A brand is the way a company, organization, or individual is perceived by those who experience it. More than simply a name, term, design, or symbol, a brand is the recognizable feeling a product or business evokes.
Brands, then, live in the mind. They live in the minds of everyone who experiences them: employees, investors, the media, and, perhaps most importantly, customers.
Simply put, brands are perceptions.
Your Brand is Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset
Despite their intangible nature, brands are business tools that drive commercial value.
Think of a brand. Any brand. Apple, Coca-Cola, FedEx, Dunkin’ Donuts—doesn’t matter. We’re pretty big fans of Apple around here, so we’ll go with that.
What is the Apple brand? It isn’t computers and phones and other cool stuff we can’t live without. Those are the products Apple manufactures. And it isn’t slick TV ads or dramatically staged presentations or chicly minimalist storefronts. That’s all marketing and advertising. It’s admittedly pretty cool marketing and advertising, but still.
Even Apple’s name and logo don’t encompass what we mean when we talk about the Apple brand.
It turns out the Apple brand isn’t any thing in the true sense of the word. You can’t hold it or hear it or even touch it. But that doesn’t mean its brand isn’t the single most valuable thing that Apple owns.
The Apple brand is the reason you literally couldn’t pay many Apple customers to use any other product. The forward-thinking, seamless experience of the Apple brand has become an inextricable part of the identities of a legion of devoted followers. For this reason, its brand is Apple’s ultimate competitive advantage. Nothing else even comes close.
A strong brand increases the chances of customers choosing your product or service over your competitors. It attracts more customers, at a lower cost per acquisition, who are happy to pay a little more and will buy a little more often.
To better understand why your brand is so valuable, let’s start by breaking it down to its fundamental elements.
Elements of a Brand
As perceptions, brands comprise a multitude of different elements. It helps to take a look at the most important ones, as these are the purview of the next concept we’ll explore: branding. The fundamental elements of a brand include the brand compass, company culture, name and tagline, identity, voice and messaging, website, and brand architecture.
Brand Compass
The brand compass is a summary of the most fundamental truths about your brand. It’s the outcome of the work done in the brand strategy phase, including research and positioning. A brand compass shows the direction your brand is headed and why. It is made up of five parts: Purpose, Vision, Mission, Values, and Strategic Objectives.
Company Culture
Company culture is a spirit of collective purpose and inspiration that drives your brand. It’s more than just fiery leadership speeches and ping pong tables in common areas, though. The strongest company culture is founded on a brand’s core values, those principles that define how your brand engages with the world and why. Rock-solid company culture results in internal brand alignment—the ideal state of being wherein a brand’s employees understand it at the deepest level and are motivated to act as its ambassadors.
Brand Personality
Brand personality is the unique spectrum of thoughts, emotions, and behavioral patterns that are intrinsic to a brand. Its personality includes a brand’s most individualistic traits. It is wh
at makes Apple the chic, minimalist auteur, or REI the rugged, pioneering outdoorsman. A brand’s personality is the reason it is identifiable to its loyal customers and the basis for the highly personal relationships they form with it.
Brand Architecture
Brand architecture is the coordinated system of names, colors, symbols, and visual language that defines a brand or brands. Superior brand architecture is highly intentional and intuitive, founded on research into the customer experience. Brand architecture systems are commonly categorized as either monolithic, endorsed, or pluralistic. The monolithic brand architecture comprises a singular master brand and multiple sub-brands. Endorsed and pluralistic architectures comprise parent brands with varying relationships to the divisions over which they preside.
Name and Tagline
A brand’s name and tagline are its most immediate face to the world. They should be replete with meaning—either intrinsically or as the result of methodical brand narrative. A lot goes into the creation of a brand’s name and tagline. In depth market research, brainstorming, refinement, testing—the process is designed to ensure that these monikers are not only meaningful but ownable as well. The complicated nature of creating names and taglines is testament to their importance. A strong name conveys a brand’s unique value propositions, differentiating it from the competition and leaving a strong impression on those who experience it.
Brand Identity
Your brand’s identity is more than just its logo. Identity is the visual encapsulation of the deep truths revealed about your brand in strategy and positioning. An effective identity will embody all of the defining characteristics of your brand, including its personality, promise, and purpose. Your brand’s identity is its stamp on the world—an aesthetic symbol full of meaning that has the power to communicate your brand’s essence in a visual instant to all who experience it.
Brand Voice and Messaging
Brand voice and messaging are critical to a brand’s engagement with the world. They distinguish your brand from its competitors by conveying its purpose, promise, and personality. Brand voice and messaging humanize your brand, making it identifiable to your customers. In every instance in which your brand’s voice is heard, whether via marketing collateral, advertising scripts, or website copy, your customers should be able to recognize it immediately—like an old friend on the other end of the telephone.
Brand Website
Your website is the most complete and centralized manifestation of your brand. A good website brings your brand to life with compelling content and engaging design. These days, websites are no longer confined to a desktop experience. They travel with us, on our mobile devices, to every corner of the world. Websites remain one of the most impactful and cost-effective ways to deliver a holistic branding experience to your target audience.
Now that we’ve parsed the various components that make up a brand, it’s time to look at how and, more importantly, why those components are created: branding.
What is Branding?
The hesitancy of some companies to invest in branding boils down to a matter of perception as well. It isn’t easy to draw direct correlations between successful branding and quantifiable returns. But the simple fact is you can’t put a price on the value of developing a truly authentic brand.
So, why invest in branding? The operative word here is “investment.” Too many companies see branding as just another expense counted against their marketing budget. But when you understand how integral branding is to influencing consumer behavior, you see that it’s more than just a tactic. It is a long-term strategy that can yield measurable returns throughout the life of your company. Take a look at just five of the top returns you’ll get from your branding investment:
Attract Ideal Customers
Central to any branding initiative is customer research. In-depth interviews, focus groups, and online surveys enable you to precisely identify which customer types align with your company’s purpose and values. With this information, you can create clearly defined audience personas and craft marketing messaging that’s specifically targeted at your ideal customers. Ideal customers aren’t just more likely to buy what you’re selling; they’re also significantly more loyal in their relationship with your brand. And few things are more valuable than brand loyalty.
Increase Marketing Effectiveness
The easiest way to make your marketing efforts more effective is to invest in the brand they stem from. When your brand is cohesive and well-articulated, your marketing initiatives will be too. Branding encompasses the essential “first steps” that define your core messaging, brand personality, and tenable marketplace position. As we just mentioned, the customer research involved in branding allows you to develop targeted marketing campaigns that are highly relevant to your most valuable customer segments. A bold new identity makes every marketing touchpoint more engaging, while the guidelines and templates that come out of branding will save you time and money on the content of all your future initiatives.
Close Deals More Easily
Ask any salesperson on the frontlines of commission warfare and they’ll tell you: Well-defined, strategically positioned brands are just easier to sell. That’s because their value propositions are built into their brand narrative. The argument for the distinct superiority of a well-positioned brand has already been clearly articulated. This takes a huge weight off of the shoulders of its sales team because a good portion of their work has already been done well before they engage with potential customers. Branding gives your sales force a unique advantage, better enabling them to close deals quickly and confidently.
Command Higher Prices
It’s true what they say: customers don’t buy products, they buy brands. And customers are willing to pay premium prices for brands they perceive as superior. A white t-shirt from Hanes will cost you about $5. A white t-shirt with an Armani tag will run you north of $150. Effective branding enables you to position your company as an industry leader with value propositions that none of your competitors can offer. This type of meaningful differentiation has tangible value built into it. It solidifies your worth and allows you to command higher prices for your goods or services.
Boost Business Value
Never underestimate the power of brand equity. In addition to justifying increased price points on your offerings, it can also have a positive effect on your share price. Stronger brands realize stronger financial performance. The long-term result of branding is that your company itself is worth more when you’re ready to exit. Not unlike the cost of home renovation, an investment in branding delivers valuable returns when the time comes to negotiate a selling price.
The Takeaway
In her seminal book Designing Brand Identity, branding expert Alina Wheeler encapsulates the internal/external upshot of branding like this:
“Branding is a disciplined process used to build awareness and extend customer loyalty. It requires a mandate from the top and readiness to invest in the future. Branding is about seizing every opportunity to express why people should choose one brand over another. A desire to lead, outpace the competition, and give employees the best tools to reach customers are the reasons why companies leverage branding.”
Leading an industry as an organization, outpacing the competition, empowering employees—according to the experts, branding is an indisputably powerful process. When you understand what a brand is, how it is created, and the measurable returns that come from investing in branding, this power becomes evident.
Branding pays dividends over the life of your company, enabling to attract better customers with lower marketing costs, all while commanding higher prices for your offerings. Smoother sales, increased customer loyalty, the multifaceted benefits of brand equity—the list of benefits goes on. At the end of the day, though, your brand is the way the world perceives your company. What could be a smarter investment than shaping that perception?