Building a Brand

Branding is a crucial aspect of business. Building a brand is not as simple as getting a logo created and dropping it onto anything you send out to customers. Building a brand is about creating a single, cohesive image for your company, from your logo design to the tone and language you use in your marketing materials to the customers you target. Every encounter a customer has with your brand will leave an impression in their mind, and it is important to make sure those impressions are positive.

So, how do you build a strong brand? There are many different things to consider, but these 3 are (in our humble opinion) the most important:

Consistency

It is imperative that you be consistent when building your brand. Use one well-designed logo on everything. Use the same color scheme, fonts, and graphic elements on everything from business cards to printed marketing materials to your website. Use the same tone when communicating to your customers; if you’re company strives for a fun, upbeat and approachable brand, don’t send extremely formal emails or use tedious language in your brochure. If your company is all about quality, make sure your brand conveys that. The last thing you want to do is confuse your customers with an unclear or muddled marketing message.

Discipline

Use discipline when building your brand. This mostly involves which customers you target. It can be tempting to expand your company into a new region or product line to target more customers. Isn’t that how you make more money, after all? Yes, but expansion must be done carefully, and only after thoroughly analyzing any opportunity to make sure that it fits your brand. Would Ferrari suddenly build an inexpensive family sedan in the hopes of increasing its bottom line? Of course not! The brand would be completely tarnished, and that decision would ultimately hurt the company’s image, and possibly hinder any future growth. Which leads us to the last key point…

Patience

Building a strong brand does not happen in a day. It can takes years to develop your company’s image and a loyal legion of customers. The trick is to be persistent. Never stop communicating with your customers, and make sure all communications support your brand’s promise. Once you stop communicating you become irrelevant and your brand is destroyed. You must strive to be first in your customers’ minds when they think about the product or service your company offers.