A company’s branding is more important than you might think. On the outside, your brand may seem like it consists only of elements such as logos and colors, but your brand is actually the entire identity of your business. Your brand gives your company its personality.
Branding has always been a crucial part of the marketing and communications process of a business. With the constant growth of social media, consumers get exposed to new brands every day. This is great for consumers because it means they have a lot of options when choosing products and can do research to find the best one, but that makes it harder for businesses to remain competitive, which is a challenge that businesses must conquer.
With the amount of competition today, businesses need to go further beyond to make sure that they are standing out in the competitive market. In order to succeed, companies should think about investing in building a brand that will get and retain people’s attention. When you learn the importance of branding and how much it can contribute to your success as a business, you have the chance to get some level of control and influence over how people perceive your company and your products.
Let’s go into the details on why branding is important in marketing and in your business.
1. Branding helps people identify and recognize your products and organization
A brand is more than just a name, a logo design, or a tagline. Branding is the process of building a brand. It is a strategy designed by companies to help people quickly identify their products and organization, and give them a unique proposition to choose their products over the competition.
Think of a brand as a person, each individual has their own personality, way of dressing, communicating, their own values and beliefs, characteristics, and story to tell. It is this that makes up who we are as people and it’s these characteristics that make a brand who it is.
2. Branding makes your company distinguishable from your competition
People don’t tend to have relationships with products, because a person’s needs or wants are constantly changing. Their loyalty and commitment are to the brand itself, because they associate your brand with a good experience, and that means your brand has imparted a good brand association. If bottled water had no branding, consumers would buy just water and any water, and it wouldn’t matter because they all look the same.
But with branding, you can make your product different and you can make it stand out from the rest of your competitors, it is the reason your consumer walks into the supermarket and purchases your brand of water above your competitors. And it’s not because it tastes different, and it’s not because that your brand of water has been proven to be the best, but it’s because they are loyal to your brand. They like how your brand presents itself, they believe the promises you have made to them, and they prefer how your brand packaging has resonated with them and for all those reasons, big or small, they have chosen your brand.
3. Branding helps you connect with customers emotionally
Building a brand helps you to create a connection and trust with your target audience, it helps to create brand loyalty, so these consumers who have become loyal to your brand because of a multitude of factors, have now become repeat customers. Good branding encompasses a lot of branding elements and your values are one of them. It is these values that are embedded in your brand which then help to create an emotional connection with people and how your brand makes them feel.
4. Branding is the best strategy to attract top-quality talent
Good company branding is used to attract quality talent to your company and help retain your top existing employees. Good branding answers the question “Why should I work for you?” or “Why should I choose your company to work for?” and instead asks “Why should we hire you?” and “Why should we choose you over the other candidates?”
A great brand strategy example that is good at attracting and retaining employees is Google. They make all their employee perks publicly known over the web. With Google Career’s good branding tagline alone, “Do cool things that matter”, could convince interested top talent to work for them.
5. Branding allows you to stay on track with your organization’s strategy, goals, vision, and mission
To build a successful brand, everyone from the CEO to the shop’s janitor needs to believe in the same vision and the same purpose. It’s this dedication and drives for that purpose and vision that will also drive your business and brand to success.
If you have employees who really understand and believe in what they doing and why they’re doing it, their drive will come through to your customers. This is why branding is important because it provides everyone working for your company with structured and detailed brand guidelines, that will reflect the brand’s purpose, values, strategy, and personality.
Having strong branding is like turning the company logo into a flag the rest of the company can rally around.
6. Building your brand helps you grow your company and business
Branding is more than just a fancy marketing term. The importance of branding in marketing for companies has grown over the years is now even included on the balance sheet.
Having a valuable brand helps to develop a profitable business. Bad branding leads to bad business because people won’t trust your brand and won’t even try your brand when they’re choosing over other brands when purchasing something. A brand can be adapted and modified over the years because a good brand can adapt to changes and a brand that can adapt to those changes will survive any test of time and will guarantee future business.
Companies are now looking to buy, invest, or merge with other companies, not because of a company’s materials or suppliers, but for the value of the company’s brand attached to it. Because your brand is the single most important investment you can make in your business. With good branding, you can do anything with your business and still have a high chance to emerge successfully.
Conclusion
Branding is more than a design on a product, a logo, or a tagline. It’s these things and more! From brand positioning, brand purpose, brand value, customer experiences, brand promises, company philosophy, and brand culture. It is all of the characteristics of what makes you, you. It’s this kind of uniqueness and difference that sets us apart from others, and how this is portrayed and marketed is what makes companies who they are in their industry.
