Whenever someone says the word, ‘Apple’ your mind immediately thinks of 2 things simultaneously: Apple, the fruit and Apple iPhone. Probably most of us think of the iPhones first. That’s the power of branding!
Apple is a great example to explain the importance of branding. It has a simple name, and simple half-bitten metallic color apple logo. This is a perfect blend of brand characteristics for anybody to remember. Also, it has managed to project itself as an “elite brand”. So, every owner feels proud to own it, this is the case especially in India.
Let us try to understand what branding actually means? And, what is the importance of branding in your business?
What is Branding?
Your brand is basically your business personality this is why there is huge importance of branding. It includes everything that makes you identifiable and stand out from all your competitions. It provides your company a unique identity using names, logo, symbols, and overall feel.
Importance of Branding is defined as the process of assigning the unique characteristics and traits to make it easily identifiable and noticeable among masses.
Let us dive right in to understand why exactly your business requires branding?
What is the Importance of Branding to Your Business?
- Boosts Marketing Efforts
Just 2% people are likely to become your customers the very first they land on your website. It is the consistent remarketing and retargeting strategies that bring them back and make them your customer.
When you standardise your Importance of Branding on both online and offline marketing channels, the customers are drawn to make their final purchase. Customers are most likely to retain and remember your products or services on seeing your brand name multiple times. And they eventually look up for your brand to buy something.
For example, Nike with its tagline, “Just do it” or KitKat with its tagline, “Have a break, have a KitKat” keep popping up everywhere. These taglines are so catchy that you remember them the first time you read it. They target the audience on every platform using the same taglines and efforts.
Thus, recalling the brand is easy. If even the customers don’t buy the products in one-go, they still have your brand name in the back of their head. So, consistent retargeting and remarketing makes them look up and buy your products or services.
- Helps you Win Customer Loyalty
If branding is done correctly, customer awareness is elevated because of the persistent hammering about the brand and its products and services via various advertising and promotional campaigns like PPC .
When these customers have a good user experience and customer service, they will surely come back to buy something else. With effectively Importance of Branding you can easily win customer loyalty.
Further seeing the same brand’s hoardings, banners, television ads, and association with their favorite celebrities reaffirms them of the purchase choice. Thus, they become your loyal customers.
For example, e-commerce website like Amazon keeps triggering you when a sale arrives. It tries to attract you with extravagant offers. Even when you are not interested to buy anything, you open the site to see what all is new and that’s when they win!
Now even if you decide not to buy anything then and click back, you start seeing those product ads everywhere (on every social media sites). At certain point you eventually come back and buy the product due to repeated persuasion that you don’t even recognize at that time.
After first buy, you realize they have good products, efficient customer service and on-time delivery. These traits make your user experience better and makes you buy the products all over again.
- Unique Product Identity
Branding helps in clearly differentiating your products and services from those already available in the market. Setting up a unique identity is important so your business doesn’t dissolve in the wide ocean of competition.
You have a defined target market and customer alignment, so your brand develops an identity for you so customers are able to find your products and services as something unique and different.
For example, brands like Coca Cola, Apple and McDonald’s help us understand the value of a brand. As well as allows us to understand that our brand strategy should also allow us to target and attract new customers. They have gained a unique market position and a unique product identity. So, they are easily identifiable among their market competition.
- Face of Quality
The companies are able to showcase their unique selling propositions and the x-factors such as quality to stand out against other competitors. This builds the image of a qualitative brand in the industry. You become the quality when customers reconfirm the products and service value.
For example, Minute Maid is a brand that successfully created a strong visual brand identity through its package designing is Minute Maid. Earlier in 2009, they decided to redesign their packaging to identify themselves with a premium range of products on shelf.
Their packaging was coherent and displayed a unified look which is easily recognizable within different product lines across various countries and cultures.
- Attracts the Best Industry Talents
Who doesn’t want to work with a brand which is well-established and well-known? Automatically with Importance of Branding, more talented people start joining you. When industry experts join you, your business is assured to soar higher and higher.
One of the great examples of such a brand is Google that attracts and retains the talented employees. Their employee perks (free meals, international careers, nap pods) are widely known over the network. In addition, their Career tagline alone, “Do cool things that matter,” have the potential to convince anyone to work for them.
- New Products and Services Launch is Easier
Undertaking the appropriate Importance of Branding strategies, a company can gain customer loyalty with just one product. After that launching new products even in different set of markets will help you gain success faster.
- Fund Generation
The power of branding can’t be underestimated in terms of attracting investors. A brand with a huge bank of loyal customers doesn’t need to worry about the funds.
Importance of Branding helps you create a niche identity in the target market that instils faith in the investors’ mind. When investors see huge inflow and outflow of money, they automatically come to join you.
For example, Coca cola is known to have unique and impactful strategies to keep their stakeholders engaged. They are known for their professionalism and investors trust a brand more easily when a brand seems to be more professional. This has improved their brand reputation as well.
- Emotionally Connects to the Customers
Several companies use the strategy to emotionally connect with their audience. For example, Surf excel with their tagline, “Daag Acche Hai” which means stains are good. They developed a unique connection with the audience as a detergent brand. Their ads are mainly focused on building a good community and unity.
This gives them a plus point as a brandto connect emotionally with the audience. Now the audience remembers the brand not just for its products or service but also for emotional connect it has with the brand.
What are the Keys to Improve Branding?
Until now, you must have understood how these big companies effectively used Importance of Branding to become a household name. Let us understand how you can improve branding for your business?
The key elements for branding are:
- The message behind your logo.
- Tell people what your brand does.
- The brand values and objectives.
- Your business stories.
- The way your brand talks to the audience (think about the best ways to communicate with your target audience)
- The style and feel of the brand.
- Content Marketing
While brand designing, don’t ever copy your competitors.
Importance of Branding is to make to stand out in a crowd. So, you have to create your own unique identity among the audience. Being said that, a proper competitor analysis can help you formulate the best branding strategy.
Conclusion
Branding demands continuous and persistent efforts. It is based on the principle, ‘Out of sight, out of mind’. Since there is a huge importance of Importance of Branding You need to be relevant and memorable every time in front of the customers.
It is an effective strategy of growth and success. It involves every business aspect, customer experience, company culture and values, and brand promises. Branding makes you significant even in the large pool of market competitions.