The Basics of Branding

 

Branding is one of the most important aspects of any business, large or small, retail or B2B. An effective brand strategy gives you a major edge in increasingly competitive markets. But what exactly does “branding” mean? How does it affect a small business like yours?

Simply put, your brand is your promise to your customer. It tells them what they can expect from your products and services, and it differentiates your offering from your competitors’. Your brand is derived from who you are, who you want to be and who people perceive you to be.

Are you the innovative maverick in your industry? Or the experienced, reliable one? Is your product the high-cost, high-quality option, or the low-cost, high-value option? You can’t be both, and you can’t be all things to all people. Who you are should be based to some extent on who your target customers want and need you to be.

The foundation of your brand is your logo. Your website, packaging and promotional materials–all of which should integrate your logo–communicate your brand.

Brand Strategy & Equity

Your brand strategy is how, what, where, when and to whom you plan on communicating and delivering on your brand messages. Where you advertise is part of your brand strategy. Your distribution channels are also part of your brand strategy. And what you communicate visually and verbally are part of your brand strategy, too.

Consistent, strategic branding leads to a strong brand equity, which means the added value brought to your company’s products or services that allows you to charge more for your brand than what identical, unbranded products command. The most obvious example of this is Coke vs. a generic soda. Because Coca-Cola has built a powerful brand equity, it can charge more for its product–and customers will pay that higher price.

The added value intrinsic to brand equity frequently comes in the form of perceived quality or emotional attachment. For example, Nike associates its products with star athletes, hoping customers will transfer their emotional attachment from the athlete to the product. For Nike, it’s not just the shoe’s features that sell the shoe.

Defining Your Brand

Defining your brand is like a journey of business self-discovery. It can be difficult, time-consuming and uncomfortable. It requires, at the very least, that you answer the questions below:

• What is your company’s mission?
• What are the benefits and features of your products or services?
• What do your customers and prospects already think of your company?
• What qualities do you want them to associate with your company?

Do your research. Learn the needs, habits and desires of your current and prospective customers. And don’t rely on what you think they think. Know what they think.

Because defining your brand and developing a brand strategy can be complex, consider leveraging the expertise of a nonprofit small-business advisory group or a Small Business Development Center.

Once you’ve defined your brand, how do you get the word out? Here are a few simple, time-tested tips:

• Get a great logo. Place it everywhere.
• Write down your brand messaging. What are the key messages you want to communicate about your brand? Every employee should be aware of your brand attributes.
• Integrate your brand. Branding extends to every aspect of your business–how you answer your phones, what you or your salespeople wear on sales calls, your e-mail signature, everything.
• Create a “voice” for your company that reflects your brand. This voice should be applied to all written communication and incorporated in the visual imagery of all materials, online and off. Is your brand friendly? Be conversational. Is it ritzy? Be more formal. You get the gist.
• Develop a tagline. Write a memorable, meaningful and concise statement that captures the essence of your brand.
• Design templates and create brand standards for your marketing materials. Use the same color scheme, logo placement, look and feel throughout. You don’t need to be fancy, just consistent.
• Be true to your brand. Customers won’t return to you–or refer you to someone else–if you don’t deliver on your brand promise.
• Be consistent. I placed this point last only because it involves all of the above and is the most important tip I can give you. If you can’t do this, your attempts at establishing a brand will fail.

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John Williams is Entrepreneur.com’s “Image & Branding” columnist and the founder and president of LogoYes.com, the world’s first do-it-yourself logo design website. During John’s 25 years in advertising, he’s created brand standards for Fortune 100 companies like Mitsubishi and won numerous awards for his design work.

Creating Sales Tools That Build Your Brand

If you’re like other entrepreneurs, you know a good logo is important to branding your company. Let’s say you already have a great logo. Then what? You need to create a variety of marketing materials that’ll help build your brand.

How can you do that? In a word: Coordinate. All your materials should graphically connect to one another. They should convey the same look and feel, include common images, and evoke similar emotional responses in your customers. When viewed side by side, your stationery, brochures and other promotional materials should look like a cohesive family.

Of course, your materials don’t need to match each other completely, but some elements should remain consistent from one piece to the next:

Color: Color is one of the most important components of brand identity because it plays a large role in memory retrieval. Choose a primary color (preferably a Pantone Matching System, or PMS, color–ask your printer about it if you need help) that’s appropriate for your company’s image, then use it as the dominant color on all your marketing materials. You can also select a secondary color to use as well, but make sure you use it sparingly. Preferably, the dominant color you choose will appear in your logo. You may find a book on colors and their perceived meanings helpful when selecting your dominant color.

Key Graphic Elements: Consistently use distinctive symbols, shapes and borders that convey the image you want to communicate. For example, a high-tech company might feature bold, angular graphics, while a clothing store might use rounded, soft shapes. Selecting some similar basic graphic elements helps customers recall your brand faster. Also, choose a photographic or illustrative style and stick with it. Black-and-white photos, for instance, are often a unique way to make an impact while setting your brand apart.

Fonts: Select just a few fonts for use on all your materials, including at least one primary serif font and 1 primary sans-serif font. (Serif fonts have “feet” at the bottom of the font, like Times New Roman. Helvetica is an example of a sans-serif font.) These two fonts should be the ones you use most frequently. Serif fonts work well in paragraphs and most text blocks, while sans-serif fonts should be reserved for headlines, numbers in charts, very small text and text reversed out of a color. You should avoid using more than two different fonts within the same document.

Messaging: The tone of your copywriting helps convey your image. Use the same voice on all your marketing materials. For example, is your brand friendly? Be conversational. Is it expensive or exclusive? Be more formal. It also helps to create a tagline or positioning statement–something memorable, meaningful and concise that summarizes your brand or your offering. Taglines often appear under a logo.

Logo Usage: Your logo is your brand’s most basic graphic element. It should appear on all your materials, and, when possible, it should appear at the same size and be placed at the same location on the page. Proportionate resizing is OK, but your logo should never be altered or redrawn. Consistency is paramount.

Remember, awareness and recognition are keys to growing your business. Creating a family of marketing materials that tie to one another helps differentiate you from the competition and builds brand loyalty.

 

By John Williams

Bling Your Business Cards

Just as your eyes are the windows to your soul, your business card reveals more about your business than just your contact information. “It’s often someone’s first contact with a brand,” says Michael Schneider, president of Los Angeles based cohesive branding and web development agency Fluidesign. What can a transformation do for your brand? We found three entrepreneurs who went the extra mile and created business cards that truly reflect their businesses.

Kathryn Goetzke White switched her business cards from paper to recyclable plastic for her Annapolis, Maryland, marketing consulting company, Innovative Analysis. When she started a new division of the company in 2004 launching a mood-enhancing product line that includes lights, teas and scents–White decided to use the same recyclable, hard, clear plastic she used for product packaging for the new business’s cards. She succeeded in reinforcing both businesses’ images of creativity. “People feel it, look through it and say it truly is innovative,” says White, 35. White named her new venture Mood-factory and developed another version of the plastic business cards. She projects 2007 sales of about $1.5 million.

It was only fitting for Anthony Dadika to hand out a business card resembling a woven label, since his business, ITC Manufacturers Group Inc. in New York City, manufactures woven labels for garments. Ever since he switched from a plain paper card in 1990, people have been asking Dadika to manufacture cards for them (unfortunately for fans of his cards, it would be too expensive for him to do so). “I’d say more than anything, [the card has] gotten people to remember us,” says Dadika, who projects 2007 revenue of about $6 million. He says that plenty of business continues to come from people who love the ingenious cards.

Every time John Costigan of John Costigan Companies hands out one of his metal business cards with a custom cutout of his own profile, he’s giving away $2. But Costigan, whose Cary, North Carolina, sales training firm expects revenue of $2 million for 2007, says it doesn’t hold him back one second. He estimates that he’s gained over $100,000 in business since debuting the cards in 2003. “Metal represents what my company is–sharp, different, bold,” says Costigan, 43. He hands out a card to every person who takes his class, reasoning, “The return on investment is more than worth it.”

Crafting a Memorable Logo

Our branding expert shares five reasons why your business needs a logo your customers won’t forget.
By John Williams

 

Historically, logos have been more of a luxury than a necessity. Businesses once attracted customers because they were the only game in town, so to speak. But that’s no longer the case. Today’s highly competitive industries, global markets and visually oriented consumers have catapulted the logo to prominence. Now your logo is one of the most critical components of your brand. So how can something so little make such a big difference to the success of your business?

1. Your branding efforts not only start with your logo but are dictated by it. Your logo appears on all your sales tools, from your business cards and stationary to your website. As a result, your logo design influences the design of all your sales tools–for better or worse. A professional-looking logo can be leveraged to create professional-looking materials. A poorly designed logo can’t. In other words, you need a “brandable” logo–one you can make use of when designing other materials to brand your company.

Brandable logos are scalable, memorable and meaningful. If people can’t remember what your logo looks like, they won’t remember your brand. Think of the logos of some of the popular brands today. Do you think of M-shaped arches, a shell or a swoosh? All are simple concepts, effectively employed by McDonalds, Shell and Nike. How can you tell if a logo’s going to be memorable? If you can’t look at a logo for fewer than 10 seconds and re-draw it with decent accuracy, it’s probably too complex to be easily remembered. (Besides being difficult to remember, most complex logos can’t effectively be reduced in size or rendered in black and white, making them useless for such elements as fax cover sheets and other business forms.)

2. Your logo is a quick visual cue that conveys the essence of your brand in an age when image is everything and time is short. Perhaps you’ve heard the writer’s lament that “nobody reads anymore.” In today’s markets, not only do you face ever-increasing competition, you also face an audience accustomed to visually stimulating media, convenience and instant gratification. Sure, a few people may read your entire ad, more may read some of it–but everyone will SEE it. The overwhelming amount of choices faced by time-crunched consumers forces them to identify shortcuts. Your logo is such a shortcut: it instantly conveys your brand message and emotional appeal.

3. Awareness and familiarity are keys to growing your business, and your logo is instrumental in both areas. Your logo is your brand’s most basic graphic element. It ties together all your sales materials–in fact, your logo may be the only visual element your materials have in common. The right logo helps solidify customer loyalty while differentiating you from the competition.

4. Your logo may be the only thing by which a potential customer can judge your business. Think of small newspaper or Yellow Pages ads. Often all that fits in these small spaces is your contact information and your logo. If your logo projects the right image, it may be the sole reason someone decides to try your company. Conversely, if it looks unprofessional or unclear, it alone may be the reason they choose to look somewhere else.

5. Your logo affords a unique opportunity for you to look like a bigger (that is, more established) business than what you are. With the right logo, you can look like a larger company that’s been around for awhile even if you have only one employee and just opened your doors last month. People who see it will associate the positive attributes of big companies–like security and financial stability–with your company. And you can still deliver the entrepreneurial qualities–like personal attention and superior customer service–that you’re known for.

Building a solid brand identity is pivotal to success in business today. Lay the right foundation with a professional, brandable logo