A company’s business brand is more than just a logo on a T-shirt. It culminates from several important features about a business that take time and effort to develop. Beyond just establishing recognition, something that can cut both ways, branding intertwines with several brand strategies of the business, ultimately aspiring to grow trust in their products and services that directly translates to increased business value. Here’s how your branding effects your business value.
Branding to sell: How Branding Effects Your Business Value
The Logo, or Brand, is Just the Face
The “T-shirt” mentality only recognizes how important advertising is to a product’s promotion and is just the face that represents many interacting market strategies that make a brand successful. If “getting the product out there” was the only criteria for brand success, then businesses could drop their advertising campaigns. Their value would find a basis in the number of T-shirts they could sell quarterly.
Instead, the marketing strategies that build a company’s brand exist in a symbiotic relationship – one supporting the other. It takes a team of strategies to create a successful brand. When the two run in sync and the product or service’s quality shines through as competitive within in its niche, then the best world exists for any company’s branding that, in turn, influences a company’s value. This holds true for each of the various strategies that help define a brand’s success and that of the business it represents. The brand is just the face – the strategies behind it give it meaning.
It Takes a Team
A logo or emblem signifies or marks a company, summoning more than just recognition, in other words, in the minds of consumers, calling to mind reputation, for example. The consumer sees the brand, recalls the experience and has a positive, negative or an indifferent reaction. From a positive perspective, it may call them to action or remind them they need to purchase the product again. In one case, it stimulates the decision to buy and in the other, the need to buy based on loyalty. This is why and where the intertwining continues – product or service features or aspects are inseparable from the other strategies that attempt to mold a successful brand. In other words, the strategies that create the brand are a team with a common goal.
Trust is Developed and is a Barometer of Brand Success
Trust evolves over time. Each of the strategies behind making the brand work sees the reflective impact in consumer success. As the brand’ success grows, so too does trust. Trust is invaluable, having as it’s measure a company’s increased and continuing value. Many products possess a well-deserved reputation that pops into the mind of consumers every time they see the logo or brand. Trying to separate advertising, from trust, from value, from … is almost impossible.
Finally, it is all about how to get there – how to put muscle in a company’s value.
A Succinct, Unique Message
Underlying the success of a brand relates to understanding how to market it. The message is competing against many messages from other companies. The more precise the message, the more it identifies a consumer need or strikes an emotional consumer chord, the greater the chances of success at increasing a company’s value. That is where the muscle is – it the succinct message that separates a product from its competitors.
The Message Must Match the Product
There is more though. Often forgotten in this equation of art is the product. The product and the message must match. They too must intertwine. Promoting the brand – attached to the product or service – must fulfill the advertised promise or representation of its quality. Like the above selling characteristics, the how-to end of it is also intertwining. When the narrow or concise message of the product matches its quality, for example, then consummation of the powerful must-achieve feature of credibility leads unequivocally to an increase in a business’s value.
The Prize
Finally, motivating consumers to buy is the prize, serving the entire effort of a company hoping to achieve enhanced value through branding. Loyalty is one aspect, but like all the other features, either the how-to grouping or the advertising campaign aspects, one feeding off the other, it can only grow when the product matches the promise. No different from having a specific, concise message, the objective comes to fruition when all components narrow to a single focus – consumer satisfaction.
Put succinctly, all the features may work, but if the product doesn’t match the brand persona, then loyalty will never develop and the entire campaign may as well appear on a ten-dollar T-shirt. That goes for each of the above-mentioned features.
Talk to our creatives about your next project