When you own a business, your priority is running it and making sure it is making a profit. Then there are daily operational problems that you have to deal with. Branding becomes an unnecessary icing on the cake when you are spending all your time and effort making sure all the ingredients of the cake are in order and that you are mixing them right to come up with a delicious baked good. However, in the long run, we want to entice more customers and a simple cake will not do that. Every business needs a branding agency if it wants to make a lasting impression.
Branding is definitely very important in order for the company to maintain its identity over the numerous advertising and marketing campaigns that it has to invest in for longevity in the business. If you want to know how to set your business apart from your competition, you can learn a thing or two from CEOs suc as Andy Defrancesco.
Here are ways for the business and the branding consultancy to keep the company’s brand all throughout the media blitz and marketing strategies.
Develop a story/theme
Part of brand management is creating a brand identity for the business. That will include having a logo as the look or face of the business, the actual brand name, as well as a tagline. For example, the colorful button-like chocolates are known as M&M’s. The logo design is the name in lower case and in brown color. But throughout the years, whenever people see a small round chocolate with the lower-case “m” in the middle, people already know that it is an M&M’s chocolate. That is when you know that branding strategies worked, because people can immediately identify your product without spelling it out for you.
But back on the issue of sustaining your brand through a story: M&M’s most-famous tagline is “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.” In every commercial, the brand tries to incorporate the tagline in it. However, when the story doesn’t really call for it, the brand is not really lost because the commercial always stars the Red Original M&M and the Yellow Peanut M&M. That’s what happens when you have already developed your brand, but if you just launched your business, you have to start with a story or a theme.
Make your audience remember your product or service with a relatable and memorable story. You can go for the dramatics, the one that will tug at the heartstrings; or go for something funny. You can also then use a service for 3D scanning like https://physicaldigital.com/services/3d-scanning/ to research competitor products, as that can save you a lot of time. Keep an ongoing theme until you have established your brand enough that you could be more versatile with it. Business owners should be on top of things in a macro level to ensure that the branding agency is coordinating well with advertising agencies.
Quality should be a priority
Branding will go down the drain if your business doesn’t offer quality products or services. That is why if you, as business owner, need to focus on the operations of the business, allow a branding agency to take over strategy design to incorporate the business’s brand identity in various stages of the business process.
This means that even before the official launch of the business, the branding firm is already there to ensure that all business materials will have the brand’s visual identity on them as well as in the physical store. Branding companies are expert on these matters. They know what is appropriate and what is enough—you don’t want to overdo your branding as it might result in brand vomit.
The branding continues with customer service. Branding does not stop with things that you see; you have to add branding experience in the deal as well. Chick-fil-A, for example, is known for its chitchatting staff. When you visit the store, the staff there will always start with small talk—that is their brand. Develop a “brand” greeting that is appropriate and thematically consistent with your brand.
But most importantly, make sure that the product or service you offer to the public is of the highest quality. That is the most important branding principle for you. The thing is, no matter how much you build up your brand, if your product is terrible or your service is appalling, people will stop paying for your brand. And these people will talk to other people about your abysmal product or service. Eventually, your business will die and no top-notch branding could save it. Businesses must never lose sight of quality.
Branding agency must adapt to the digital world
A business’s chance of surviving the entrepreneurial world without providing digital experiences to the public is going to be slim. Even if the business is still developing brands and is just starting out, a website and possibly a mobile application should already be in the works. These items should be part of the pre-launching plans even if the monetary investment would have to wait. Through it all, the branding company should be there to provide consistency in the web design, branded digital products, as well as social media. The branding firm should be able to check in with the design company to ensure consistency in the business identity, as an experienced branding speakers says.
A business’s online presence and activities, especially in this day and age, are going to be very important branding tools. So the design agency needs to keep the brand in every page of the website or mobile application without sacrificing functionality. Remember that quality is essential in making a brand so even the online tools would need to be of top-notch quality. It is so much easier to destroy a brand name in this digital age, especially if that brand still doesn’t have a leg to stand on. A low-quality product or service and a poorly made website or mobile application could easily become targets of social media attacks. You could immediately lose a lot of customers as well as interested people who could have been customers. As a person in the digital world, you know how easily truths or fake news spread throughout social media. Your brand should be ready for eventualities.
Finding the right branding agency is essential in launching a successful business. Find one that fits with your business principles and one that has extensive experience in creating visual identities and developing brand strategies like Ramotion.