Branding for Business: More Than a Feeling

Branding should never be underestimated. Whereas great branding can boost your overall performance, bad branding or the lack of such can bury you six feet under!

Hello folks! We are back in the saddle again for our weekly dose of business tips and tricks that can help you rock the crowd! I hope you enjoyed my previous blog post on how to create content that is too hot to handle. Today, I will take you for another marketing joy ride. As you might have already guessed, we are going down the branding for business highway. Just buckle up as I am ready to roll!

Great marketing comes with great branding. Often, entrepreneurs and marketers forget about the immense value of some quality branding. This solidifying element, revered by some, ignored or shunned by others, gives that something extra to your business mix and it can help you transform your company from an old-fashioned loudspeaker to a powerful marketing magnet.

In its gist, branding is a coordinated expression of your business personality. It embodies everything you claim to be and everything you are into one single notion: your brand. It is the omnipresent, omnipotent invisible string that keeps your business concept together. It has played a huge role in the past as it transformed certain businesses such as Coca-Cola into virtual industry icons. Nowadays, its role is even greater. Indeed, companies and marketers are struggling to brand their products, services, actions, and even casual expressions in the social media. Out of a sudden, it feels like your marketing efforts have quadrupled and gone beyond the realm of the imaginable. Your site, your blog, other people’s blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook,Google +, relevant forums… where do you draw the line? It seems like you have to do much more to achieve the results you achieved in the past. Yet, there is a little caveat: successful branding can take your business to new industry heights and your brand can spread on the web like a wild fire. This, however, takes quite a lot of efforts. Hence, it is not an easy thing to do.

Before we go any further, let’s dissect the very notion of branding, which some people still consider confusing, smokey, and even a waste of time and money. Well, not really, but, hang in there. I will clarify it in an instant!

According to its definition, branding is the entire process of creating a unique name and image for a product (tangible or intangible) in the mind of the consumer through various campaigns with a consistent theme. It aims at establishing a significant and particular presence in the market that attracts new customers while retaining the old ones. If this definition is too complex or too vague, we can resume it in two words: branding is all about your unique presence. So far, so good. We have covered the main branding ground. Now, we can move to square two.

Often, people underestimate the value of good branding from the very onset. There are lots of companies that spend a lot of money on graphic designers to create amazing graphics that decorate their websites. Unfortunately, some of them end up being just all glitz and no substance. Indeed, they are so focused (to the point of obsession) on their visual identity that they forget to complement it with their business identity, which stems from their marketing concept. This is how things start disintegrating and eventually, they fall apart. Indeed, it should be pointed out that branding is a complex concept that consists of your visual identity, your corporate identity, and the way you assert your online and offline presence. Consequently, you have three separate grounds to cover: visual, actual, and active identity. You might cover ground one and two, but forget about ground three. Indeed, every time you produce a piece of content that is related to your business (regardless of the fact whether it is a tweet, a Facebook message, an e-mail to a customer, etc.) try branding it. Please, note that branding a piece of information does not imply adding your company name, slogan, or signature to it. Instead, it calls for consistently expressing and reasserting your overall identity. For example, imagine you were a marketer at a company that makes cookies. You might position your product as a family treat and since the family angle is part of your identity, you might want to emphasize on it and reassert it continuously. You would not go with a message blaring how orgasmic your cookies are and how they enhance your… uh, artistic performance. Instead, you should be emphasizing on how your cookies help a family bond together and you should be trying to convey this message throughout all the content you produce. There are ways and ways to express yourself, but overall, stick to the identity you have adopted and try not to go over the top. This, in a nutshell, is the recipe for successful branding.

At the end of the day, the only piece of advice I can give you as far as branding is concerned is to practice what you preach. This is how brands are built, asserted, and further expanded. Everything else will come into place. Still, brand recognition is a long term process, which is subjected to multiple marketing and business variables. It is extremely time and energy-consuming and it takes a lot of marketing and social efforts. But again, it’s a long way to the top if you want to rock & roll! So grit your teeth, roll up your sleeves, and start solidifying your branding foundations! It is worth it!

Although this blog post has been trimmed down to the very basics, I will do another entry and discuss branding for the social media. Till then, stick around for other interesting blog entries or news. Just subscribe to the feed that rocks to receive all the updates that can help you succeed in business! You can also find and follow us on Twitter or join us on Facebook. And one more thing: do not forget to keep up with your great comments. We are happy to have you around!