You might think branding is easy, because all you need is a great name, a lovely looking logo and a good tagline, right?

Unfortunately, its not that simple.

Branding is simple to define but it is a little more complicated to summarise in practice. Branding is the collective identity of your business, which means that everything that is related to your business is your brand, from what it is, what to expect and how it makes people feel. We are going to give you a hand and help you to understand why your brand matters.

When you think about the big brands of today, you'll think of Apple, Facebook, Tesla etc. While these businesses have great logos, that isn't all those brands are. But for Tesla, the 'brand' is much more than the sharp red Tesla icon.

So branding should communicate what you're expecting from your business. It shows your potential customers how you work and what you do as well as how you are doing it. Ordinarily, all customer-facing aspects of your business will be classed as your 'brand', although, recently, the definition of brand has moved to subsume the things you do behind closed doors as well. Your logo, the way you interact with your customers, colours that you're using, the employees that you have etc. These are a few of the main components that fall into the 'brand' category. So the question you may be asking is why does all that matter and why does having a great brand mean you've got a great business?

So why does brand matter? If you had the time, we could discuss all things when it comes to branding but we will keep it simple so as to not overwhelm you. Some key points that are important are Brand Awareness and Consistency which we will be going over, which will really help you when it comes to branding.

Brand Awareness

If you want to be recognised, you need to have a strong brand. Placements of products and how successful it can be will be down to how easy it is for your customers to spot you. Let's look at Tesla again, if you took the logo away and used the Tesla infotainment system and placed it into another car, you'd know that, the infotainment system would be Tesla's because of how they've made it and set it all up. Of course, not everyone will recognise Tesla's work but the point is that many people, even if they haven't been in a Tesla have seen videos of the interior and how the infotainment system works to know it would belong to Tesla.

Consistency

Another important thing to remember is being consistent. Brand consistency is how a business delivers messages that are directly aligned with its values, customer experience, brand identity and brand promise. Basically, it refers to how "on-brand" your business's marketing content is, in regards to your brand identity and guidelines. Having powerful branding promotes consistency across all the stuff you do. So a good example of this is if your business is selling cars, you web and social media activity should encapsulate a consistent message. You should be sticking to using the same colours, tone of voice, the way you engage with customers and so on.

Emotional Branding

Emotional branding is where the consumer forms a relationship with a product or brand by provoking their emotions. Consumers can have highly emotion reactions, not just to brig brand but to smaller companies as well. This can be done by creating content that will appeal to customers emotions, ego, needs and aspirations.

So as you know, the pandemic has been a major event and many companies will create emotional ad/content in response to massive events, while promoting their products or service. A good example of this was when the pandemic struck last year and we went into lockdown. ITV produced an ad pushing the idea of everyone coming together to support each other through the tough time in their "Apart. But Never Alone. Get Britain Talking" advertisement. Making this statement was bold but an effective brand positioning strategy.

Hopefully, you'll find the information in here helpful and it will help you create and think about how you want your brand to be perceived. We are grateful you've read up to this point! If you are looking for some more branding tips follow us on social media to stay updated when we post on our blog! You'll hear from us soon.