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5 Crucial Tips for Building a Strong Brand
Why is a strong brand so important?
A brand is about how customers, employees, and others perceive your business as well as your products and services.
What thoughts, feelings, and associations appear when they see your logo and hear your name are mentioned? A brand includes everything from the graphic profile with which colors, patterns, and fonts are used, your website and how you advertise, to how you post and respond on social media and answer the phone. In short, your brand is the soul of the business in a nutshell.
The brand is important to build and disseminate for several reasons.
- It creates recognition. Customers get a clear association when they see your brand.
- It sets you apart from the competition. In a tough market, it is crucial that you do not disappear in the crowd.
- It creates affinity. Customers who like a brand and identify with it are happy to talk positively about it, and personal recommendations are crucial when purchasing.
- A strong and clear brand creates a sense of professionalism, credibility, and trust.
- It creates added value. Perhaps the strongest brand that exists – Coca Cola – accounts for just over half of the company’s share value.
Creating a strong brand is not something you do by just designing a logo. It requires thoughtful tactics and long-term strategy.
Here are five key points for building a strong brand.
1. Make it memorable
Today’s consumers are flooded with choices and decide quickly based on what the brands signal. Here it is important to choose colors, graphics, fonts, and motifs that both stand out from the crowd and that clearly convey your values and the emotions you want to create.
A brand that wants to be associated with traditions, crafts, and sustainability (for example, restaurants, clothing brands, etc.) can create a vintage design with warm muted colors, worn textures, and retro fonts; while one who wants to breathe efficiency and modernity (for example, technology and electronics companies) fits together with a clean, simple and minimal design in a bright clear color. But regardless of style, it needs a personal touch that people remember.
2. Make it meaningful
Today’s consumers not only want products that fit their needs, but they also want to feel a part of the brand, feel that they share values and interests.
If they are going to wear a sweater, cap or fabric bag with your logo on, they should not only like your products – they should also feel that you stand for the same things. Examples of brands that have succeeded with this are Nike – which conveys passion and determination, and Patagonia – which is strongly associated with an environmentally friendly and natural lifestyle.
3. Do it consistently
If you want to build a brand that is clearly visible and convey the right feeling, you need to be consistent. By continuously repeating all the elements of the brand, you create a clear image that quickly catches on by those who see the brand. It’s all about the design of websites, business cards, corporate vehicles and not least clothes with print.
The profile garments that the employees wear are crucial to the brand as the profile clothing makes them a walking advertising pillar for the business, so it is important that the clothes harmonize with the company’s tone. Also on the profile products and giveaways that you give to customers, suppliers, and others, the design must go hand in hand with the brand feeling.
4. Make it credible
Digitization has made the world more transparent. Today’s consumers can review and compare services and products in a completely different way than before. This has meant that you have to be honest when building your brand. The brands that have tried to stick to values that they basically do not stand for (for example being ethical and environmentally friendly) have quickly become transparent and have gained a bad reputation.
As you build your brand, start by asking yourself who you are and what you stand for.
5. Make it professional
We all want to be professional because professionalism creates status, which in turn creates demand and loyalty. Highlight what you are really good at and let it shine through in your graphic elements as well as through how your brand representatives dress and meet people. A professional brand image is associated with a high standard of products and services.
