Branding is a term that tends to be unclear and carries many different meanings along with it. Most people will say it is the company logo, to others it’s a product.
Let’s clarify what branding really is. At its core brand is an emotional experience. It’s a person’s perceptions about your company, product or service. Branding is about creating an impression that makes you unique in the mind of others. When a customer thinks about your brand, it’s tied to a feeling in their mind. There’s an association there and it’s your responsibility to create that association and you have to manage it on an ongoing basis.
Think about when you smell, see, touch or hear certain things and how it triggers a memory in your mind. Like a song that triggers the same memory every time you hear it, branding is about making sure that when a customer sees your logo, walks into your store, or receives an advertisement, that this connection in their brain aligns with what makes you unique. It’s genuinely important that it aligns with associations that create a sense of who you are, what you’re selling, and why they want it.
Looking at it another way, a brand is really just a feeling, and the goal of good branding is to dictate exactly what that feeling should be, and to create in the mind of your ideal customer, the belief that there is no other product or service on the market quite like yours.
In branding, we work to figure out what this feeling and perception should be, and make sure that we don’t communicate anything that could change that perception. By building a powerful brand, you’ll have crafted a powerful marketing platform, and a good brand makes the sales process much easier.