What Is Branding?

What is Branding?

Branding is the process of creating a distinct identity for a business in the mind of your target audience and consumers. At the the most basic level, branding is made up of a company's logo, visual design, mission, and tone of voice. But your brand identity is also determined by the quality of your products, customer service, and even how you price your products or services.

By building a website that describes what you offer, designing ads that promote your goods and services, selecting specific corporate colors that will be associated with your company, creating a logo, and featuring it across all your social media accounts, you are branding your company. That is, you are shaping how and what people’s perceptions of your business are.

Yet, even if you never invest a strategic brand strategy, you're still going to have a brand. If you're a company with bad customer service for example, that will ultimately affect how your customers view you. You can be known as a company who doesn't care about your customers just as easily as you can establish yourself as a brand that goes above and beyond.

Ultimately, what your customers think and say about your brand is the reality (not what you’d like them to think). It’s the impression that pops into their minds when they hear your business’ name. It’s based on a feeling they have that is based on their experiences they’ve had with you, good or bad.

That's why your branding strategy and brand management plan are so important.

Why You Should Take Branding Seriously 

Virtually no business starts out hoping to create a an unreliable or "bad" brand. Many entrepreneurs start a company with a grand vision of delivering great products, at a great value, and creating loyal customers for life.

Again, you're going to have a brand regardless if you invest in building a strong brand identity so you might as well give your self every opportunity to succeed.

The purpose of branding building is to simply and easily help your customers understand what you offer and how through effective positioning. But it’s not only a USP (unique selling proposition), it is the combination of all the ways you communicate what you stand for. In the case branding, what you do is far more important than what you say. If your company mission statement focuses on your world-class quality service, but you don't actually deliver great customer service, there's a mismatch.

Effective branding requires a strategic plan, including clear brand guidelines, as well as alignment as a company on your desired brand identity.

Benefits of Building A Strong Brand

Investing in your brand identity isn't just for fun, it has many real world benefits that can help your company grow and succeed at scale.

Benefits of a strong brand include:

• Increased sales.
• Customer loyalty and recognition.
• Helping create a clear and inspiring mission or purpose company wide.
• Helping create a strong company culture where your employees love what they do.
• Attracting top-quality talent to help grow your business even further.
• Developing strong brand equity helping you stand out from your competition.

Again, building a strong brand does take time, but the effort is well worth the reward.