What are Brands and Branding

Branding

Brand and Target

Of all the things that help you determine strategy, a brand and a target audience are perhaps the most important. This medley is a statement about who your company relates with and how it does this.

What is a Brand?

A brand is what your customers think of your business; their belief of what a business provides for them, emotionally and functionally. In essence a good brand is the goal to strive for and drives much of your strategy. After all, a brand is what customers think of your company; the reason they buy from you. A good brand is your business’s greatest asset while a bad brand is its greatest detriment. Furthermore, there is no way your company can spurn branding. Customers automatically feel and think something about your company. Two or three decades ago some small businesses got away with ignoring what customers thought and felt. These companies made little or no effort to provide specific services and products which met customer needs. Due to exposure and demand that time has passed. Customers flock to businesses with the strongest brand, the primary reason why large companies dominate the market.

Furthermore, the Internet makes a world of products readily available to nearly every customer. More and more businesses compete with an ever-growing list of other business brands. Success mandates you guide customers towards your company, conduct their impression of your brand, and encourage them to keep your company in mind. Encouraging repeat customers is of the utmost importance.

Branding is not a burden. Knowing what you want your brand to be is the first step to more easily making decisions about your company. Business, as previously mentioned, is all about decisions: how to price your products, where to locate, what advertising methods to use, who to hire. At the center of all of these choices is your brand because your brand is your relationship with your customers, and every choice you make affects this.


What is Branding?

Branding is the conscious effort you make to guide people into thinking specific things about your company. This means, of course, that anything can become part of your branding efforts; from the prices you charge to the way you speak will all have an impact on what people think of your company. Branding can be split into two parts; what you do and what you say.

1) Actions speak louder than words or so the old saying goes. While this isn’t always true, it often turns out to be in the long term anyways. It’s important to incorporate your brand into your strategy in order to determine the tactics you’ll use and the people you’ll hire. Remember that your company’s brand, aka people’s good opinions of you, is based on their contact with your employees.

This also means, however, that the brand you work towards developing must be based on something which you can achieve. After all, if you are unable to fulfill the promises you make, people will figure it out, and it will ultimately hurt you if your branding efforts are centered around them. For example, retail businesses often claim to be focused on high quality while they are unable to afford to throw out bread that has gone a little stale. Having a quality brand means that people who truly care about quality will try this bread and then destroy your company’s reputation as they spread the word about their bad experience. On the other hand, if your brand is based on something other than quality, and it attracts people who are less likely to notice stale bread, this won’t be as damaging. Always consider what you can afford to do in your brand.

2) People judge each other and nearly everything else by the way it looks. We can all wish this wasn’t so, and we can speak philosophically about how it shouldn’t be, but in the end whether you get a customer or not depends on peoples’ first impression of your company. This makes what you say, how you dress up your company with store layouts, web designs, logo designs, ads, etc., an important part of making people think about your company in a positive way. For many businesses, in fact, this design becomes all that matters. Consider Morton Salt, for example. It sells well for a higher price than nearly any other basic table salt, yet its ingredients are pretty much the same. Further, it’s doubtful that very many if any of its customers know its history, how it treats employees, or anything else about them other than that they have an interesting package design with a little girl and an umbrella pouring salt in the rain.