What Is Involved in Branding?
Building a brand is a specialist service, and branding agencies will employ experts such as strategists, marketers, designers and developers.
The first important step is understanding your business and its position in the marketplace. Your new brand must enhance your industry reputation. Your chosen agency will also discover your organisation’s core values and ethos to understand what drives it and how you wish to be perceived.
Your visual brand identity is used everywhere, including:
- Website
- Social media
- Marketing materials, e.g. brochures, billboards, business cards etc.
- Packaging design
- Building design
- Signage
- Events stand
How Important Is Branding?
Your branding is integral to your entire business.
Your branding guidelines become the bible for your staff to follow, giving them a clear sense of the company they work for and how to present themselves to your customers.
Your marketing efforts will rely on having strong branding in place. Your branding could be the deciding factor on whether your business will succeed or fail.
Let’s imagine you have launched a brand-new fizzy drink. It has a great taste and is healthier than current fizzy drinks, and your market research suggests your target audience will love your product.
The packaging design of your drink needs to be instantly recognisable from all the other drinks on the shelf.
Everything from your logo to your unique proposition needs to be appealing, both visually and from an emotional point of view. If your unique stance is that your drink is healthy and ethical, your branding must reflect and capitalise on this.
Now imagine you are the consumer. You like to buy ethical products and are health conscious. What would convince you to try a new drink? Would a package design with a scene of a person hiking with a glorious backdrop of mountains appeal? How about a logo which features green leaves in the design?
The design choices mentioned were deliberate to invoke images of health and the natural world and certain feelings such as happiness and peace. These choices allow your customers to form an emotional connection to your brand and develop positive associations.
Do You Need a Branding Agency?
Building a strong brand is essential for any business, from small start-ups to large corporations and branding agencies are still very much relevant in the digital age.
An agency won’t have any affinity to your old branding and can approach your project objectively. Their experience and talent allow them to build a strong branding strategy.
While you can choose to create your own branding, you might find it a false economy if you later need to employ a branding agency to start over. It could also take a lot of clever marketing to recover from any branding failures. A branding agency can also advise on your existing branding and create enhancements to improve it.
