Branding is something incredibly unique and incredibly special. The way it joins both the creative worlds and the business worlds is unparalleled. Every business owner knows from the day they start their business that they need to have a logo. In some case it’s all business owners think about. And sometimes, business owners make the mistake of getting a logo before they even know what their business does!
But branding isn’t just a logo. It is so much more than that. Branding can cover everything from how your flyers look to how the copy on your website reads. In a world where we are information rich and time strained the population tends to make its decisions on products or services not based on a list of features and fancy bells and whistles, but on cost and, perhaps more importantly, brand loyalty.
Brand loyalty is everywhere. Everyone could easily make a list of 4/5 perhaps even more brands that they are loyal to and these lists will vary from person to person. Not because any brands are bad, this variety in brand loyalty is purely down to the fact that a brand means something completely different to different people. As Jeff Bezos says “your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” This quote is, in my opinion the best reflection of what a brand actually is. Although you may think (and probably some brand designers and strategists are guilty of thinking this as well) that your brand is a sum of a company’s visual identity, logo, colour palette etc. The fact is, that the brand is the impact all of these have on your customers vision of your company.
Apple is the perfect example of brand loyalty. They use their clean and sophisticated brand strategy to appeal to people of different views and beliefs. Buying an iPhone or an iPad is not just buying a smartphone or a tablet. It’s joining a lifestyle movement. Even the Android users will agree with me on that!
So why do companies need branding? Without any sort of branding it would be almost impossible to identify a brand. Companies would be unable to stand out from their competitors and would sink away! Without branding there would be no ‘brand promise’, the unspoken agreement made between company and customer that makes the customers know exactly the type of quality they will be getting from the company. Without the unspoken brand promise companies like Apple or Samsung would be unable to consistently sell their products year after year the way that they do.
In short, branding creates an emotional connection between the company and their clients/customers. Without it customers can get left behind, and companies can never truly appeal to their target market. Your brand is an emotional relationship, and it should be looked after like one as well.
Itís hard to come by knowledgeable people for this subject, but you sound like you know what youíre talking about! Thanks