Branding and How To Get It Right.
Your brand is your identity, it can be one of your greatest, often overlooked assets. It’s not just about having a modern minimal logo, strap-line and design scheme but it should embody the customer’s experience of your business.
Your brand is in your customer promise, your business values, personality, mission statement also the way in which you talk to your customers and through whatever means you talk to your customers. It’s in the way you that you sell your products and services; it’s what you stand for as a company. A brand also acts as a seal of an expected standard of service/product and is therefore an unwritten customer guarantee.
Benefits of Branding
Your brand should tell your customers what to expect from you. Deliver on your promises and you will have regular loyal customers. But a good brand identity will also attract new customers by highlighting the difference between you and your competitors. It is an ideal way to differentiate yourself and allows you to niche into a particular target market.
Brand Values
If you’re a start-up or thinking about re-branding then you will have to think, what are the core values of the business? What are you trying to achieve? Who are you trying to target? And how do you differ from the competition? There is no point in developing a premium looking brand if your target market is value for money products. A prime example of this to highlight the differentiation of branding is between Aldi and M & S TV adverts: Aldi keeps it clean straightforward and pushes the promotional deals highlighting its ‘Value for Money’ whilst M & S sells a premium lifestyle and introduces its products into that lifestyle which emphasises its ‘Quality & Exclusivity.’
Effective purposely targeted branding will give your firm a personality, allow you to differentiate and niche yourself among the industry and should be reflected in the pricing to compound that image.
How To Get The Most Out Of Your Brand
Great brand design gives your business a consistent image across all marketing mediums from social media and print to branded clothing, people should be able to recognise it and make the immediate conscious thought process of what that business does/sells and where it is placed in the market i.e. premium or value for money.
Your products will have to fit together within a brand strategy that makes sense. If you offer high-end cosmetics and decide to bring out a cheaper range then it would be a wise commercial move to develop a separate brand identity that focuses on the new set of core values and targets the new market appropriately.
Colour
Colour is incredibly important in branding as humans instinctively have connotations and emotions attached to specific colours. Therefore we naturally react differently to varying colours for instance Yellow is usually associated with optimism, clarity and warmth, whilst Green is usually linked with being peaceful, natural, health and growth.
Colours have emotional consequences and we can see that clearly from the range of the world’s leading brands i.e. Virgin red to McDonalds yellow. So when you step back to evaluate what you want your business and brand to exude as an image then invest a lot of time into colour, think which colour will be most effective in my logo and design scheme; even test the market for reactions and feedback.
Remember, your brand will be damaged if you fail to maintain a consistent focus on your core brand values. If your business is off kilter with your current branding it might be worth considering a revamp.
Ensure that your branding is uniformed across all marketing and advertising mediums and use these hints and tips to turn your branding into an effective sales generation tool.
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