Why Is Branding Important?
The word branding has become a ubiquitous word over the years. When you say branding most people think logo, business card, letterhead and potentially a website. However, branding is much more than that. A brand is a gut feeling about a company. When a customer walks into your store or goes onto your website, the emotions they leave with about your brand, is in essence branding. This may sound quite nuanced at first glance, but there are a multitude of variables that we as brand strategists or designers adjust to make people feel a certain way. When we point a consumer or viewer to intentionally feel a certain way, I call this the “subjugation of instinct”.
The Cart Before The Horse
Creating cohesive branding is essentially creating a platform to derive meaning from. It allows customers to find value in what you do and who you are. Additionally, if the consumers feel connected to the brand in someway, then you’ll potentially have a customer. Marketing may get people in the door, but branding will keep them around.
“Branding is about connecting who you are with what you do.”
A brand plan is very similar to a business plan. A brand plan consists of each brand to internally evaluate themselves and give intrinsic answers to the following inquiries:
What do we stand for?
Why do we exist?
How do we differentiate?
How do we position our company to standout?
Who are our customers?
A good brand strategist or brand designers should be asking all of these questions during discovery sessions.
A Brand Is A Bridge
Brands are not only seen, but they are felt. I’d like to emphasize what we talked about before, regarding connecting who you are with what you do. This singular aspect is one of the most important because it enables you to foster lasting relationships with consumers. With as little as 1000 dedicated followers you can make $100,000 dollars. By answering all of the questions within a brand plan. you are not only learning about yourself, but you are learning about your customers. These answers enable you to strategically target product designs and marketing endeavors.
The Whole Is Greater Than The Parts
If you are well versed within the marketing world you may have read the circus analogy before. If you haven’t, it goes something like this:
If your job is to market the circus† coming to town. You paint a big sign and post it by the main road into town, that's Advertising. Put that sign on the back of an elephant and march it downtown. That's Promotion. The news reports the elephant's romps through the mayor's prize-winning, rose garden. Publicity. Get the mayor to laugh about it afterwards. Public Relations. Call local businesses to discuss promotion opportunities at the event. Sales.
If you plan the advertising, promotion, publicity, public-relations and sales, that's Marketing.
- Allan Dib
Branding is analogous to marketing in the sense that it is about the sum of its parts, rather than the parts alone. Logo design, positioning, user journeys and profiles, consumers segmentation, brand attributes, competitive audit, naming & messaging, collateral and environmental design combined together makes branding.
Traditional Marketing Is Dead
People no longer trust traditional advertisements. Consumers are much more likely to read reviews or listen to an influencer than believe an advertisement. This is why influencer marketing or integrated marketing is popular right now. In today’s societal paradigm you cannot have a product that is not backed up by experience. People trust people whom they have a connection to. Creating a bridge from brand to consumer helps build that connection.
What is branding? A brand is more than one thing. Branding is the amalgamation of many variables. A brand is not a logo. A brand is not a website. A brand is the result of all these thing laid bare onto a consumer. These pieces then meld together to create an emotion within a customer. A brand is locked within your mind and your heart and what keeps people coming back. Your brand is not what you say it is, it is what they say it is.
