Building a brand seems complicated and like a huge undertaking. However, if we break down the what and why… the how becomes a piece of cake.
What is a brand?
A brand is everything from the employee’s uniform to your advertising message. This includes your logo, signage, tagline, values, how your employees interact with customers, and more.
As Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos says, “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
Brand building is the most important aspect of growth for your company and it can be complicated. It is how you, as a business, use the power of psychology to create a strong brand that creates customer loyalty, motivated employees, and builds credibility.
BEFORE YOU BUILD YOUR BRAND…
Your Brand image will influence how your customers, current and prospective, see your business, products, and services. It will give a fair look into your attitude, aspiration, and future goals to your audience. So your colors, graphics, and logo should reflect the same. We all know that shapes, patterns, and colors evoke emotions. So before you begin building your brand, research your target audience and get to know them.
Let’s look at the benefits of brand building:
1. It Increases Your Value
People are usually willing to pay a lot more for something that has a perceived higher value, which means that they think that the product in question deserves the higher value. For example, people willingly spend $5 on a bottle of water that’s produced by a certain company while they could simply spend fifty cents on a generic brand of water.
It’s a fact that consumers are constantly faced with advertising and marketing for brands and products. But when they see value through an emotional connection in a piece of marketing… they take notice of your brand.
Businesses with a strong brand value often have a strong understanding of who their customers are and what their target audience prefers. These businesses usually stand apart from their competition because they communicate and connect with their customers.
Strong brand value can increase your company’s market value and allows you to set higher prices.
2. Brand Building Generates Trust
Let’s face it, nobody wants to put their money into something that they don’t feel good about. We talked about emotional reactions to branding and we want to elicit a great emotional response before we buy something. So a professional look means trust and reliability to a customer.
When brands are honest and upfront about their products and values, there’s more trust in their products. Customers value openness.
3. Brand Building Builds Customer Loyalty
Customers remain loyal to brands often for generations. This is driven by the shared belief systems of the consumers and the brands. So communicating your values and beliefs through your brand is a sure-shot way of building allegiance to the brand.
4. Brand Building Improves Employee Morale and Job Satisfaction
Brand reputation is important, not just for keeping customers, but also for keeping your employees motivated and loyal. More and more employees, especially millennials are choosing to work for companies whose social and cultural values align with their own. So if your employees feel strongly about your business, they will be proud to be associated with it. They are likely to mention their work and the company to the people in their lives.
So having a clear mission statement that describes your values, function in the market, and competitive advantage is important to have; followed by a vision statement that defines your products and future and how it benefits the customers.
Remember branding can be difficult, but not impossible!
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