Why The Right Brand Can Change Your Whole Business Landscape

When you think of almost any business, the chances are that their products and services aren’t the only things that appear in your head. There might very well be a lot of imagery, whether it’s a logo, a tone, or even a marketing campaign. These are all parts of the brands of those businesses and they’re one of the reasons that they stay so memorable. But they do more than that. The right brand builds a connection, it builds community, and it can even improve the business from within.
 
Create an ideal customer
As with almost everything in the business, the customer has to be the first thing you think about when it comes to a brand. After all, you can create a brand that’s true and use the best methods to disseminate it, but if it doesn’t matter to your customer, then it’s not going to be much use. When thinking about your customer base, it’s best to start narrow. You need to think of who your ideal customer is and turn them into an avatar. This is done with extensive market research and it’s done to create the perfect reminder of their wants, needs, struggles, and lifestyles. The more you know that customer avatar, the easier it is to fit your product to them by branding.
Find your persona
Of course, the customer is only one half of the relationship. Your business and the products and services it provides are the other. Think of the customer as a puzzle, and the avatar as the means to find the missing piece. The persona of your brand, the voice of it, is about creating that missing piece. This isn’t to say that you create a voice that is untrue. It absolutely needs to be crafted from the strengths of your business and the values your business is based on. Otherwise, the disconnect between brand and business will be quickly noticed. Imagine your brand is a person, sitting down to have a conversation with the customer. What does it offer them? What tone does it take to best communicate? Is it one of reassuring warmth, inviting luxury, or protective professionalism?
 
The importance of positioning
Unfortunately, your brand and the customer aren’t the only ones involved in that conversation. In fact, it can be filled with voices from all directions. Those are the voices of your competition and you’re going to have to find a way to stand out from them if you wish to stand any choice. This is called market positioning, and it’s best done by doing a little investigating. Research your opponents, from what they offer to how they market. What you’re trying to find is the niche that they’re missing, or the element of the business you focus on that might be considered a weakness of theirs.
Getting it noticed
Nowadays, the internet is one of the quickest and easiest ways to spread information of any kind. Your brand requires that said information is spread as effectively as possible. This requires a mix of sending it out to potential customers in outbound marketing and making it more visible with inbound marketing. The visual style is something you have to nail down first. It’s a good idea to build the website first as a base for it. Consider learning more about color psychology and finding the right iconography and simple images to create your logo. From there, it’s all about staying consistent with the visual nature of it. Creating too drastic a difference in visual branding will make it difficult to put across any one image.
 
In the workplace
Your branding is useful for more than adding some visibility to the business. It’s used to reinforce an identity to make it more memorable to customers and members of the team alike. After all, if your business is built around some core principles and values, it’s a good idea to have your staff remember that as well. That’s why you should look into adding that same brand image to your workplace. Adding graphics to the wall of the logo itself is a start. But think largely about the aesthetic of the business. How does it sculpt their interpretation of the business? Does it use bright colors to emphasize creativity or sleek surfaces to manifest an idea of professionalism?
Your mark of approval
As we said, consistency is important to a brand. Going the extra mile to keep all your materials consistent will reinforce it further and further. Don’t miss an opportunity to make your mark, setting a distinct line of what is your business and what isn’t. This means using collateral branding as well as pure marketing and décor. For instance, any brochures and information documents that your business produces should bear your mark. As should even simple administrative documents like invoices. Instead of getting checks from the bank, consider printing your own computer checks with your logo on them. The more collateral branding you build up, the more opportunities for it to sink into the subconscious of anyone dealing with the business.
 
Building those positive associations
As well as associating all kinds of materials with your brand, you should also think about what you’re associating the brand with. The brand is a signifier, and the signified is usually what your business provides as a product or service. But the signifier can be more than that. For instance, you might want to consider creating content that helps, informs, and entertains your audience. If your branding is pasted on that, then the brand becomes a signifier of the expertise you display, too. One of the reasons that good email marketing campaigns work as well as they do is that they’re a constant reminder of what the brand offers, sculpted directly to the needs of the reader.
Finding the right partners
You can do your best to establish a well-designed brand, but the truth is that if no-one else is talking about it, it won’t have as much as an impact. Giving it the visibility and the prestige it needs means that it needs extra exposure. You can build it yourself through networking and making prominent appearances at trade shows. But you also need to get other people talking about it. For instance, it’s been shown that print media is still a hugely effective way to add some legitimacy to a brand. Or you can get in touch with popular pundits in your industry through the use of influencer marketing. It’s all about finding the partnerships that fit you and, more importantly, your audience.
 
Don’t be afraid of brand evolution
We’ve mentioned consistency a few times, and there is no doubt that it is vital to making sure the right message sticks. That doesn’t mean, however, that a brand can’t change at all. Brands evolve all the time, even if the core of them stays the same. But how you evolve that brand is an important question to ask. If a brand changes to fit the ideas of another success and tries to play the copycat, it will be known for the pandering that it is. Branding evolution needs to begin from within. Adapt your own material with a new context. Feel free to modernize your brand or to make it more relevant to an expansion of the business. But do it deftly. If your brand has any power amongst your consumers, changing it drastically can make them feel like you’re abandoning what made you good to them.
Finding a brand is both an internal and an external practice. While it’s most useful for communicating with your customers, it needs to come from a place of truth. Find that truth and use the right methods to spread it to the world.