Talking about Brand leads you directly to connect with your emotions, who has not experienced that when they hear or see the logo of a brand they immediately associate it with memories, smells, flavors; The connection that brands achieve is so powerful that it permeates the deepest part of your being, it is a symbolic value that reflects lifestyles.
That is why your company must use the power of the Brand as a differentiating element; a successful combination of design and communication can be transcendental in customer perception. The importance of building and developing a brand is an essential element in strategic business and marketing planning.
What is the brand?
The American Marketing Association defines a brand as “a name, term, sign, symbol, design, or a combination of these that identifies a company’s products or services or differentiates them from competitors.” Three key elements can be distinguished in the brand: the name, which is the word that can be pronounced, the emblem, which is the graphic that distinguishes the brand and is recognized by sight, and the logo, which refers to a group of letters, figures, abbreviations, terminations cast in a single block in order to facilitate typesetting.
What is branding?
Branding is the process of developing and disseminating the brand through a series of strategically designed Communication and Marketing elements and actions. In short, it consists of defining each of the elements that make up the brand, aligning them with the business model and communicating them in a certain way to internal and external audiences.
Through Branding, we can build, create, shape a brand based on certain concepts, symbols or ideas that allow users to link the brand with the product and experience.
And Marketing has stopped selling products, now it sells experiences. This process allows us to develop that emotional component that creates the true bond with the brand and generates that intangible value that all companies seek to create. It is the ability to provoke the admiration of those who see us, at the same time that we demonstrate that we know what we do.
Brands are one of the most important means to attract and retain customers. For Tom Peters, the great Branding guru, the differentiation of a company lies precisely in its intangible factors: the value, credibility and uniqueness of a brand.
How to achieve a successful strategy for your brand?
Once you have understood the importance of The Brand and its incalculable power in the market, you must take all the necessary precautions for its creation, taking into account the following aspects:
- Design your strategy, but not before analyzing in depth the objectives, mission, vision and values of your company, characteristics of your products, profile of your target audience, market characteristics and the objectives of your brand strategy.
- Connect emotionally with your customers through your brand.
- Think carefully about your promise, making it relevant to your target audience. This may be the key to differentiating yourself. But remember that making a promise means making a commitment to the consumer.
- Your logo should be simple, visually attractive, versatile to adapt to different media, as well as conveying the spirit of your brand.
- Research very well the name you will give to your brand. Look for domain availability on the web, test it in different languages and make it easy to pronounce and remember.
- Define the positioning of your brand. Research your competition, and based on that, determine which positioning strategy should be chosen.
- Determines the communication channels with consumers thinking about providing the best experience, always taking into account their needs and interests.
- Design a global brand architecture thinking about providing autonomy to each of the sub-brands, if applicable to your business model, while providing an image of global coherence, trying to achieve synergy between the sub-brands and the support of the parent brand.
What you should avoid
In this strategic process that involves the creation of The brand, we usually make some unforgivable mistakes, which is why we bring up some of the most common ones:
- Don’t think about the brand solely from the visual aspect. A brand is not just a logo, a name or its visual identity. It is the emotional response constructed by people based on the perception they have developed from the different contacts they have had with the company and its products.
- Not carrying out prior research on the company, its target audience and market characteristics to define a strategy based on data.
- Design a complex and confusing brand architecture.
- Make a promise that you cannot later fulfill through your products or services.
- Not respecting the visual identity of your brand.
- Build a strategy that cannot be sustained in the long term.
- Positioning your brand in the wrong markets. Present it in places and events or associate it with people who are not linked to its values.
- Not responding quickly and appropriately to your client’s requirements and discontinuing the relationship with them once the sale is made.
- Losing sight of the attributes defined for the brand, in search of gaining market share over the competition.
- Constantly change through rebranding strategies.
Finally, the Brand represents an intangible asset of the company, providing added value to the product and/or service we offer, which in many cases is fundamental in the consumer’s choice. This intangible value is recognized by the market, which is willing to pay more and prefers branded products to others that are not socially identified. Therefore, the value of the brand is established in relation to the degree of satisfaction it produces both cognitively, emotionally and behaviorally.
Remember The Brand defines who you are and how you will be seen in the eyes of the world.
