18 Feb

The Art of Brand Building

Do you want to stand out? Do you want to grow your business? Do you want to tell your story? Do you want to become extraordinary? Well, you need branding. No question about it!

All businesses need great branding. Understanding what branding is about is an important part of ensuring the success of your business.

A brand incorporates the sum of feelings, perceptions, and attitudes that consumers relate to across both the intangible and tangible characteristics of a company. It includes the vision, values, senses, psychology, spirituality, emotions, creativity, innovation and more.

To put it simply, a brand is a promise your customers believe in. It’s a commitment about who you are and what benefits you deliver that is reinforced every single time people come into contact with any part of your business.

Today, branding is a sophisticated process and is so much more than a stamp on a cow or logo applied to a product, process or service. New technology and a deeper understanding of buyer behaviour and human psychology means that branding has evolved considerably. We now incorporate brands into our everyday language: “I’m hoovering the front room” and “I’ll Google it” are phrases that make total sense to us.

So, what are the essential elements of branding that make up a good brand, and how can you better position yourself for growth and improved perception? Your brand should be all encompassing, reaching all corners of your business and every touchpoint that a consumer has with you. This includes how you describe your brand, differentiate, position, promote and personalise yourself. Once you have identified these, then key design ingredients can be added to visualise your brand through colour, shape, name, touch, materials, sound, illustration, typography, as well as retail and working environments. Branding is a continuous process of development. The best brands are flexible and evolve in a responsive way to external and internal changes, whilst still staying true to their core values.

QUICK STEPS FOR EFFECTIVE BRAND BUILDING

  • Ensure identification of the brand with customers and an association of the brand in their minds with a specific product class or need.
  • Firmly establish the totality of brand meaning in the minds of the customers by strategically linking a host of tangible and intangible brand associations with certain properties.
  • Elicit proper customer responses to this brand identification and brand meaning. Attract for the right reasons.
  • Convert brand response to create an intense, active loyal relationship between customers and the brand.

Every BRAND must have by birth or by design, what I call, a centre of gravity, which needs to be identified clearly and built upon and around. There should be something unique /exclusive about a brand, which it is known for, and can be trusted in, as far as efficiency is concerned.

Claude Hopkins, the famous copywriter put it very aptly “Consumers don’t buy medicines (read products), they buy results”. Moreover, once you’ve been acknowledged and accepted in the marketplace, it is nothing less than sacrilegious to deviate from it. After all, the market has perceived and accepted you with your strength, with your chosen difference. It had better be the same throughout.

As in business so in brands, all transactions are in exchange for value (not just money). Therefore, it is the primary duty of the entire brand building force to Create, Maintain and Enhance Value for all its stakeholders, especially for its consumers.

 


 

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