Branding 101: The Importance of a Coherent Brand

When you enter the supermarket to buy your groceries, you head toward a certain aisle and are exposed to different brands of the same products. Usually, you will be more likely to reach for the products you know and are accustomed to using. This can happen in any consumer market you go to, whether it’s physical or digital.

Choosing what products people use in their day-to-day lives can often seem like second nature. People will rarely try to experiment with new products in the market, especially if they don’t know where they are from or why people enjoy using them. This is because trying something new can often lead to disappointment.

But if that new product is marketed in a good way, such as being promoted by a public figure they trust, or if it has a visually compelling design, then this might encourage more people to try it. All these efforts fall under the branch of marketing and brand caretaking, which are both essential for businesses.

What Is a Brand?

In a nutshell, your brand is the overall image of your company. This includes your name, symbol or logo, and design that makes your business easily identifiable by the public. Through branding, you’re helping your potential customers distinguish your products from others in the market.

This means that your brand is the physical manifestation of who you are as a business, what you aspire to be, and how you plan to achieve your goals. It is an all-encompassing image that should coherently be communicated through all your materials disseminated to the public.

Branding has four goals: to build awareness, recognition, recall, and loyalty. When consumers are introduced to a specific brand, they become aware that it exists, and this helps them recognize the brand among the same category of products based on their identifying characteristics.

Once the consumers are continuously exposed to the brand, they will have a much easier time recalling the brand off the top of their heads when a certain product category is mentioned. And this constant exposure has the potential to bring about brand loyalty because the trust with the consumer has been established.

Why is Branding Important?

The main purpose of any business is to find customers that will pay for their products to generate sales and profits. This may seem like an easy task, but if you considered the swarm of competitors that are all vying for the attention of the market you’re trying to get, it becomes a harder task.

That’s why all businesses need to implement marketing strategies to attract the right market and build patronage that will eventually lead to sales. But this entire process will be impossible if the business doesn’t have a unified and coherent brand that consumers can attribute them to.

This is the reason why branding is important. If your company promotes your products in a unique tone, color palette, font type, and every other visual or auditory aspect of your brand, then it becomes easier for your target audience to identify you among the crowd of similar businesses.

How Can You Work on Your Brand?

With so many products and services available on the market, it can be difficult to build a brand that is unique or fresh to the market. This is especially true if you’re trying to compete against companies that have dominated the industry for a long time because their brands are almost second nature to consumers.

However, all hope is not lost. The process of building awareness, recognition, recall, and loyalty might be a long, winding road, but it’s a challenge that you need to face if you want to become a successful business owner. Once you ignite the fuse to raise awareness, everything else will follow.

To work on your brand, you can begin by identifying your main reason behind starting the company. It can be something personal to you or to a cause that you believe in. Your reason may also be about something that you struggled with growing up, which is why you decided to create a solution for it.

No matter what your reason is, it’s essential to show your potential customers that your business is more than a profitable venture—it has a heart. Every day, consumers tend to remember brands that create an impact on them on a personal level, which is why you must keep that factor in mind.

You can approach this as if you’re the storyteller and your products all play a significant role in developing your story. It can be a heartfelt or touching encounter between individuals in your target market, and it shows how relevant your products are to their lives.

A brand is something that no business can live without. This is because your brand is the embodiment of your business and all it wants to be. Without a distinct and coherent brand, your business will fail to capture the loyalties of your potential customers.