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Blog posts tagged branding
Branding: Good news or old news?
April 25, 2012
Branding - It's a word that’s bandied about a great deal these days. But what does it actually mean and what's changing within the world of branding? The Design Council defines a brand as: "a set of associations that a person (or group of people) makes with a company, product, service, individual or organisation.
These associations may be intentional - that is, they may be actively promoted via marketing and corporate identity, for example - or they may be outside the company's control." (Source: The Power of Branding: A Practical Guide, The Design Council)
While the value of branding is growing, many small businesses still overlook the relevance of its role in helping to increase leads and revenue.
Much more than a logo
In an increasingly visual world, it's surprising that so many businesses still view branding as being purely about a logo. While a powerful logo is still important, bringing branding to life in business means ensuring that the look or design of a company matches its overall strategy. Linking brand and design with your overall value proposition and business strategy is the way to make it work for a business.
How can businesses bring branding back to life?
Almost half of UK businesses believe that design contributes to some extent to increased market share (46%) and turnover (44%)
So why is it that many companies continue to miss out on the full benefits of branding? Is it possible to build a company brand that actively connects with customers and delivers a real return on investment?
The secret is not about having a big budget, but about taking a well considered approach. Integrating branding within an inbound marketing approach allows companies to achieve this because inbound marketing uses technology that allows companies to research the demand that exists in their target market.
Why the branding agency is adding to the problem
Business-owners looking for a brand with commercial impact may ask ask a design or branding agency to do the job for them. But in return for their fee they often recieve only a one-off logo or website design along with the significant level of consultation and cost associated with the rebrand. On its own this misses out on the bigger picture of branding, which is to make money for the company. Instead, it is very likely that the agency will focus on:
Good logo design:
Great, you have a new logo, but does it reflect what your company stands for and your marketing strategy?
Good branding and design:
Even better, your branding agency or design agency is focusing on creating a powerful, joined up brand and overall design. But before you go there, take a closer look at what these companies are offering.
Do they link branding and design directly with Return On Investment (ROI)? With 7,099 design businesses in the West Midlands alone (Source: The Design Council), it's important to select a design or marketing agency that actually aims to look at what your customers want.
What separates the branding winners from the losers?
Despite the popular myths, your brand, your logo and your company look and design is not intended for you - it's intended for your target audience and, most importantly, aimed at generating visits, leads and sales. Here are some ways to build branding that actively boost company performance:
Make sure your branding is shaped around the demand in your existing market. Inbound marketing technology allows you to research the demand that is already out there.
Align your branding with your company's value proposition. This provides a better ROI and ensures that your branding shows what differentiates you from the competition. Combine the online research into your market with marketing persona research where you interview your existing customers, potential customers and even competition to find out what your target audience really want, what their business plans are and how your competitors sell.
Use a range of resources. Why leave your entire brand in the hands of a design or branding agency when you can have access to a wider range of resources to make it work harder for you? From heat mapping that allows you to see the demand for your services to mystery shopper facilities, inbound marketing gives you the insight to shape and create a more meaningful and profitable company brand.
Sookie Shuen is the community manager at Tomorrow People, an inbound marketing consultancy. Read her Inbound Marketing Blog.
Brand survival and the brand iceberg
May 27, 2011
Branding, is like an iceberg — it exists mostly below the surface. The visible brand messaging accounts for what we see above sea level. The invisible brand – the company culture, the customer experience — is the mass below the surface
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin came back from the moon, the first thing they were greeted by was a huge neon sign that said "Welcome to Earth — home of Coca-Cola". That is how powerful a brand can be.
But your company doesn’t have to be the size of Coca-Cola or Mercedes to have a brand. In fact, every business has one. And by building yours into a strong one it can become one of your most valuable assets. Branding is a simple representation of who you, your company or your product are. One of the key fundamental steps to begin this process is to implement some honest self-analysis to discover your brand truth. The results of this establishes your unique brand identity if you are true to yourself.
Branding ultimately creates that all important first impression in your customers mind. A dynamic branding and product positioning formula is one that will invite new customers, and propel them into a desired action.
Remember, a brand is not a name or a logo or a colour scheme or a design layout or a tag line or an advertising theme. A brand lives in the customer’s perception. A brand is not what the marketer says it is; it’s what the customer thinks it is. A brand begins and ends with the customer, and most important to the customer’s perception is the customer experience. Customers will believe their own experience before they believe the advertising.
Advertising works only when it is supported by the customer experience, and strong brands are built one customer experience at a time. Effective branding is what causes people to walk past all the no-name, on-sale colas at the grocery store and pick up the six-pack of Coca-Cola that costs twice as much — just ask Neil Armstrong.
Berry Burgess is an expert contributor to Marketing Donut, and managing director of Armadillo Creative.
Powerful design: what's the difference that makes the difference?
May 04, 2011
Powerful design enables you to connect with your ideal clients. It’ll help you attract, engage and seduce them into buying from you or working with you, and of course, it’s a wider thing than just design. It’s about your powerful design fitting into a powerful brand strategy.
How can you be sure, when you’re working with a design agency, that they’re going to provide you with powerful design and not just good design?
What is the difference that makes the difference?
Powerful design requires an in-depth understanding of your business, your objectives and your customers. Run a mile from anyone who asks you what colours you want or to sketch out how you’d like something to look.
Powerful design takes time. Coming up with creative concepts that will really connect with your audience and unlock something within them doesn’t happen in a matter of moments. It’s going to take time to develop those concepts and produce polished artwork.
Powerful design uses colour psychology to unlock your goals, values and message and also use it to authentically communicate with your ideal clients. There’s more to colour psychology than simply knowing that blue is calming and red can be aggressive. Colour psychology enables us to help our clients communicate coherently, authentically and with clarity.
Powerful design is creative. When we create powerful design we think outside the box. A business that works with large corporates should have a website that is bland and safe, right? Wrong! A designer must tap into a client’s brand values and company ethos to create a site that firmly differentiates their company from their competitors and enables them to connect with their customers. Oh, and win a whole pile more business.
Powerful design sweats the small stuff. Often the difference that makes the difference is the attention to detail. When you look through a powerfully designed website, it’s not just the homepage that looks lovely — that strong design runs throughout the site and reassures and engages.
Powerful design will cost you more than good design. You need to find a really good agency – one that has a firm understanding of not just how to layout a page, but typography, design trends and colour psychology. They’ll probably be very serious about investing in their team, which means that their hourly rate will reflect that. They won’t be the cheapest, but they will give you the best results.
Fiona Humberstone is an expert contributor to Marketing Donut and managing director of Flourish.
What makes a powerful brand so powerful?
March 24, 2011
I often talk about powerful brands, and in fact the eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that I run branding workshops on the very subject. But what exactly is a powerful brand? And how do you get one?
Well, powerful brands are certainly about more than the way your logo looks or how pretty your website is (although they do play a role in the overall story). Powerful brands attract, engage and entice the right sorts of clients. They help you win and retain more profitable business, differentiate you from your competitors and generally make growing your business a lot easier.
Let’s start by looking at what makes a powerful brand:
Powerful brands are focused. They know exactly what they’re best at, who their most profitable clients are and what those clients value about what they do.
Powerful brands know what they want to be known for. And it’s that focus that lies at the heart of everything they do. They know what their core values are, they make sure they can deliver what they promise and they communicate that with a flourish.
Powerful brands have a point of difference. Something that makes them stand out from the competition. Something that adds value to their clients. Something that means they don’t need to compete on price.
Powerful brands communicate with a flourish. They take themselves and their image seriously. They invest in a look that communicates their core values, entices and engages their ideal clients and seduces them into buying.
Powerful brands deliver what they promise. They make doing business with them a pleasure. They delight their clients and those delighted clients refer more people like them.
Everyone that works for a powerful brand knows and buys into the brand. They’re proud of the business and they make it their business to deliver what they promise, delight their clients and reinforce the brand image.
You can see that a nice logo is only part of the story. There’s a lot more to a powerful brand than just the “look and feel”.
Fiona Humberstone is an expert contributor to Marketing Donut and managing director of Flourish.
Still need to know more about branding? Read I'm a small business - why do I need a brand? And check out our guide to building a brand.
Have you got your business voice right?
February 15, 2011
Here are my top five tips for creating a clear business voice:
Keep it short and sweet
Short sentences are better than long ones. Really, they are. For example, if you’re reading this hoping to discover the reasoning behind my implication that the length of both word and sentence impacts upon the readability of said article, or web page, then by this point you might be becoming a little weary of it, wondering aloud to yourself, maybe quietly, maybe not, when, oh when, will it ever reach a conclusion, and I might say to you, maybe quietly too, or I might shout it, or even sing it as an operatic soprano might, in top C, that it’s not going to.
So, short and sweet is better. Cut sentences down. Be ruthless. Don’t be frightened of full stops, they’re your friends, so use them.
Use simple language
And it’s the same with words. Don’t say “facilitate” when you mean “help”.
I’m not saying limit your vocabulary, English is full of beautiful words, but if there’s a simpler way to say it, then use it. Your aim is to be clear and easily understood. Get potential clients from A to B without losing them on the way in a maze of confusing words and meandering sentences.
Twitter is great for getting you to cut down on the waffle, and it’s good to keep that discipline in mind when writing other copy too.
Create a team
Your voice should reflect your brand. If you’re more than a one-man band use “we” when you’re talking about what you do. We help our customers like this. We is inclusive and engaging, and can put you on a level with your potential client. But… read on…
Look lively
Get some energy into that copy to engage potential clients. A good trick for creating a compelling business voice is to look at the first words in each of your sentences and make sure they’re different. Long lines starting with “we…” are dull; “we do this”, “we do that”, yawn, yawn. Throw in some new ones. Shake it up a bit.
Let your expertise speak for itself
Don’t blind customers with science. Even if what you do is highly technical and specialised, avoid using too much jargon. Potential customers need to see how you solve problems for people like them. Expertise can be a stumbling block if you just dump it in somebody’s path. Take a step back and get some perspective on what you do. Ask your clients what they like about you, and I guarantee it won’t just be your technical know-how. If you’re good, it will be your problem-solving abilities, the fact you keep your promises, the way you use your skills to make their businesses run more smoothly. A powerful business voice communicates these qualities first, and let the expertise speak for itself.
Sharon Tanton is an expert contributor to Marketing Donut, a freelance copywriter and marketing consultant and a Valuable Content associate.
Images of 100-year-old businesses
December 15, 2010
For this month’s issue of MyDonut, we've interviewed three small businesses that have been around for more than 100 years. Two of them sent us some great photos – so good that I thought we should have a blog post about them.
As a child of the 1970s - an era before the great retail modernisation of the 80s, I find these images of Parsons the Jewellers in Bristol and London cheesemonger Paxton and Whitfield familiar and strangely comforting. Perhaps you will, too.
Paxton and Whitfield, est 1797
This is the Jermyn Street shop interior as it was in the 1960s:
The exterior of the shop looks today much as it always has – it still has a reassuringly old-fashioned air from the outside:
But the inside is much more modern, though it retains its ‘artisan’ feel:
Parsons the Jewellers, est 1710
The three images show the changing faces of Parson’s the Jewellers, which has inhabited three different sites in Bristol over the last three hundred years.
The original Old Market premises before being demolished to make way for a roundabout in 1966. Just creeping into the top left is the base of a statue of Cupid that was perched precariously on top of the fascia. The statue disappeared when the shop was moved and was rediscovered above a jeweller in Hatton Garden, London, where it remains.
I’m not sure about the location of this shop but, there is a clue in the newspaper advert for Parsons next to the photo. I’d say it’s the Clare Street branch, opened in 1923 and long since closed.
The shop now resides in The Mall in the centre of Bristol – you can see a photo of the modern-day premises here: http://www.parsonsjewellersltd.co.uk/
If you’re interested in photographs of small shops, then I strongly recommend Shutting Up Shop: The Decline of the Traditional Small Shop by the photographer John Londei. It’s a marvellous book which powerfully evokes an era before mega-chains when almost every shop was a small family-run businesses and each had its own unique flavour. Is this something we’ll ever see again?
By the way, we’d also love you to send us your own images of old businesses and business premises. Just email them and we’ll try to include them on the site.
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