What is branding? It’s a concept that is referred to a lot. But many business owners struggle to picture what it actually means. Is a brand just a logo?
In this blog, we’ll break down exactly what a brand is, what it’s key components are, and why successful branding is so important for a business.
What is a brand?
A brand is context. It frames the relationship between a business and its target audience. In other words, it’s how people perceive your business.
The factors that shape how people perceive a business are similar to those that shape how we see other people. Do you take into account their name and appearance? Sure. But what about the way they speak to you? How they have treated you in the past? What are your favourite and least favourite memories with them?
That’s why branding is a difficult concept to understand, because it encompasses so many intangible components.
What are the core components of a brand?
Brand Mission: the overarching vision of your business. What do you do? Why do you do it? What do you want to achieve?
Brand Values: the guiding principles that dictate how your company operates. Your values shape your unique culture, influencing things like how you interact with customers or what the working environment is like for staff.
Brand Identity: how does your business look, across all of your public touchpoints, including online or in store, in advertisement and at the point of sale. This is built on design elements like your logo, colour palette, typography, and imagery.
Brand Voice & Tone: how does your business sound. Both your style of messaging and means of communication should be tailored to your specific stakeholders. For instance, you might be an authoritative presence in the market, or a playful start up.
Target Audience: who does your brand speak to? The most important audience segment should be who your product serves best (i.e. your target customer), but you may also want additional audience segments for other key stakeholders, such as current and prospective staff or investors.
Invest in brand consistency
Consistency across the different components of your brand is key, as they link up across all your public touchpoints. That’s more than just how you look on paper. It’s the user experience of your website and the thoughtfulness of your product packaging. It’s how you approach customer service and how you treat your staff. Your brand is the personification of your entire approach to business.
A professionally designed look is not enough.
Think about why certain industries have notoriously negative reputations, such as insurance, utilities and broadband providers. Do they all just happen to have unappealing logos? Of course not. But their brands are damaged by how they treat customers. These industries typically punish brand loyalty in order to incentivise new customers with discounts. They get away with this because the administrative barriers to changing your provider are high in these industries. But as a consequence, their brands are tainted by the systemic signal that they don’t value repeat custom.
Why is branding important?
Misunderstanding what a brand is can lead to businesses employing inconsistent messaging, sending mixed signals to potential customers. Are you an established brand or a challenger brand? Is your business built on heritage or modernisation? Are your products luxury or budget?
Inconsistent messaging creates an uncomfortable environment for customers, injecting uncertainty into their purchasing decisions.
But successful branding is a powerful tool that can establish a competitive advantage. It can provide differentiation by reinforcing unique selling points (USPs), and it can create customer loyalty by building an identity people can trust.
Investing in your brand reassures customers because you have skin in the game. Long lasting or well known brands command trust because their continued high profile demonstrates their financial commitment to the market.
By crafting a compelling and distinctive brand, we can enhance the lens through which people people perceive your business. If you’d like to know more about how Koan Creative can upgrade your branding, visit our services page.