Your brand is perceived in many ways. When you step back from the business babble you can return to fundamental concepts about how brand identity and marketing actually function, so you can produce far stronger results.
You’ll viscerally appreciate the impact of your branding, when you observe where and how your audience gets that first impression. And how they get past that decision gateway to enable more impressions.
1) Your Brand Identity Is Signage For Your Business
Your brand identity tells prospects and customers to “come do business here,” just like the old hanging boot in front of a shop in Colonial America. They recognize your business, and the way you do business, and begin to form an impression.
Brand communication in the new millenium comes from a firehose spray of subtle impressions — the company name (or product/service name), logo, tagline, style, description of your products and services, customer service, your blogs and social posts, your voicemail message, and all kinds of other nuanced communication and interactions your prospects and customers have with your company.
When all is said and done, and conceived and produced and engaged, your "brand identity," with all its components...IS your business. While some improv within your marketing communications is perfectly fine, it should always reference the compass of thought-out strategy for your company/brand.
2) Your Brand Identity Reminds Them How You’re Different
Could be style, substance, or both. Preferably both! And if you don't think your business is any different than others in your field, we either need to look harder, or start inventing!
Remember, your brand should be different beyond the newest homepage photo you've posted, it must extend to smarter innovative ways to do business, so your prospects and clients come back.
Also, regarding your logo and tagline, a key first impression, don't think "yeah, that looks kinda like a logo, it'll work"... when a good logo and tagline positively influences your audiences thousands of times over a period of years.
3) Your Brand Builds Awareness & Recall
If your name, logo and tagline and overall look are on your digital and print communications and places like your office and trade show booth, people remember your brand and your business. Name recognition really matters — ask any "unknown" political candidate who lost, even though they had better ideas.
Remember that your company name, logo and tagline are the first (and most powerful) of an array of interactions and impressions your audiences get, across many areas of your company.
4) Your Brand Builds Loyalty Among Customers
When your customers are happy they come back for more. And they bring new business with them via word-of-mouth recommendations. And if CFOs and Marketing Directors went out for beers they'd discover it's far less expensive to keep a customer than to hunt down a new one.
Brand Ddentity — with your logo and tagline and graphics and content style — helps focus customer attention, and if they like what you offer overall, helps build brand loyalty,
5) Your Brand Identity Lights Up Your Employees
When we say "band identity," it's ironic that "identity" is part of that phrase. Interestingly, the impact of a good brand goes beyond prospects and customers. Your employees like working for a brand they value. It inspires pride and purpose.
When they understand and get behind your company (your brand)… that gets communicated powerfully to your prospects and customers.
6) Your Brand Graphics Promote Consistency
Even if your products and services may be plentiful and in seemingly different categories, the unifying elements of brand identity that help tie everything together, across your marketing channels and communications. Repetition creates that consistency.
Those are six. They represent more… because the sum total of the components of your brand and your website, is your business!
Your brand should initiate the prospecting and sales process…Don't take Step One before Step Two Is Ready!
Our own approach to branding is highly strategic — for the short-term and long-term — and transparent. We’re told this is uncommon -- good branding shouldn't be. It doesn't come so easy, it's not just a cute logo or new website colors..
We need to work hard at developing that first impression. And work harder developing a second-tier engagement with your customers. That second impression — usually before we launch the brand or rebrand — engages, and converts a suspect into prospect into a customer.
Practically speaking, this means looking at the full branding, marketing and sales process. Talking to customers. Potentially whiteboarding Customer Journey Mapping. Also, very practically speaking — make sure you have your "back end" ready (your website, with well-branded, clearly-explained products and services, your processes) — before you invest your efforts and the attention of your prospects on "front end" (social, email, promotional) marketing! This falls short often.
You really don't want to gain the interest of prospects with a good promotional campaign, and turn them off when they hit your website or in the sales process!
Your website should have architecture and content that converts a prospect into a customer. (Read that last sentence again!)
It's necessary to go beyond mentioning “target market” and avatars… to tweak products and services, so they’re worth engaging with and worth buying.
We use proprietary consulting tools and processes that get the tricky job of defining, refining and articulating the essence of that brand done quickly. It's necessary to connect cranial synapses like a circuitboard, noticing where "symptoms of opportunity" come up.
"Problems" within the company are usually the drivers of action. Yes, you need to address them — but it's best not to do this reflexively, but systemically, so strategic, branding, sales and marketing problems don't keep popping up like Whack-A-Mole. You don't want to spend your time "reacting and responding" to problems… you want to plan your thinking and "create" results, based n the company and culture you want.
If you do — you'll create a business impression for your company that is "on brand"...that is brand new.
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Joel Alpert is a Branding and Marketing Specialist in Atlanta who uses all kinds of brainy consulting tools and a unique combination of strategic and creative approaches to engineer marketplace impact. He works with “the largest and smallest companies in America.” Find out more about PowerBranding… rebranding… our unique strategic consulting… personal branding and more — connect here on LinkedIn, and come visit: www.MarketPowerOnline.com (I'll even show you some more of what's "inside my head"!).
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