Why is branding so important for your business?
You might be wondering why branding is so important? What’s the purpose of branding? How to apply branding in practice? Then buckle up, this one's for you!
Discover the three primary functions of branding that support your business goals. These functions are at the heart of every successful branding project and getting them right is the difference between struggling to survive and thriving as a business. I first clarify the difference between brand design or branding vs. brand vs. brand identity to make sure we are on the same page. I also provide practical steps of a branding process and explain why brand identity guidelines are your best friend. We also walk through a real-life example of one of the most successful brands in the world and see how they are using their brand to their advantage. Let’s dive in!
Branding vs. brand vs. brand identity
First things first, let’s clarify the difference between brand design or branding vs. brand vs. brand identity to make sure we are on the same page.
BRANDING
In short branding or brand design is a process combining both strategic and design thinking. While it may seem that branding is as simple as picking out your favorite colors and thinking of a nice logo, there’s more to the story of great branding than meets the eye. Branding is a process that involves thorough research and strategy development to shape a clear understanding of who you are, how you want to be perceived by your clients and what you promise to your clients (your brand) as well as the development of the visual elements and the accompanying resources. Strategic branding is the leg work that silently takes place before your brand identity is born.
BRAND
“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or business. It’s not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is. ” Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap
A brand is something intangible and that's where all the confusion comes from. It serves a very strategic and versatile goal so it becomes hard to define it as one single thing. Essentially, a brand is an emotional connection with your clients and it shapes how you are being perceived by every single person that interacts with your business. It's how you stand out from the crowd. It's the message you communicate. People fall in love or hate brands, people trust or distrust brands, and form loyalties towards them. Your brand is the promise you make to your clients and your success depends on how well you keep that promise.
BRAND IDENTITY
A brand identity, on the other hand, is tangible. It’s the unified visual elements that are typically thought of when talking about brands - logo, fonts, colors, patterns, imagery etc. It’s also all building blocks that create your visual presence including product design, packaging design, advertising, marketing etc. While strong and distinctive brand elements are essential, that's only the tip of the iceberg, the tangible outcome of all the background work that led to the development of these elements. Brand identity is documented in your brand identity guidelines with the appropriate resources and guidance to apply your branding in practice.
So why is branding so important for your business? There are three primary functions of branding that support your business goals. These are creating distinctiveness, communicating a brand promise and relationship building. Let’s walk through all of these in detail.
1. Creating distinctiveness
Like all people, your business also needs to have an identity and a personality in order to attract and speak to the right audience, that’s your brand. It's how you're being perceived by every single person that interacts with your business. Branding ensures that your identity and personality shine through at every touchpoint. Think about the different identities and personalities of businesses like a yoga studio, a personal finance advisor, a photographer, a wedding planner, a skin care studio, a personal trainer, a travel blogger. All these businesses will have a different identity and will aim to speak to a different audience. Branding ensures that your unique personality and identity is clearly reflected and attracts and speaks to the right audience.
Through showcasing your unique personality, branding is also a means of standing out from the crowd. If done right, branding will set your business apart in a saturated market with fierce competition. Branding also creates recognition of your business and distinguishes you from the rest of the crowd creating memorability. It is by no means an easy or a quick process but the long term function of branding is to create distinctiveness, brand awareness and brand recognition.
Just think about how hard it would be to filter through the noise and find products or services that are the best for you if we lived in a world without branding. If all businesses and their offerings looked exactly the same, if they didn't have any means of distinguishing themselves from the others, or if there was no way of showing their identity and personality, that would make life very difficult. Imagine going to a shopping mall and all of the stores looking exactly the same from the outside. Or imagine shopping online and having all businesses and their offerings look exactly the same. How would that shape your customer experience? How would you know which business provides the offering that you are looking for? That’s why you need to create distinctiveness.
2. Communicating a brand promise
Your branding communication creates a promise to your clients - your promise on the quality, value and positioning of your products or services and your knowledge, expertise, experience and how you measure against your competition.
Additionally, communicating your business values has become increasingly more important as part of your brand promise. Mostly, this means the ethical and ecological standpoint and practices of a business. To illustrate this in practice let’s take the topic of sustainability. If you as a buyer deeply care about sustainability and your ecological footprint then you will naturally gravitate towards and seek out businesses that clearly show their commitment to the environment through their branding. From the business perspective, your branding should clearly communicate your business values and your commitment to them in order to appeal to your client values.
“Making a difference has become essential to building a brand. Consumers are shopping their values, and businesses are rethinking their value proposition. The triple bottom line—people, planet, profit—is a new business model that represents a fundamental shift in how businesses measure success.” - Alina Wheeler
A very important point to mention here is that your branding should truthfully reflect your brand promise. Only if you are truthful about your offering, your experience and values then it will be beneficial to your business. Communicating a message that’s different from the actual situation, or positioning yourself in a way that is not truthful will lead to negative outcomes. If your brand promise differs negatively from the actual user experience, it will be damaging. Social media enables instant and public feedback so be prepared to hear about it loudly and publicly if you don’t come through on your brand promise.
3. Relationship building
Most importantly, branding is your way of interacting with your audience in order to build a relationship with them. Relationship building is important for creating trust, loyalty and eventually sales. Let me walk you through the process.
As already explained, your brand is the promise you make to your clients and your success depends on how well you keep that promise. The messages you communicate, the promises you make, the value you deliver to your clients, all of these interactions are building a relationship with your audience through customer experience.
Delivering value to your clients and a great customer experience often comes down to customer service. This is a very important area of your business no matter what industry you are in or what products or services you provide. Customer service shapes user experience and the direct relationship your business has with your client so getting this right it's very important.
Over time, customer experiences generate an expectation. Clients learn what they can expect from you and your success really depends on how well you deliver on that expectation time and time again. Building successful relationships and then consistently meeting client expectations leads to emotional attachment, brand loyalty and eventually sales. So generating financial success requires first focusing on relationship building.
Real-life example
Let’s take a look at a real-life example to illustrate how the primary functions of branding work in real life.
Let’s take one of the most recognizable and valuable brands in the world - Apple. Think of their logo. How long did it take you to remember it? Usually a split second will do. When you see someone in a cafe with a laptop that has an apple logo on it - you will instantly recognize it without having to read or invest any time in finding out the brand. You (instinctively) know the quality of their products, you know that their products are sleek and powerful yet simple, intuitive and easy-to-use. You know that the process of purchasing, setting-up and using their products is a breeze and there’s so many resources available to help you along the way should you ever need it. You know that they consistently meet and exceed their promises to their customers through all touchpoints.
Now put it together, their brand recognition is instant and effortless thanks to the distinct logo and the sleek and minimalistic design of all their products. By being able to recall their logo it’s clear that their brand is memorable, easily distinguishable and recognizable. They’re well-known for over-delivering on their promise of simple, intuitive and easy-to-use products. They deliver exceptional customer service.
While these are only some of the reasons why Apple is so wildly successful, this clearly shows the power of getting the primary functions of branding right.
How to apply branding in practice?
The branding process consists of three steps: firstly the strategic branding process, secondly developing a visual brand identity and thirdly developing the necessary resources and guidance for applying all of this work in practice. To ensure you are not missing anything make sure to grab a copy of our Website Design & Branding Checklist, it’s free!
The first step is conducting a thorough research and shaping a clear understanding of who you are, how you want to be perceived by your clients and what you promise to your clients (your brand). The second step is creating a visual brand identity that allows you to show up and communicate with your audience in a consistent and memorable way. This involves the creation of all of the tangible visual elements of your brand identity. And lastly, the third step is creating your brand identity guidelines and other resources to ensure that you can apply your brand identity consistently after the designer's work is done.
FREE RESOURCE
WEBSITE DESIGN & BRANDING CHECKLIST
In case you’re wondering… What are key elements of a strategic website design & branding? How to ensure your website & brand identity tick all the boxes? Does your current website & branding (still) suit your needs?
Brand identity guidelines are your best friend
Your brand identity guidelines document is the outcome of the branding process. It's a set of rules and guidance that help you bring your branding to life. There are many visual elements that go into the creation of good brand identity guidelines. The most obvious ones being your logo variations, color palette, typography guidance but also product design, packaging, marketing etc. All businesses need branding no matter their size. But your brand identity guidelines can be as short or as extensive as necessary for your specific business needs.
All businesses need branding no matter the size for building your visual presence. BUT your brand identity guidelines can be as short or as extensive as necessary for your specific business needs.
I completely understand that having an extensive brand identity guidelines document might seem too much when you're just starting a business or when you’re running a small business. That's completely OK.
I want to make it very clear - branding is something that all businesses need no matter the size of the business. BUT the level of detail of your branding process and brand identity guidelines is completely dependent on what stage of business you are in or what are your unique needs. The branding process and the brand identity guidelines will look very different for a new/small business vs. a large corporation. Your brand identity guidelines need to work for you, so they can and should be altered to suit your specific business needs.
I hope that this post was helpful on your branding journey and I'm so excited to see how you apply these in practice!
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