Any company needs to master marketing if they want to draw in new customers and survive market fluctuations. But to understand marketing, you first need to grasp one of its cornerstone concepts: branding.
In a nutshell, branding is what identifies your company from other businesses that may be similar or in the same industry. But this only scratches the surface of what branding really needs and why we believe it’s the most important element of your company’s social identity.
Let’s break down branding in more detail and look at why it’s an absolute must-have, especially for start-ups who are still trying to figure it out.
What Is Branding, Really?
Branding is more than just a slogan or an insignia for your company. Brand is about identity, and it’s the way that you keep a company relevant in the long-term.
A company’s brand can be summarized in a few different ways:
it’s how people think of the company when they remember the time they spent with it
it’s a company’s reputation
it’s what the company is known for overall
it’s the flavor or aesthetic theme of a company
That’s not it when it comes to brand, however. Brand is also the set of beliefs that you’re getting your customers to subscribe to. It’s the way you build a loyal customer base, the way you interest people in your company from the get-go. Most importantly, branding informs literally. Every. Single. Decision. That you make about and for your company.
Here’s an example: Apple’s brand is unique and distinct from its primary competitor, Microsoft. That’s because part of the purpose of a brand is to separate your company from your competitors. This is absolutely vital in every industry. Even if you feel that your product is so unique that you’re exempt, there’s always going to be a copycat rival that pops up, so you need to connect with your customers’ beliefs in order to stay competitive.
Apple’s brand can be characterized in a few different ways:
Its aesthetic is often called hip, minimalist, or cool. This is directly counter to Microsoft's corporate, business-focused aesthetic.
Apple’s brand is also dominated by exclusivity. You have to use Apple products to charge your Apple devices, and all of your Apple products combined help to form a big part of your consumer identity.
Apple’s brand also includes a reputation for cutting-edge technology and slick interfaces. This means that, whenever Apple comes out with a subpar product, its brand necessarily suffers.
By building your brand, you give it an identity beyond what it practically does or the raw numbers of your business. It’s both “soft” and abstract and plays a big role in the day-to-day success of your company as well.
Why Is Branding Important?
Why focus on creating a strong brand? There are a multitude of reasons why companies need to emphasize smart, effective branding before beginning their first marketing campaign, and it starts with the idea that customers make decisions based on feelings and emotions rather than metrics.
Branding Boosts Recognition
For starters, branding helps boost your company’s recognition, especially if it’s young and just starting out. A company’s brand is the primary way through which new customers first interact with the company, so it’s good to think of brand as a key part of your conversion pipeline. Your brand’s verbal and visual design is what is going to make a first impression on potential consumers.
This identity is how people are able to discern the values you stand for as a business and be able to categorize your brand amongst the vast sea of competitors.
Your brand should live as the strategic foundation of all business decisions and act as a guide to remain relevant to an ever evolving culture.
Branding Improves Soft Equity
A good brand strategy can also increase soft equity, which is essentially social capital or trustworthiness. For instance, brands that people have relied on for decades or even longer have more social capital to spend if they make a mistake or have to backpedal on a business decision because they have loyal customers. It all ties back to building that fanatic customer base that’s going to stick with you through thick and thin—and that’s where our team comes in.
For instance, Coca-Cola has a long-lasting legacy and a very established brand across the world. This has granted the company a huge amount of brand equity – there's a reason the company didn't totally go under when the debacle of New Coke ended up tanking their stock and wasting tons of resources.
Coke’s social capital was so immense that they could pivot back to so-called “Classic” Coke and regain all of their market share. Today, that company is just as widespread and powerful as it ever was, even though they made one of the biggest blunders in soft drink history.
Branding Boosts Employee Satisfaction
There’s an often understated benefit to branding mastery in that it improves employee satisfaction, along with improving the customer experience. This is more important than you might think.
Employees that work for strongly branded companies usually have more loyalty to the company. Consider Disney: arguably one of the biggest entertainment conglomerates of all time.
People who work for Disney tend to be a little fanatic about it. This is great for Disney’s executives, and it’s something you should aim for with your business.
Everything that Disney does ties back to their overall brand strategy and corporate identity, which makes it easier for people to align their values with the consistent brand in the same way they might with national identity or religious identity. This kind of messaging creates an emotional connection.
This is also great for drawing in new employees as you expand. It’s relatively easy to get people excited to work for SpaceX compared to some of the other space-oriented startups because SpaceX has a fun, cutting-edge brand that blows away the competition.
Branding Boosts Marketplace Trust
While soft equity is one thing, branding can also boost your company’s overall marketplace trust.
Everyone knows what to expect from a corporation like Walmart, so it has a lot of marketplace trust, and it’s why its stock values tend to rise no matter what’s going on with the broader market.
By boosting marketplace trust, it’ll be easier for you to raise capital for future business expansions and to please shareholders, should your company eventually go public.
Branding Makes Marketing Easier
Identifying and sticking with a successful brand strategy for your company makes marketing a more cohesive project. Once you have your brand voice and belief system in place, you can tailor not only all of your marketing strategies but all of your business decisions and strategic placements to those brand guidelines.
This guides you to effective marketing campaigns and business tactics instead of leaving you out in the proverbial creative wilderness. Furthermore, it allows you to create long-term marketing campaigns that still bring in excellent profits or consumer conversion rates in its target market. After all, how long has Coca-Cola been using that same polar bear for its commercials? Yet that marketing campaign is still excellent.
It’s all because they stick to their core brand. Reinvention is, in a way, the polar opposite of Coca-Cola due to the aforementioned New Coke debacle. So they stick with the classics and end up enjoying fantastic marketing results.
Everything needs to be in sync. Consistency is key, and branding should be part of everything you do—for example, we mentioned above that Apple’s brand is exclusive and minimalist.
Apple maintains this identity through all of their strategic processes, even the way they announce new features to the public. In order to maintain the appearance of exclusivity, Apple saves new announcements for one or a few big events each year. Fans and loyal customers wait on the edge of their seats in order to see what Apple’s latest innovation is going to be, and it’s all done in line with their brand.
Build a brand that works for your company, and you’ll be able to create a timeless, long-lasting company.
Branding Is The Bottom Line
Understanding what branding is and how you can do it successfully is key if you want to make it over the long-term. Fortunately, marketing and branding agencies like us at Herman-Scheer can help you breathe new life into your current brand or build a successful brand with a focus on longevity from the ground up.
Using our talent and resources, you’ll be able to create masterful marketing campaigns, make sophisticated strategy decisions, and solidify your brand identity design for long-term retention and market stability. Be sure to contact us today to set up a meeting and see what we can do for you.
Sources
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1913612_1913610_1913608,00.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jerrymclaughlin/2011/12/21/what-is-a-brand-anyway/?sh=3c911bfa2a1b
