Archive for the ‘Branding’ Category
Branding – Beyond the Logo
Most small and even some medium sized businesses use the term ‘brand’ interchangeably with ‘logo’. In reality, a logo is just the graphic device that represents the company or product.
SO WHAT IS A BRAND?
A brand is more than a simple graphic device. It tells the entire ‘story’ of your marketing strategy.
A true brand brings meaning and relevance to your product and occupies a particular position within the mind of your customer or prospect. It speaks to your market in ways that are less obvious, using non-verbal cues, metaphors and other subtle, albeit powerful tools.
Take a moment to think about these well-known and easily recognized brands; Mini Cooper, iPod, Hell’s Pizza, 42 Below, Tui, Volvo.
You may not be able to immediately recall the logo devices of all these brands, but you will most likely have an innate feeling and opinion about their brand personality and what they mean to you, positive or negative.
The reason for this is that over time we look beyond the logo device and base our brand opinion on the experience we have with a product or company, from the way they speak to us in the written and spoken marketing word, down to the way they interact with us in personal contact situations.
Nothing kills a brand faster than failing to deliver on the brand promise. Unless you are confident you can deliver, don’t over promise.
The use of carefully selected colour palettes and fonts, style of copywriting, general format of printed material and templates, all communicate a specific message. In fact, a strong brand can create recognition even when the logo device is not visible.
Branding is all about personality. Compare a brand to our own personality – in assessing ourselves we would include our appearance, voice, style of speech, mannerisms, sense of humour, temperament and a host of other traits. All of these aspects would add up to brand ‘ME’.
Although some of these elements may not be unique to us, when combined in a particular way (according to our DNA) they create our own unique personality. In the same way, numerous brands may use similar fonts, others may use the same colours, but your brand brings these elements together in its own unique way (brand DNA), setting you apart.
TELLING A COMPELLING & MEMORABLE STORY
You can’t build a credible brand without a unique value proposition. It serves the same purpose as the underlying plot of a great novel or movie.
The elevator speech is THE STORY of the brand and captures the essence of your unique value proposition in a concise and easily understood statement.
When an elevator speech is correctly written, anyone in your company can use it to explain to a prospect what makes your company or product different from all the others out there. This piece also becomes a core component of your marketing messaging.
The brand story reflects your marketing strategy and can’t be divorced from it or seen in isolation. Therefore, logic tells us that you cannot develop an effective brand without a clear marketing strategy.
BE FLEXIBLE, BUT CONSISTENT
When you’re developing your brand identity with your marketing agency, don’t be too close-minded. We have seen clients reject a colour or font because it had been used in a logo for a completely different product in a totally unrelated industry. Just because someone else has used it doesn’t mean it’s not well suited to your brand.
There are literally millions of logo designs out in the market and it’s quite possible that your logo may use a similar colour palette or font style to a brand somewhere else in the world. Your brand becomes unique in the way the elements are combined and consistently applied to represent your strategy and personality. This is where a BRAND GUIDE can be a valuable tool.
A typical brand guide details:
- Acceptable versions of the logo (standard colour, reversed, black and white, grayscale)
- Colour palette usage and official colours in the main colour systems (CMYK, RGB, hexadecimal, PMS)
- Font styles and sizes to be used
- How the logo should be applied
- Graphic templates for common applications
FALSE ECONOMY & MAXIMISING YOUR BRAND VALUE
Consistent delivery of your core marketing message and graphic identity elements are critical to building and maintaining a strong brand.
These companies may have their business cards, stationary and even their marketing brochures designed by their local printer. (Local printers often do design work as a loss-leader, making their margin on the printing).
Others may use a nephew or niece who is studying graphic design at university or polytechnic, or even worse, they may try to do it themselves using Publisher. They may also get the Yellow Pages in-house design team to develop their directory ads, usually free of charge.
Some companies have their advertising material designed, either free of charge or at low cost, by the media that it is due to run in. It’s just hard to imagine how a graphic designer at a magazine or newspaper would have the depth of understanding of a company’s marketing and brand strategy to be able to produce anything more than a ‘pretty’ ad.
In most cases, these companies use a range of unrelated suppliers or designers to craft their marketing and promotional material. Whilst this can save on costs, the inherent downfall of this approach is that strategic branding (or marketing strategy) is not being applied. This ‘economical’ approach weakens a brand’s potential to develop a firm position in the mind of the customer or prospect over time.
When you consider the total cost of executing a full suite of marketing material, the additional cost to have the brand professionally designed and executed by a capable marketing or design agency is minimal. It’s really false economy to do it any other way.
Personal Branding
Personal branding is mainly the way you market yourself to the world. Your personal brand is what other individuals think of you. In a number of ways it’s beyond your power, although you certainly have some control on it.
Personal branding is inevitable. As others network with you, they will involuntarily outline mental links that tie you with certain labels, usually during the initial few seconds. You can not stay away from being labeled, and others can not keep away from labeling you. It takes place involuntarily for the reason that our brains are wired to identify patterns and create links. The labels people connect to you turn into component of your personal brand.
If you send an email, you are branding yourself. If you have a talk with an associate or relative, you are branding yourself. The way you dress up, what you eat, and how you speak all add to your brand. Visualize your brand as the summation of the entire connections regarding you that are saved in people’s minds.
Your external brand
Your external brand is the way you present yourself to the world. There is an aspect of selection here. You can choose what to state or write with the intention to put across a particular image. Your projected image will control what others feel about you and the way want to interrelate with you. You may bump into this image by chance, or you can intentionally target a particular sort of image.
I believe the most excellent external image to project is the one you think best reveals who you actually are. Being yourself basically means being truthful and straight forward.
Your internal brand
Your internal brand is what you think of yourself.
What are the three adjectives that you would use to describe yourself? Take a minute to consider that, and list it down. Is this a brand you feel good about? Does it actually resonate with you? Is this the picture of yours that you project to the world? If you could alter those adjectives, what would that change be?
Now check whether your internal personal brand is similar to the external brand you project to others. You do not necessarily be familiar with what others think of you, although you should at least identify if there are any parts of yourself you don’t completely admit which you attempt to conceal from others. If you discover some areas you have been concealing, then your lack of self-recognition may be preventing you from noticing these features.
Branding & Brand Signals
Brands are like people, they have all the senses to communicate the value, equity and emotions that encompass their individual brand personality. Brands should not be taken as something mechanical, they contain power to stimulate and innovate people and their emotions. Every brand id known to its consumer through many sources of communications. Some recognized a brand with its logo, other recall it with the signature tune and some knows it with the dominating color of the brand. All these sources of brand identity serves as brand signals that captures the attention of target consumer on the move.
Effective branding is the process of managing all the signals in such a way that no one misses the signal on their way in their normal life=cycle. Contact points are identified by the brand professionals and a strategy to ensure brand presence at all those contact points has been developed.
It’s the biggest challenge that any brand has to come across while designing a result oriented branding campaign. The better the contact points of consumer and brand communication are identified, the more chances of getting desired mileage one has.
Brand taps the consumer attention and a strong brand recall is achieved. All these brand signals depicts the brand differentiation and establishes a very strong brand identity in the mind of target consumer. The better the brand management process has been maintained the greater the chances of desired results any branding campaign scores. Branding largely relies on the effective communication of brand signals and it has to be well understood that consumers are well aware and exposed to the brand signals. Every brand signal has its own impact and a definite time to be executed and every individual signal address a different set of problems.
Branding in a campaign are controlled by the available budget, available spaces, time and priorities and these signals are governed by very strategic decisions.
Effective management of these brand signals ensures effective communication of any campaign. Over communication of many brand signals within an area creates a lot of novice and kayos, clarify of branding campaign and simplicity of ideas also contribute to large extent. Logo, tagline, signature tune, corporate color, brand style and typefaces are the brand signals that help to create strong brand differentiation and recognition in any brand.
Joe Daley
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