Brand identities are the core of any successful business. Branding builds a relationship with consumers, inspires loyalty, and creates long-term business, and the small business owner ignores branding at her or his own peril. While branding often seems prohibitively expensive, brand building on a budget for your small business is possible. In this article, I offer some simple and basic ideas about branding: covering corporate and brand identities and visual identities, branding strategies, brand origins, and the basics of how to brand.
The average consumer is exposed to over 3,100 ads daily, up from only 700 in the 1960s, and now, more than ever, the successful companies are the ones that have brands, not just marketing campaigns. A brand is a company's most valuable asset, and while many small business owners might see a branding strategy as an unnecessary extension of a marketing campaign or beyond the reach of their limited means, it isn't, and the small business owner ignores branding at her or his own peril.
Branding builds a relationship with consumers, inspires loyalty, and creates long-term business, but building a brand identity doesn't have to cost millions, involve prohibitively expensive research, or involve dealing with an army of art directors in $900 dollar frames and Prada loafers.
The starting point for the development (or refinement) of your brand must be conversations with your customers. Today's consumers actively seek out and reward the authentic and innovative brand that produces memorable experiences, and actively punish the campaigns that rely on the merely novel or manipulative.
Entrepreneur, Know Thyself...
Perform competitive analysis. Gather up as many elements from the campaign of your closest competitors (or the brands you wish you could compete with) - check their websites, clip print ads, record their television ads, and sit down with your creative team. Analyze the campaign so you can create a point of differentiation for your brand. What makes your brand more credible, more exciting, and more compelling to the market you're competing with this brand for? Reverse engineering the campaign to imagine what the process your competition went through to create their campaign is a creative exercise that will pay dividends, as well.
Privilege Experiences Over Images.
Human beings make the majority of their decisions based on emotions. The one great conceit of the Enlightenment, that man is, at heart, a rational animal, engaging in carefully weighing the options before deciding on a course of action, has been time and time, especially during the 20th century proven remarkably off-base.
Successful branding is aware of aspiration, ambition, drive, as well as the need to feel content. Brands can have that specific Proustian quality - tied in with memories. Where did your brand originate? An origin story can help customers empathize with your brand, with its development, to mirror their own ambitions and see it in your brand.
Keep Your Brand Consistent
The best way to ensure that images conform to your brand identity and that your external communications stay on point is to create a brand manual, outlining the visual identity of your brand, and informing your staff and anyone else involved (clients, for example) of the guidelines for using your brand image.
Successful brands create memorable experiences, but remain consistent to the brand's vision. Think of the variety of Icelandic musician Bjork musical permutations and transformations. There's still an intangible quality, a feeling that remains constant. Her visual identity is closely controlled, but her aesthetic is mystical, playful and, at once, dark. This aesthetic is her brand identity.
Photographer Juergen Teller's campaigns for Marc Jacobs also create memorable and interesting experiences, often times completely divorced from the product, while remaining thematically consistent.
Stop, Collaborate & Listen
If you're to create a meaningful and memorable experience for your customers, you have to consult with them to figure out what your existing strengths, if you can expand without diluting your brand, or if you have to work on the core values that inform your business' vision.
Having one of your employees gather up all of the mentions of your brand, whether it be word of mouth, customer reviews on websites, or press clippings can help you improve the customer's experience, and with the internet, feedback can be practically instantaneous.
Depending on your size, it can be as simple as taking a loyal customer out for dinner and thanking them for their business, or throwing a cocktail party that lets customers know they're appreciated, listened to, and that doesn't attempt to sell them anything.
Finally, when developing your brand identity, have fun & play. Brands should represent both the aspirations of your brand, as well as the initial enthusiasm that made you, the entrepreneur get into the business to begin with.
