Brand identity. Most business owners recognise the link between a strong brand and a successful business but few understand the importance of developing the right brand identity.
Effective branding is more than just a logo. Branding is a way of defining your business, not only to your customers and other businesses, but to yourself.
Whether your business is large, small, deals with retail or B2B, a powerful brand strategy will give you a major edge in your competitive market.
Defining your brand
Your brand identity isn’t just about what your business looks like, it’s about its cores and values. Developing the right brand identity really is the first step in creating a brand that sends a clear message to your external audiences.
What Is Driving Your Business?
Consider what is driving your business. What is its purpose? Who are your competitors? In order to establish the right brand positioning, it helps to think of your business as a personality. What makes up its character and how can you ‘sell’ this to your audience?
Customers Are More Aware
An important factor to take into consideration is that customers these days are more aware. Modern day customers are actually quite business savvy – more so than their predecessors. Most are able to see through attempts by companies to charm their way into a sale. Customers now need to connect emotively, they need to believe in your brand.
Sharing The Same Values
To effectively connect with your customers, your business needs to communicate in the right way. They need to know that your business shares the same values and beliefs as them.
This is how you create loyal customers and give your brand better differentiation. It makes you stand out from your competitors (who will often rely too much on promotional discounts.) Imagine not having to lower your price in order to snare deals – the right brand will give you this.
A Promise To Your Customers
Your brand is your promise to your customers. It tells them what to expect from your services, products and business as a whole. It is essentially, what sets you apart. Your brand is who others perceive you to be as well as who you want to be.
Establishing Long Term Relationships
The more loyal customers you gain, the better it is for your business. You do this by not raising their expectations too high as more often than not result in broken promises. You want to create trust with your audience and stay true to your business values. How do we do this? Through consistent branding.
Consistent Branding
When speaking to your audience, it is important that your branding is consistent across whichever platforms your choose to promote from. You want to be speaking to your customers with a consistent tone of voice. This will help reinforce your brand identity, ensuring all customers are aware of exactly what to expect.
Brand Equity
A consistent brand will eventually lead to a strong brand equity. How so? It’s down to the perceived value from your customers. When your products are brought with added value, you can charge more for your brand compared to similar, unbranded products and services.
A good example of this is Coke and Pepsi when compared to standard soda and fizzy drinks. Pepsi and Coca Cola have built an extremely powerful brand equity so they can charge more for their products – customers are willing to pay extra for the name. As mentioned before, this also comes from an emotive attachment the customer has towards your brand.
This is why an effective brand identity is essential to your business, especially a business wanting to grow and reach a wider audience.
How To Create An Effective Brand Identity
- Get a fantastic logo
- Know what messages you want to communicate and make sure every employee is aware of your brand attributes
- Integrate your brand with every aspect of your business – from email signatures to how you answer the phone
- Create the right ‘voice’ for your company and one that effectively reflects your brand
- Think of a tagline. Develop a tagline which memorable.
- Be consistent. Stick to the same colours and logo placement.
- Stay true to your brand and make your customers want to return to you.
How Can We Help?
Here at ICAAL, our expert team can help you define and articulate the right brand message and identity. We have helped many companies develop a unique and engaging brand. Our in-house digital and creative teams have experience in both web and print media so why not find out more about what we can offer.
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