Blog Post

Branding Essentials: Businesses Are People, Too

  • By Mark Baker
  • 09 May, 2017
A colorful rainbow umbrella amid many black umbrellas.

Contrary to popular belief, brand image extends far beyond logos. Everything related to your company comprises brand image. Brand is identity, and a strong brand forms connections and cultivates relationships with others—kind of like you in your personal life.

Question: Which laundry detergent do you use, and why? Is it the smell? The stain-fighting power? The nostalgia? Whatever it is, I can pretty much guarantee that if you have loyalty to any one laundry detergent, it comes down to your emotional relationship with the brand. You buy it time and time again trusting that it will come through for you just like it did the last time. You know that every time you wash your clothes, they will smell like comfort and fond memories, not last week’s BBQ stain. You buy your laundry detergent because of your bond to your brand.

And if you don’t have an attachment to any one detergent, you probably try something new just about every time one runs out—like speed dating. Imagine the laundry detergent companies vying for just a chance at your attention. They lament your refusal to commit. Do you see their sad, jealous faces in your head? Do you want to be one of those sad, jealous faces in the crowd?

 

Getting Started

When you’re creating your own brand, it may seem like a given that you seem as special in the marketplace as you feel as a person. These are delusions of grandeur, my friend. In today’s world, consumers have a million options in most categories, and only the strong survive. A strong brand helps consumers to make decisions about which vacuum to buy, which restaurant to go to for dinner, or which team to cheer for. It also determines if they’ll buy again.

Branding and identity are one and the same. Your company has a brand/identity whether you meant to make one or not. Many aspects make up this identity. Some are explicitly represented like logos, colors, text, and fonts. Others are implicit, like values, missions, and personalities. These components interact with each other to influence everyone who encounters your brand. Your goal should be to make people think of your company the way you envision your company to be. 

 

Research

Start with thorough market research to understand the current marketplace and your place in it. Market research helps you discover what problems your target customers face and what you can offer them. Unfortunately, just because you think your product is cool, or even if your product has truly innovative and unique technology, none of it matters without understanding your business through the eyes of your customer. That’s the only way to pinpoint the product’s true value. After all, the customer is always right.

Market research can also teach you the common characteristics of your buyers, from their hometowns to their hobbies, and that knowledge can sustain your brand. You can collect new information from your target with focus groups, surveys, or one-on-one interviews with the field’s most enthusiastic consumers. These are especially useful during the development stages of any product, service, or campaign. You can and should also collect data as you go along for all your digital marketing efforts. Google Analytics enables you to track behavior on your website, like the source that led the user to your site, where they went and through what path, how long they remained on a page, the demographics of visitors, and much, much more. If you want to run some paid search advertising, Google AdWords and Facebook offer analytical tools to track performance as well. And for your email marketing, MailChimp offers reports about recipient activity so that you can see who’s engaging and with what. Whatever you do, make sure you have some math to evaluate yourself and make ongoing improvements.

 

Concept

Based on your market research, you can develop a concept that highlights the product’s most desirable features and benefits. The concept should include creative content that connects with your target audience in a memorable and intriguing way. Visually, you can characterize your brand by its own unique combination of colors, fonts, and tones to tell a memorable story that resonates with your audience. Choose designs and styles that sum up your brand. For example, if your company values imagination above all, choose red as one of your central colors.

Once you have designed the overall concept, deploy the creative content strategically. First, submerge your own employees in it so they know what’s up. Next, roll out the concept across all mediums that interact directly with the customer. You might want to create different versions of your content according to the medium and the target audience. This can be as simple as adjusting the formatting of images you share on different social media platforms (Facebook needs a larger image, while Twitter needs a smaller one). Or, if you have very different audiences across social media channels (your Facebook followers are mostly male teenagers who love cooking and your Twitter followers are mostly middle-aged, outdoorsy females), you might want to curate different content for different platforms, catered to each segment.

 

Internal

Reinforce your message in company meetings and in all interactions with other employees. The message of your brand should reflect your company, which means that the people in your company should embody the traits of the brand. Since your brand relates directly to your company culture, it should affect hiring decisions. Bring on people who have the same values and qualities to keep a consistent identity and foster great employee morale.

Having a consistent brand image across all mediums can catapult your brand’s performance. But as the relationship between companies and their customer base changes, the brand should also reflect these changes. As a company, you must understand the evolving relationship between your company and the end user, or you’ll die out. And if a member of your company fails to represent your core values, they can leave a long-lasting bad impression on the people you wanted to attract. On the flipside, if your members have the heart and soul of the culture, they’ll be ambassadors for your brand just by going about their day-to-day lives. That’s great PR at no cost (I mean, if you don’t count all their salaries).


Competing

A successful brand requires consistent improvements and innovations to overcome competition demands, but this doesn’t mean changing the story, mission, or values of the brand. Improvements should maintain the overall image and integrity of your brand.

Remember back in high school, how people—not you, but, you know, other people—would change their clothes, speech, and opinions to fit in with a clique? Now, while it’s true that the environment naturally evolves, and Victorian petticoats are not stylish anymore, you realize that you—excuse me, OTHER people realized that THEY—should have just been who they were. It’s the same with branding.


So why is branding important? Branding is your product, service, and company. With an effective brand image, you can build lifelong relationships between your company of real people and the real people in the marketplace.  

Mark Baker

Mark Baker is a natural artist. Since starting his first business hand painting graphics onto vehicles in high school, Mark gained experience in the entertainment, sports, and retail industries before founding this company in 1993. Honest and pragmatic, Mark knows that anything can be accomplished with a great communication plan and creative thinking. 

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