Whether you’re a starting a new company, or looking to take your current business to the next level, the strength of your brand plays a critical role in your potential success.
How you are viewed in the eyes of your customers, competition, and community comes down to your brand. Building a respected and strong brand is not something you can accomplish by checking off a few items on your todo list. Instead, it should be approached with the long term in mind.
What Is Branding? Branding Definitions and Benefits
Branding is the process of creating a distinct identity for a business in the mind of your target audience and consumers. At the the most basic level, branding is made up of a company’s logo, visual design, mission, and tone of voice. But your brand identity is also determined by the quality of your products, customer service, and even how you price your products or services.
By building a website that describes what you offer, designing ads that promote your goods and services, selecting specific corporate colors that will be associated with your company, creating a logo, and featuring it across all your social media accounts, you are branding your company. That is, you are shaping how and what people’s perceptions of your business are.
Yet, even if you never invest a strategic brand strategy, you’re still going to have a brand. If you’re a company with bad customer service for example, that will ultimately affect how your customers view you. You can be known as a company who doesn’t care about your customers just as easily as you can establish yourself as a brand that goes above and beyond.
what your customers think and say about your brand is the reality (not what you’d like them to think). It’s the impression that pops into their minds when they hear your business’ name.
It’s based on a feeling they have that is based on their experiences they’ve had with you, good or bad.
Why You Should Take Branding Seriously
Virtually no business starts out hoping to create a an unreliable or “bad” brand. Many entrepreneurs start a company with a grand vision of delivering great products, at a great value, and creating loyal customers for life.
The purpose of branding building is to simply and easily help your customers understand what you offer and how through effective positioning. But it’s not only a USP (unique selling proposition), it is the combination of all the ways you communicate what you stand for. In the case branding, what you do is far more important than what you say. If your company mission statement focuses on your world-class quality service, but you don’t actually deliver great customer service, there’s a mismatch.
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.
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 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 by your customers?
- How your staff members treat customers: Are you known for incredible customer service and a great customer experience?
- The products you carry: Are your 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 signifiant impact on your brand recognition, and brand value.
- Public relations: Public relations and branding strategy often go hand in 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.
Branding is a complex process, mainly because its success or failure is determined by your customers’ reactions to the act of doing business with you. You won’t always get it right, but the costs of not investing in your branding far out weigh the negative consequences of being seen as an untrustworthy or reliable brand.