Why Is Branding So Important?
For any company establishing your brand and brand positioning is very, very important. Identifying what is the customer benefit that your business provides, knowing your points of difference, identifying who your customers are and pinpointing the market your business operates within is key. Only once you know these things can you start to get creative with brand names and logos etc.
And once you have a brand, a logo and maybe a tag line pinned down, you may be forgiven for thinking that most of your branding work is done, but in today’s world it’s not, not by a long shot.
Your branding should purvey every aspect of your marketing, traditionally known as the 4 P’s of pricing, product, place and promotion. If one element of your brand positioning is around quality, then a bargain basement price is not going to ring true, similarly your brand being available for sale in the wrong channels (place) means you’ll stand out for the wrong reasons and be wasting your efforts.
A brand’s positioning should also permeate through all of your employee communications, your company values and every touch point your customer interacts with throughout the business.
It’s not enough to just define the look of your brand, traditionally documented in a style guide. These days your brand’s tone of voice is just as essential. With branded content being pushed out through multiple channels, social media in particular, if your tone of voice in your writing does not match up to your brand positioning it’s going to dilute your brand.
Defining your brand’s imagery style is also very important. Is it fun, is it serious, is it vibrant or demur? Defining these things consciously will make image selection so much easier and efficient when the image style has been determined. Over time your customers will identify an image as yours by its style even before they have fully absorbed the image itself.
Other elements of a brand strategy that can help to further round out a brand’s positioning is to identify the brand’s personality, the brand’s behaviours (what it does and doesn’t do) and defining the role a brand plays in someone’s life. Anything that helps a company, a marketing department, an ad agency or content producer to be ‘on brand’ is worth investing time in up front to create efficiencies down the track.
A brand strategy document recently completed for a client showed that they had three fundamental unique selling points included in their existing marketing material. By going through the exercise and developing a complete brand strategy, they were able to identify other unique aspects of their brand which helped to add depth and better position it for success in its emerging market place. Now with a well-rounded branding strategy they can go out to market with increased confidence that their communication pieces are going to hit the mark.
Find out more about our branding services here: Strategy, Marketing Plans, Branding