The Importance Of Branding
Of all your business organisation’s assets the one that is perhaps overlooked, but is most important, is your corporate brand! Your brand image is what identifies your business, what makes you instantly recognisable to the customers, and therefore encourages sales and business growth, and what sets you apart from competitors. Your company brand headlines and supports all your marketing and advertising strategies, vehicles, and events. Branding, regardless of the corporate arena in which your company operates, will build a distinctive and reputable image, whether it is a new business start-up or an established name and company – here are some aspects of business branding for you to consider:
Influences Purchasing Decisions:
Among the many benefits of branding is that a well-known and established brand can often be the deciding factor in making a customer choose a purchase – many brands are associated with quality in their specific field but, more importantly, to many consumers, the brand will convey reliability and consistency! Your brand gives your business an identity that extends beyond the actual product or service your business provides, whilst also making your business memorable and setting it apart from other businesses providing a similar product.
Brand Development
In any competitive corporate marketplace you need your business to stand out from your competitors – you need to make yourself be seen and heard above the others – investing in brand development will achieve that by creating an association of your brand in people’s minds. A good example of brand image at its most influential is when a product becomes referred to by a manufacturer’s name rather than the item itself – for many years people referred to a vacuum cleaner as a hoover – whether the cleaner was actually made by Hoover or a completely different manufacturer!
Consistency
Consistency of presentation is the key to effective brand development – a consistent image that instantly identifies your brand and business and that people immediately recognise. Your brand name acts as a symbol of the quality and reliability of your company’s delivery of such and becomes synonymous with a particular product or service.
Target Audience
Your business will only be successful if you can attract and retain customers – developing your branding will help achieve that! By identifying a target audience, you can more easily tailor your branding to appeal to that specific sector of the marketplace – knowing your customers will allow you to offer them the personalised experience they want and therefore create a resonance with them that leads to brand awareness, recognition, trust and, importantly, revenue!
Your Customers
You want your brand to be unique, but at the same time to be associated with certain generic characteristics of any successful product or service – aspects such as quality and reliability, so you should focus on your target clientele and address what their specific problems and requirements may be and create an appropriate product to cater for them. Always remember though, that when building a recognisable and successful brand, the quality of the product and service you provide must then be of the standard required – people will associate your brand with their own personal experiences of it, so having a strong brand development campaign will be more harmful than productive if your product or service is substandard or poor quality.
Summary
Branding is a perpetual process as it never stops – your target customer base and the marketplace in general is forever evolving and changing so your brand image and strategy must change along with it to keep pace with competitors. Brand development, when properly conceived and implemented, can be a very powerful and valuable business tool – it guides consumers in their thoughts about the credibility, and therefore the quality, of your business based simply on your branding alone! People’s perception of your brand is what shapes your corporate reputation – that is the association that an individual has in their mind regarding your brand, so branding is critical to a business because of the overall impact and influence it makes on your company!
