Branding: why you must take care of it

A brand is something that goes far beyond a logo, fonts, and colors. It is an idea, a symbol, a message, and a way of life that crosses the limits of our perception and touches the unconscious. This can only be achieved when you work through the entire brand image process.

Creativity is imperative for optimal brand development. In the past, many companies put aside the importance of design when convincing new clients. That’s a mistake: in our daily lives, we are exposed to so many visual stimuli and it’s only those that are truly well-designed and align the concept and message with overwhelming creativity that are going to capture the attention of future consumers. The verbal and the visual are inseparable.

All this is called branding and it makes a lot of sense, given that this term displays the need to keep acting, so the brand doesn’t die. Because brands have a life of their own, once they are released and start to interact with people, we have to work on brand positioning.

Defining a corporate branding strategy

Within a Marketing 360º strategy, brand construction has its own space. When we work on digital branding, it’s important to fully understand these things to maintain its essence long-term. Later on, I’ll explain some of them:

• Category Insights: Ideas or main concepts of the sector of activity to which the brand belongs. They can help us define the action plan.
• Competitive Environment: Study of the competency that it has after the brand positioning
• Brand Vision: The “why” of the brand’s existence. Its mantra, so to speak.
• Brand High Ground: Their origins and goals, how the brand was born and what it wants to transmit
• Consumer Experience & Drivers: What needs must the brand cover, from the point of view of its target audience.
• Reasons to Believe: Main values that have to be transmitted
• Brand Ambition: Where the brand wants to get to, an objective destination that we focus on and want to reach.
• Human Culture insights: The context in which the brand can help people and provide value.
• Target: To which buyer personas the brand is directed.
• Archetypes of Jung: A summary about the archetypes that the psychologist C. G. Jung described; factors applied to the brand to help to understand their essence and their behavior in a very intuitive way
• Personality: How it acts or is perceived by the public.

Once these main points have been defined, it’s time to apply them. We have to carry out a strategic branding plan to meet all of the goals that we proposed.

Each iteration (the repetition of a process with the intention of reaching adesired goal) acts with a purpose. Yes, it acts with a purpose. At the beginning, it has an intangible value, but in the middle, it means we don’t have to think so much about prices, and instead, we can offer good products or services that align with the corporate image.

You don’t have to create an egocentric brand identity, given that this process is bidirectional. The brand must listen to the buyer personas to give them the necessary inspiration to keep falling in love with and getting hooked on the brand. It’s a one-to-one relationship.

Brand marketing has to have a story to tell. It’s known as storytelling: the capacity to tell a story that creates an emotional connection with its target. There is a very interesting experiment that shows the strength a good story can have. Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn did an anthropological experiment called Significant Objects. They bought a few objects on eBay for around $1.25 and with help from various writers, they rewrote the product descriptions, adding history to the object and ended up selling them for around $8,000. It’s a great example of how strong an effect a good story can have on improving the brand characteristics.

How to measure ROI in branding

A brand that isn’t concerned with measuring its RIO will not get a good positioning. When faced with considering how to create a brand, how do we know if we’re doing it well? The answer is very simple: like all digital marketing actions, it’s calculated through metrics. These are some of the most important ones:

• Organic, direct, or branded traffic: Visits from both the brand and your products that come from search engines and referral links.
• Web visit study: Statistics of the number of visitors and how long they stay on your page and the parts of your website that they visit.
• Social Audience: Monitoring the mentions on social media with tools like Brandwatch, among many others
• Leads/clients: If you have launched a good branding campaign, you will see results when it comes to lead generation and/or the increase of your sales. Here, it’s interesting to analyze the conversion rate, which means the percentage of visits that convert into sales.

Digital Branding: future investment

As you’ve figured out throughout this entire text, digital channels have an immense importance in the branding that is carried out daily. Brands need to be present and well-positioned in the network, having attractive profiles on strategic social networks for their business and fighting for attention in the ultra competitive environment that is the Internet.

The current context of the pandemic caused by Covid-19 has accelerated changes in the habits of the population, and the consumer experience is increasingly more digital. This makes Brand Managers prioritize online channels in their brand strategies to the detriment of (or in combination with) offline channels. Digital branding is also of great importance in brand perception, and a clear example of that is Google. Recently, Google changed the majority of the logos on their apps (Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Hangouts) to make space for Google Workspaces, a grouping of their applications that aims to integrate the use of all its products and change the idea that the public has of them as independent apps. The use of the same colors and the fact that, at first glance, some logos are almost indistinguishable makes sense within the rebranding objectives of the company.

Companies that look to create brand value and present themselves to the public with creative concepts, worked designs, and rounded strategies can use We Are Marketing’s services. We are experts in helping companies grow through the construction of a solid brand.

Contact us and we’ll work together to convert your strong points into a brand identity, one that attracts more ideal clients and helps your project be recognized wherever it needs to be.