Are You in Sync? When Branding and Brand Are Mis-Aligned
Branding isn’t only about your company’s logo. Reaching beyond the domain of your marketing department, your brand is reflected in anything that influences public opinion, including your team, location and online presence. Customer perception plays a large part in purchasing decisions.
Effective branding is about aligning your product/service with your brand identity, as well as maintaining consistency across all channels, including websites, campaigns, media and office culture.
Where Design Matters
Although branding isn’t just about design, it’s dangerous to undervalue the importance of a brilliant graphic designer, a skilful product designer or an experienced, creative copywriter.
The artistic design of your product packaging, as well as on- and offline advertising can make or break your business. In the absence of good design, an outstanding product or service can easily go unnoticed. However, a well-designed brand paired with a mediocre product/service may initially get noticed but quickly lose consumer confidence. In short, your branding needs to match the reality of your brand.
The two can work symbiotically though, say brand management companies like the Blond Ideas group (www.blondideasgroup.com/), with good design fuelling the kind of brand innovation that leads to improvements in product/service quality, as your employees, producers and suppliers get enrolled into what your brand represents.
Making It All Stick
According to brand management experts, everything from your email marketing, Facebook posts and the invitations you send for company events should be cohesive. Inconsistent branding can be confusing and with the few seconds you have to capture a potential client’s attention, you want to ensure your message is clear and leaves a long lasting impression.
Brands like Apple, for instance, have made it almost impossible to miss anything they produce. A similar impression of sophistication and ease are translated across its marketing, service and purchasable items.
According to market research company AYTM, there are a few initial strategies you can employ to sync your brand and your branding.
Ensure staff are invested in your brand, trained and provided with the resources they need. These include but are not limited to, brand guidelines that define fonts, colours and images to be used to reflect your brand’s identity, and the use of a brand champion, responsible for keeping all communications and business strategies in line with brand style.