Branding. Most small businesses know they need it, but few understand branding’s true role in business or what goes into developing a truly memorable one for that matter.
A brand by definition is a business’s unique and deliberate identifier or mark. It is often developed from some combination of a logo, tag line, colors, and overall design style. A brand is also the ultimate impression a customer has of a business, rooted from marketing, first-hand encounters, and the business’s reputation. In both cases, a brand evokes emotion, creates a reaction, incites conversation and what businesses ultimately want: Creates action.
Now, how do you develop a brand that inspires customer loyalty, evoke emotion, and uniquely identifies your business? It starts with market research gathered while creating a marketing strategy. Primarily, research centered around your business’s given industry, that industry’s trends, your target audience, your business’s goals, your company history, and ultimately your competition. All of this information determines the following:
Brand Positioning: The starting point in developing a brand is to evaluate your business’s culture, values and your current product and or service offerings.
Is your business serious or is it more playful?
Is your business local, online, national, or some combination of all three?
Are you service oriented or do focus more on being a price leader?
Do you care about the environment and your community?
A well-developed brand takes all of this into consideration and channels it into its business’s positioning through messaging, design, and an encompassing marketing mix.
Business Claim: Next, it is important for a brand to refine its business’s claim. A brand should give prospective customers an understanding of WHY a business exists and how its products or services solve a prospective customer’s wants and more importantly, needs uniquely when compared to its competitors.
Credibility: Credibility or a lack thereof, makes or breaks brands. In marketing, this is where logos, color scheme, packaging, and a digital presence impact a brand’s credibility and work as subliminal influencers to customers and followers alike. For example, the color black is associated with elegance and the color blue being a representation of faith and stability. In-person encounters also impact a brand’s credibility. Some examples of this can be found at a store’s physical location, that location’s décor and layout, and even customer service.
Connects to an Audience: One of the last steps in developing an impactful brand is to evaluate your business’s buyers while keeping trends in mind. Through market research, your business ought to have a customer profile, which would include an understanding of your ideal customer’s likes and dislikes. Your brand should take these customer preferences into account and “speak” directly to that customer. For example, an aggressively progressive approach won’t likely work when trying to identify with an conservative Christian audience.
Maintenance: Now, once you address these ideas, your job isn’t done. You have to maintain your brand presence and augment it as needed as your customer preferences change and your competitor’s marketing tactics pivot. Change is what will keep you, your brand and business relevant as it is a natural occurrence in nature as well as in the world of business.
Interested in building a brand? Feel free to shoot me a message!
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