What is Branding?
Branding is a way to manage the brand strategies of a specific company.
This brand management includes long-term planning in addition to creating and managing the elements of your visual identity.
All this enhances the perception of your company in the consumers’ minds.
Branding works with the concept that a brand needs to be planned, structured, managed, and promoted. All of these processes that encompass brand management are part of this work.
The goals include:
Ensure that all your stakeholders understand your position.
Increase your relevance in the market.
Enhance your visibility.
Make your company have a good reputation before the public.
These strategies allow your company to grow sustainably. Branding means ensuring that your business will grow smartly and lastingly.
This management must focus on what your brand is and how it wants to be perceived. Let’s understand more about that!
What is a Brand?
A brand is not just a logo, a name, or a visual identity. It’s a set of feelings and experiences that your audience had and created from your product or service.
Such a process is often individual, as each person understands your brand differently.
This perspective will always be based on each person’s social, cultural, and economic contexts — essentially, on their experiences with their company.
That’s why a branding strategy is essential.
You will never have complete control over how people perceive your company, which means you must differentiate yourself from the competition.
You have to create a unique brand that delivers incredible experiences from start to finish. After all, a brand is what differentiates successful companies from many others that are left behind.
Why did Nike become one of the largest sports brands in the world? The “Just do It” is much more than a tagline or a slogan. It represents management focused on the customer and their actions.
Brands need values, a purpose that guides all their actions. It influences from the conception of a product to its advertising in any communication channel.
The Importance of Branding
Your brand is more than just a way to help your products and services stand out from all the others when it’s time for your customers to buy.
It’s also an opportunity to give your company a personality — something your customers can genuinely connect to.
Branding makes your business memorable
Without branding, every soda, car, lipstick, or pair of shoes would be just like every other of its kind. But with branding, those same products become unique, inviting, and utterly memorable.
They become Coca-Cola, Revlon, Toyota, and Nike – iconic brand names that go well beyond the actual products they represent.
They’re experiences that fit seamlessly into the lifestyles of millions of loyal consumers everywhere.
Branding can tip purchasing decisions in your favor
When a customer makes a purchasing decision, they’re choosing more than just the quality and reliability of the product they’re buying.
They’re also choosing everything the brand behind that product represents.
In fact, research shows that a customer will spend up to twice as much money when they feel a personal connection to a brand as compared to those who feel no particular connection.
Branding helps your team feel invested in their work
Memorable, strong brands do more than attract large, loyal followings of happy customers.
Your unique brand identity gives your team members and associates a reason to feel personally invested in what they do, as well.
Strong teams who love their work help the brands they work for achieve even greater success over time.
Key Branding Terms to Know
Part of building a powerful brand means learning the lingo. Here are a few essential branding terms to keep in mind as you continue to develop your current branding strategy.
Brand Identity
Well-crafted brands are more like people than you think in that they’re unique individuals with distinct personalities.
Your brand identity represents that personality, as well as the values, experiences, and takeaways you want your customers to associate with your company.
Brand Recognition
Nearly everyone instantly thinks of “Apple” when they see the illustration of a bitten apple or “MasterCard” when they hear the famous “There are some things money can’t buy” tagline.
They don’t even need to see the company name to recognize the brand on sight.
That’s the magic of brand recognition at work — a consumer’s ability to identify or recall your brand by your brand assets alone.
Brand Awareness
Before someone can consider buying from your brand, they first need to be fully aware that it exists.
Cultivating brand awareness is all about familiarizing your target demographics with your products, services, and brand identity.
Achieve high enough brand awareness, and your brand could become an “it” brand — a brand everyone chooses because it’s popular or on-trend.
Brand Management
Branding isn’t something you do just once before forgetting all about it indefinitely. Brands need to be managed and maintained on an ongoing basis to help keep them contemporary and relevant.
Packaging, visual elements, taglines, and more should be updated frequently to keep the brand fresh and dialed in.
Brand Trust
Brand trust is all about how loyal a brand’s customers are and how much faith they have in that brand.
Do they trust it to provide a reliable, high-value experience? Do they trust your company to treat them right, stand by its promises, and make them proud to buy from you?
Only 25 percent of modern consumers feel confident that bigger businesses will deliver on their promises, so high brand trust is a goal every company should aim for.
How to Build and Manage Your Brand’s Image?
You may have noticed all the complexity that surrounds a brand. Therefore, managing it is no different.
Every company must have many communication channels and professionals involved, from employees to suppliers. Also, you need to attract customers.
To achieve this goal, you need to understand, right from the start, who your company is and its values.
Your brand needs to have a strong and consistent identity, which will improve communication. That helps to leverage and manage the way your audience sees what you are building.
Finally, your branding strategy must guarantee that you promote your brand to ensure more prominence, making it a market leader.
These are the strategies that we will help you create. Let’s learn some essential steps for this process!
A Brand Guide will be very usefull everytime you decide to outsource your content.
1. Start with a round of research (or an audit)
If you’re getting ready to launch a new brand (or rebranding an existing one), the first thing you want to do is some deep research.
Be sure to cover not only your industry but your target audience. You really need to know the niche you’re getting into, as well as the people you’ll be marketing to.
Some key questions to ask yourself include:
What is your ideal customer like, and what demographics do they belong to?
What feelings and experiences do you want people to associate with your brand?
What problems might your audience have that your brand aims to solve?
What does your brand bring to the table that its competitors don’t?
2. Create a set of customer personas
More isn’t always more when it comes to spreading a marketing canvas.
No brand or product catalog is so good that it’s right for everyone, so it’s crucial to know who your products are really for and to tailor your branding efforts with those people in mind.
It’s also essential to ensure your entire marketing team views your existing and potential customers as people with real lives, personalities, values, and goals.
A well-planned set of buyer personas can make this process simpler, easier, and more natural.
Buyer personas are meant to represent key members of your target demographic. They are fictionalized personalities with jobs, families, goals, and fears, just like real people.
In this way, they make it easier and more intuitive to create truly personalized, on-point marketing material that resonates with the people they represent.
How many different buyer personas a brand might have depends on its size and complexity.
3. Get a solid read on your competition
The goal of a good branding campaign is to stand out — to be unique, do things differently, and move into a niche no one can fill quite the way you can.
That said, you should never imitate your competitors, but you should always be aware of them and their branding strategies.
If you don’t know your competitors and understand how they’ve positioned themselves within the market, then you won’t be in a good position to convince your target audience to buy from you instead of them.
So thoroughly research competitors in your niche and hone in on their marketing tactics. Ask yourself questions like the following throughout the process:
What makes consumers loyal to this brand?
What steps have they taken to build a recognizable brand identity that works?
What are they doing that’s really working for them?
What are the weak points in their branding strategy?
Use what you discover to identify needs and desires your target audience may have but that are largely going unmet by other brands in your industry or niche.
What can you do that your competitors aren’t? How can you take what’s working for them and do it even better?
4. Create a brand platform
On what basis was your brand founded? What does it promise to deliver to the world? What makes it unique?
A brand platform is a set of components that allow your customers to connect with it. As a consequence, this helps you to communicate your essence.
Purpose, promise, attributes, and positioning are points that any brand platform should encompass. Let’s talk about each of them.
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