Expert branding advice

Posted By: Cami

Your branding is talking about you behind your back. Do you know what it’s saying?

By building an effective brand, you will be creating your company’s most loyal, most vocal and strongest ally. Imagine having a staff of brand defenders on your payroll, working in the public marketplace to explain and promote your company to everyone they see. If you could have this group of brand gossips working for you at all times, everywhere they went, would you send them into the world empty handed? Probably not. Instead, you would inform them of your goals and the benefits of your product, dress them to best represent you and, most importantly, to be consistent in what they say and how they say it.

You can and do have this group of brand gossips – although they aren’t human. This group is made up of all your brand communications, your printed collateral, corporate materials, sales presentations, public relations efforts, multimedia, and online communications – all the pieces that make up what your customers see. This is the majority of what your customers know about you. The rest they know from you personally. Presumably, you have confidence in the information you have given them personally. How much confidence do you have in the rest of their interactions with your company? These branded materials are speaking about your company with or without you there. Do you know exactly what they are saying?

If the message conveyed by all your marketing materials makes up the majority of what your customers know about you, it stands to reason this is something you should focus on. The future of your brand and the success of your marketing and, by extension, your company, depend on it. Brand-focused marketing is not simply about promoting specials and giving your contact information to as many people as you can find. Brand-focused marketing is about a process of discovering what you want to be when you grow up and crafting all your communications around a feeling and a theme that represents that idea..

Brand Karma. It’s real. And it’s powerful. Your prospects and current customers see you through the glasses you give them. They see only what you show them. Study your materials carefully from the perspective of your target audience and ask yourself honestly what you look like and what your brand is saying about you. Evaluate your message first to determine if it is representative of what you want to portray. Next, consider the visual portrayal of this message. Every visual element in every piece should reflect the message you are trying so hard to convey. This includes the use of your logo, the color palette, typography usage, spatial consistencies and the overall look and feel.

Imagine for a moment you’ve just completed an amazing new product offering or stunning new branch of service the whole company is proud of. A lot of man-hours, hard work and late nights went into conceiving and implementing this new facet of your company. The entire board of directors was involved in creating something that had value for your customer and would also raise your bottom line if people bought into it. You researched your manufacturing and distribution scrupulously to ensure you could offer the product or service and deliver it well and make a profit. You’re not done.

You haven’t even started.

Until you capture the essence of your brand – your brand karma – in a captivating, brand-focused marketing campaign, no one cares, no one knows anything about it and no one will buy. The visual reflection of your product or service is what makes it real to the customers you desperately seek. Brand communication built around a consistent concept and visual theme speaks to your audience in ways you never could alone. Two easy and very common branding mistakes are:

1. Neglecting marketing until it’s too late.

2. Not involving marketing partners (consultants, designers and other members of a design firm you trust) early on in the process so they can understand and reflect the core of your company.

The success of your brand depends on how strongly you believe that your brand communications truly are talking about you behind your back and on how effectively you control and craft what they are saying. A visual representation of your company that creates an army of brand defenders loyal to the promise of what you say you are, will become your greatest asset. Begin your brand process with careful inquisition regarding what you stand for and what you are all about. End by trusting this message and giving it a visual strength and clarity, which will never be misunderstood.