What is a Brand?

Brands are the identification that differentiates one business from another (through name, symbol etc.). However, today brands can also be defined as the personality they reflect to people in relation to status, emotional characteristics and subjective quality. They give the consumers a perceived knowledge of the product, its quality and uniqueness before they buy it.

Brands give the surety for deliverance of the service as promised by them. For example, Pizza company A claims to deliver pizza within a certain time and Pizza company B claims to deliver most delicious Pizzas. It makes easy for the consumers to identify what they want and which brand to choose for it. It is important for a brand to accomplish the claim advertised by it to attain a good Brand Image. Apart from consistently rewarding the confidence, brands also works towards delivering expected emotional response.

Building a Brand

Know Yourself

Before building a brand, you should analyze what is that you achieve for your customer and how it affects their lives. Where you stand and what is your current position in the market. You should identify your target market and identify their preferences and interests. It is crucial to know opinions of customers as well as employees about your business. Find out what is customer perception about your business, what is the first thing that comes to their mind when your brand is mentioned to them. Are they aware of the services you offer and do they trust your business, product or service? Such research will later help in forming the basis of your brand message.

Know Your Competitors

You should know what your competitors are doing and what are their strengths and weaknesses. How your brand is different from your competitors and what is your brand’s position as compared to them. Find out what your competitors are missing and what you can do to achieve it.

Define Your Goal

Once you know your current status as well as that of your competitors, you can start defining your goals. You should have a clear idea of what do you aspire your business to become. Define your goals on a timeline, divide your plans in phases and set targets with deadlines. While setting up goals, one shouldn’t forget to keep them relevant to consumer needs and preference.

Personalize the Looks

This is one of the most important parts of Brand Building. All major brands have unique visual and verbal identities such as logos, fonts, slogans, etc. Design every aspect of your brand and make sure that they match each other. This will help create a personality that encompasses all the characteristics the brand is supposed to have.

Protect Your Brand

Register your brand in the key market you are entering. Measures should be taken to prevent your brand from being confused with other similar brands as it can result in loss of business. Hire a good lawyer to help you with legal formalities.

Deliver the Branded Experience

Establish your brand with strategic thinking and careful use of resources like SEM, PR, online advertising, blogs, influential advisers and strategic email campaigns. The brand experience totally depends upon how consistently you present your brand. It should be instilled into all your products and services; and at every customer touchpoint. Customer’s notion of your brand is formed with their first experience with your company, products or services. Every customer interaction is a chance to enrich the brand.

Evaluate your Success

Evaluate performance of your staff from time to time. Hire a third party quality analysis team to keep a track of the quality of your products and services. Provide your clients with feedback forms after every project. Request feedback from your customers and find out if your products and services are meeting their expectations. Add feedback form to your website. You can also carry out surveys to find out any change in customer preferences.

Extend your Brand

Offer new products and services from time to time to keep your brand relevant to the target audience. Modify looks visual and verbal identities to relate to changing needs of the consumer. However, make sure that the brand message is delivered consistently. If you are introducing a new product or service which doesn’t lie under your brand values, you should launch a separate brand for it.



By: michael

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Website content

Successful business branding is one of the most important aspects of any successful company or business venture, and it is certainly worthwhile considering the possible options available. One of the most crucial aspects of branding that needs to be considered is continuity. Today there are so many different ways to reach out to customers, publicize and promote your business and get your business name known and recognized.

But sometimes it can prove difficult to transfer the brand image from one medium to another. What works well on paper may not work so well on the screen, when translated to web technology. Again, what may work well on a huge billboard may fail when transferred to a business card, and radio may see another possible pitfall waiting to happen. Branding is important, whatever medium is used, and so when embarking on a branding or re-branding project for your company or business, take care to consider all of the possible media which might be used to promote your business in the future, and consider how the brand image will translate across all of them fluidly, consistently and recognizably.

Don’t make the same mistakes made by some companies, many of whom are no longer with us. Never try to piggy back your business into the marketplace on the success of a rival company’s brand image; it rarely works. It will also be important to plan your branding not for the present, or even the immediate future, but for as long as it is possible to imagine the company continuing. Don’t brand your company on the basis of current fashion trends, as such branding could easily date your company.

Today one of the most essential elements in terms of successful branding and choosing a brand image and name which will work in your favour is to consider effective use of keywords. This applies both to the brand name itself and also to the slogan or tagline which will be associated with it. The reason for considering keywords is that today, in a world driven by internet technology, this is how people are searching for products and information relating to them.

Why else are some of the biggest prices online associated with domain names? These commodities, which in themselves are nothing more than a phone number equivalent, can sometimes be valued at many millions of dollars, simply because they contain, or are, a particular keyword which is highly associated with that industry or product or service.

By considering the keywords which people are tending to use, and there are many tools, including Google’s own version, which can enable you to do this, you can start to identify appropriate wordings and terms which can be incorporated into the product brand name or slogan.

Don’t ignore the slogan or tagline, as often these can prove to be just as successful at promoting the brand as the brand or product name itself. Because you can squeeze one or two keywords into these, they actually carry more advertising weight than the product name itself in many cases.

Visual recognition is increasingly important too. With an unbelievable quantity of slogans, brand names, images, adverts and slogans bombarding all of us every day we have grown very used to the same old forms of advertising and promotion. We tend to walk around with a special pair of lenses in our glasses which filter out almost all of the adverts which we see each day.

If you were asked right now to state how many adverts or promotions you saw yesterday, you may well hazard a guess at a dozen or perhaps twenty. The truth is that almost certainly you were exposed to many hundreds, through a wide variety of media. The fact that we estimate the actual number so low is evidence in itself of the importance not only of brand image but successful marketing of that brand name or slogan, as people will almost certainly filter out anything which falls within their peripheral frame of consciousness.

This peripheral frame of consciousness is the average person’s ability to subconsciously deduct what slogans, brand names, images, adverts or promotions might prove worth picking up on and carrying through to our conscious perception, and ultimately to the possibility of us actually taking notice of it. To achieve this takes a good deal of trouble and if you are on the path to launching a new product or service, or perhaps even a new business, then thinking about ways in which you can break out of the traditional mold and offer something which can succeed at getting people to become conscious of your product or brand name will be of tremendous importance.

Since people are actively using keywords to search for products or services it makes good sense to consider branding a product or service which taps in to this active searching, since already you’re more likely to break through that peripheral barrier. Well thought out business branding can make all the difference!



By: Naz Daud

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How to brand

What is most important to consider when it comes to branding development for your business? Whether you are a huge multinational organization, or a small home business, branding will be of crucial importance, and can make a very significant difference to the success of the company.

For new businesses starting up, the concept of branding can seem exciting – and indeed, it can be a lot of fun. However, this is also an aspect of your business which needs to be treated seriously, and it will be important to consider a range of aspects.

By considering a wide range of aspects of corporate branding, you will be able to ensure that your business retains a consistent image throughout the marketplace. There can be no doubt that confusing branding can be highly damaging, no matter how clever the concept was in the first place.

One of the starting places which it might be worth considering is to check out the branding ideas pursued by your competitors. To understand how they have arrived at the branding images they have developed provides you with an appreciation of how you might be able to market yourself differently. It will be important to ensure that your company is seen as being, not only distinct from your rivals, but also more professional. Copying ideas of branding styles from your rivals does not make you the market leader, and can often lead to confusion; confusion in turn often leads to loss of sales and customers.

Piggyback branding is where a company launches a product or corporate branding image which is deliberately designed to look very similar to a known, successful brand which has already reached a wide audience and established a name for itself. The idea being that by creating products or a brand image that is similar, people will either purchase your products in error, or assume that they are of similar quality. Orientals are masters at this type of branding.

This is dangerous territory. There are few success stories when it comes to piggyback branding. The only market that can safely achieve this is perhaps in supermarket own-brand items. Where supermarkets package their own brand to look very similar to the leading product, but at a much lower price, they are often able to achieve much greater profit margins. People are rarely confused into buying their product, but it does help to draw attention to the own-brand items. That is one of the major objectives of advertising: the ultimate being to make a recurring sale.

In other areas of the retail and service industries this can be very tricky, and is rarely advised. Ensuring your own distinct brand image allows you to establish yourself as distinct, unique and able to provide a service or quality of product which is good enough in itself not to need a branding development which relies on confusion or mimicry to succeed.

Having said that, there are certain markets where themed brandings have taken off rather well, and in these fields it will be helpful to understand the trends being used. If a branding trend has succeeded, customers will be aware of this and will frequently start scanning for particular colors, styles of themes.

Think of the colors used for gaming consoles for example. Silver and black are dominant themes used in many products and labels, with green and blue used often as secondary colors. This is no coincidence since the colors evoke impressions of sturdy space age metal, NASA technology and futuristic styles. Developing a brand quite distinct from this could work either for or against you. Creating a brand which ties in with a known theme, and with a successful visual style, can help you to be seen as a significant part of the market.

On the other hand, heading off in a new direction in terms of style and color could work in your favour, with the impression being implied that your technology is different, and is heading off in a new direction. Being able to support these claims will be important of course.

Frozen foods often use blue and white within the theme to evoke ideas of ice-cold environments, whereas hot salsa products will invariably be packaged in warm reds and oranges with a general sense of heat.

These are just small examples of how the market has often developed successful branding styles which will be important to cash in on for maximum success. It might be an interesting experiment to try selling frozen food packaged in red and salsa sauce in blue and white, but it could end up being a very expensive one!

In terms of successful branding development you will need to consider the name of the company, and there again the same ideas apply. In piggyback branding, the name, and even the font used in the advertising campaign, could mimic a known rival or established brand. However, there are also many well-established styles and themes which work well and are worth considering. To go with the flow or to break away – it’s a tough decision.



By: Margaret Winfrey

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