Your Brand Is More Than Your Logo
Success leaves clues.
A Brand Is Not . . .
- A Trademark (These are legal properties.)
- A Mission Statement (This is a reminder.)
- A Logo or Slogan (These are your signatures.)
- A Product or Service (These are just the tangibles.)
- An Advertisement (These deliver your messages.)
A Brand Is . . .
- A Point of View — Branding is a strategic point of view, not a select set of marketing activities.
- A Customer Value — Branding is central to creating customer value, not just sound bites and images.
- A Competitive Advantage — Branding is a key tool for creating and sustaining competitive advantages.
- Engineered — Brand strategies must be “engineered” into the strategic planning process.
- Alive — Brands get their identity from meanings. Products and services are the blood of a brand. Your organizational culture and standards for action are the heartbeat.
- Logic and Emotion — Branding is part science and part art.
BRAND PURPOSE
Brands must have a clear purpose and significance for customers in today’s hyper-competitive, over-connected society. A true brand is created from the inside out. Branding just tells us what they believe will be more appealing. A few interactions with the company will quickly reveal if their marketing and branding are simply saying what they think will appeal rather than what they think and believe.
What is your brand? What is your brand? If the question is posed, how do you answer it? Describe your logo and the colours you’ve designated? Maybe it’s descriptive words, like describing a buddy or confident colleague? You’re talking about it? Or perhaps you answer your business purpose?
So if a brand isn’t your logo, colors, and fonts, what is it?
A brand represents the entire package, including a logo, color, typeface and promise, purpose, voice, vision, services, and a knowledge of your customers. Service is becoming incredibly valuable in today’s service-oriented community.
A defined brand is a strong instrument for marketing. The next phase in the process of branding is to implement it through several points of contact and channels. As you brand your target audience, you are training to recognize yourself or to retrieve particular design qualities immediately, whenever you or your category consider them.
IT’S WHAT’S ON THE INSIDE THAT COUNTS
Logos and other components of visual branding must be made from a deeper branding goal. Most people feel that they can spring right into things. Now don’t get me wrong, websites have an excellent job of creating hundreds of concepts for lovely logos but if you haven’t spent time finding out the essential values, goals, and messages of your firm, every logo you look at won’t be entirely authentic to your brand.
WHAT TO DO?
Sell emotions
Coca-Cola sells happiness. So does McDonald’s. Visa sells the feeling of freedom. Toyota sells freedom, reliability, adventure. Many large brands sell you a feeling and deliver it through service or product. They deliver it through an experience.
Actually, most people do not want the particular item, service, or product they buy. They want more security, more security, more happiness… Or less pain, less stress, less output time or effort, and greater outcomes. The demands and desires of most users are basic. Companies tend to overcomplicate things while trying to stand out and think, because their distribution systems for their products are so distinct from their competitors, that they care about it as much as they do.
Map the customer journey using emotions as the basis for transformation and let your marketing then speak to each segment as they move through the conditional logic that is your marketing funnel.
Consistency is key
The fundamental to every branding initiative is consistency. Branding is a promise. That promise MUST always be stated in your marketing initiatives for integrity in both the front and back end.
Defining and sending out a consistent message to your audience, ensuring that any new goods, services, or marketing channels are continuously measured against who and what your brand is. Run it when it fits. You know, if it doesn’t, and no is going to be so much easy to say.
You construct a container for your company when you define your brand. You understand what fits into the “box” that defines who your business is and who it is and who it serves. You know what you’re doing and what you’re not doing.
Mind over Matter
When there is a trivial, limitless, and available distribution for everyone, it is a thing of the past to advertise a captive public sitting on a couch opposite a TV or radio. Indeed, clients have been opposed to this form of old-world Marketing. With their adjustment in the media and the always fresh world, they look for value by exploring, discovering, and sharing their own personal brand caches with their colleagues, and don’t wait for unwelcome messages to disrupt them.
“Consistency, Clarity and Authenticity are the holy trinity of branding.”
Ref: 60-minute brand strategist — IDRIS MOOTEE
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