simple as saying thank you to your loyal customers can go a long way in strengthening your brand image. Show gratitude by running special loyalty programs or promotions, offering occasional free gifts or extending discounts. It’s a surefire way to build long-term relationships with your customers and humanize your brand.

Brand Guidelines and The Branding Process

Having clear brand guidelines are critical for keeping a consistent and cohesive brand. Your brand not only includes how your customers perceive you, but how your employees think of you well as well.

In addition to your logo and corporate colors, you can communicate your brand message and brand identity through:

• Your store environment and atmosphere: Is your store environment uplifting and modern? Or is your atmosphere, dull and boring?
• Having a clear brand promise: What do you want to be known for your customers?
• How your staff members treat customers: Are you know for incredible customer service and a great customer experience?
• The products you carry: Are you products known to be high-quality?
• The price you charge: Is your branding geared more towards luxury customers, or are you selling to customers who value a great bargain or deal?
• Product packaging: Often overlooked, strategic product packaging can have a significant impact on your brand recognition, and brand value.
• Public relations: Public relations and branding strategy often go hand. How you respond to the challenges and mistakes made while growing a business impacts your brand.
• Sponsorships: Who your brand partners with also plays a big role in your brand image.
• Advertising: Effective advertising is critical for improving your brand recognition. Your messaging to your target audience should speak directly to their pain points, challenges, and needs.

Virtually every decision you make in your business will ultimately impact the strength of your brand.

Brand Strategy Guide

It’s true, branding is creative work. It’s also a team effort, and there are many stakeholders who should be involved in the process. Everyone has an opinion, and navigating useful feedback and changes can make branding a challenge.

But you don’t have to invent your brand without help – these templates can help you create a powerful brand. To show you how a template can improve the branding process, let’s walk through a few examples next.

• Company Profile Templates: This resource can help you pull together the story of how your company began and how you plan to position yourself in the market. This makes it easier to refine your identity and strategy.
• Company Culture Code Template: The culture of your business and your brand should be intrinsically connected. This useful template makes it easier for your team to hone the core of your unique culture so you can impart that knowledge into your brand.
• Value Statement Templates: These templates can help you refine the value your company offers to customers. It includes over 30 pages of useful prompts and visual tools to hone your messaging.

Branding Tips for Small Businesses

1. Treat your brand like a person: To best warp your head around the branding process, think of your brand as a person. Your brand should have an identity (who it is), Personality (how it behaves), and experience (how it’s remembered). 

Ask yourself these questions about your brand:

• How would your brand introduce itself?
• If it had to describe its appearance, how would it do so?
• How would your brand talk about your products or services? Would it be serious and professional, or would it be humorous and edgy?
• What would someone say about your brand after “meeting” it for the first time? What are a few sentences they’d use to describe it?

The purpose of branding is to create relations with your customers. The easiest way to do this is to treat your brand as a person and understand that you want your customers to do the same.

    2. Prioritize consistency: 88% of consumers are looking for authenticity from the brands they support. Consistency is essential for branding because it builds trust and shows customers that your values are authentic. Without it, you could accidentally undermine your brand and confuse your customers.

Recognizable, valuable brands focus on consistency – and they reap the benefits. So, make your brand a unified presence across mediums and platforms. This makes it easy for your customers to get familiar with, recognize, and come to prefer your brand over time. Brand guidelines can help with this initiative.

    3: Build and follow a brand strategy: A brand strategy is more than your brand guidelines. It’s a plan with specific, long-term goals that your team can achieve as your brand evolves. These goals typically resolve around your brand’s purpose, emotion, flexibility, competitive awareness, and employee involvement.

Remember how I said that branding is a continuous process? There’s a lot that goes into it. A brand strategy can help you turn that process into a well-oiled practice that keeps your brand moving toward success and recognition.

   4. Don’t let inspiration turn into imitation: Competitive analysis is important. Not only does it educate you on where your competition stands and how they are excelling, but it can also give you ideas on how you can improve or further set apart your brand.

But be careful to not fall into an imitation trap. Keep your competitive research limited and focus on what your organization brings to the table. Just because a competitor (or two) has branded their company in a certain way doesn’t mean that you have to follow suit. New, unique, provocative brands are memorable brands.

    5. Use branding to hire: Strong branding makes your employees proud. If hiring is a strong initiative for your organization, dedicate some of your resources to employer branding.

Brand Management and Branding Tips For Growing Your Brand 

If your business does not yet have a consistent brand, or you don’t like what your brand currently stands for, you may benefit from a “rebrand.” Before you throw out all the hard work you’ve put into your current brand. It’s important to keep your target audience and loyal customers in mind.

Avoid the temptation to “start from scratch” unless absolutely needed. A new brand can dramatically improve the health of your business, but you want to avoid alentiaitng current customers in the process.

Here are some steps to take to steps to take to shape public perception for the better:

Here are some steps to take to shape public perception for the better:

• Identify what your customers and target audience love most about your business. What makes your stand out? What are your strengths?
• Create a brand message and brand promise that conveys what your business aims to do for its customers – what you’re best at Geico promises to save you 15% in 15 minutes. That’s its brand promise. Marriott promises quite luxury. What are you promising your customers? Here it can be helpful to list out a 3-6 brand attributes you want to absolutely excel at.
• Make sure your visual elements match your desired visual identity and your brand. If you’re promising innovation, don’t use greys and boring images. Colors and design play a critical role in developing a strong brand image.
• Develop standards for employee dress and behavior that support your brand promise. Make sure they understand what your brand is and can support it.
• Apply your visuals across every marketing tool you use, from advertising to signage to store displays to mailing to shopping bags. This helps both existing customers and new customers a consistent brand message.

Branding Terms to Know

Here are some other brand-related buzzwords you should know. They show the importance and value of branding your business.

Brand Awareness

Brand awareness refers to how familiar the general public and your target audience are with your brand. High brand awareness leads to brands being referred to as “trending,” ‘buzzing,’ or “popular.” Brand awareness is important because consumers can’t consider purchasing from your brand if they’re not aware of it.

Brand Extension

Brand extension are when companies “extend” their to develop new products in new industries and markets. Brand extensions allow companies (or individuals) to leverage brand awareness and equity to create more revenue streams and diversify product lines.

Brand Identity

Brand identity is the personality of your business and the promise you make to your customers. It’s what your customers to walk away with after they interact with your brand. Your brand identity is typically composed of your values, how you communicate your product or service, and what you want people to feel when they interact with it.

Brand Management

Brand management refers to the process of creating and maintaining your brand. It includes managing the tangible elements of your brand (style guide, packaging, color palette) and the intangible elements (how it’s perceived by your target audience and customer base). Your brand is a living, breathing asset, and it should be managed as such.

Brand Recognition

Brand recognition is how well a consumer (ideally in your target audience) can recognize and identify your brand without seeing your business name – through your logo, tagline, jingle, packaging, or advertising. This concept goes hand-in-hand with brand recall, which is the recall, which is the ability to think of a brand without any visual or auditory identifiers.

Brand Trust 

Brand trust refers to how strongly customers and consumers and consumers believe in your brand. Do you deliver on your marketing promises? Do your salespeople and customer service go above and beyond? These things can create trust among your customers, which is important in a world where a mere 14% of people feel confident in large businesses.

Brand Valuation 

Brand valuation is the commercial valuation of your brand derived from consumer perception, recognition, and trust. This concept goes hand-in-hand with brand equity. A powerful brand can make your business invaluable to investors, shareholders, and potential buyers.