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Branding gives your audience a clear sense of purpose and direction– a credible voice that people want to listen to. For starters, branding is way more than just an iridescent dash of colors (aka logo). It includes everything you do, or claim to do as a business – even if your organization is only about you. Put differently: Your brand is the sum total of your customers’ perceptions, notions and experience. It is the face, personality and the values espoused by your business – and everything in between. More importantly, every single facet of your business – be it your social media profile, the tone of your voicemails or the way you present, market and deliver a service – captures the essence of your branding and sends an implicit message about how much you respect your own business. Beyond that, your brand represents who you are, what you believe in, and how you want to be perceived by your audience. That is why branding is so important to an organization. What Should Your Brand Accomplish? Today, game changers have realized that branding can no longer be viewed as a means to lure your prospects to prefer you over the competition. Your mission is to get them to see you as a dependable thought leader/influencer who addresses their needs or problems with panache, candor, and hopefully, better than anybody else. Against this overarching theme, your brand must accomplish the following objectives: Deliver a message clearly and succinctly Reaffirm your credibility Build an emotional connection with your audience Generate goodwill and loyalty Motivate your potential audience to buy or take the next step Brands Signify Your Intent Branding reflects a bold proclamation that your business makes. It tells your audience that you mean business (literally!) and are here to keep all the promises made by your company. Everything that your organization exemplifies should be easily recognizable throughout the brand. Else, your customers will be quick to notice the gap between what was promised and what was actually delivered on the ground. Needless to say, this gap can be catastrophic not just for your brand awareness, but also for your overall well-ebbing of your business. What this also means is that if you’re unwilling to back your intent with appropriate action, you might as well not intersperse it in your brand. Branding Goes Past Mundane Transactions The beauty of branding is that it’s not restricted to what transpires before a purchase is made. In fact, it’s got more to do with the kind of experience it delivers to your audience at various touchpoints in their journey, especially after a business transaction. Was the quality of the product as good as you had promised? Did it serve the purpose it was supposed to? How was the overall customer service experience? By answering these questions honestly, you give yourself a great chance of creating a loyal customer base that looks forward to trusting you. Moreover, it also lets you align your marketing strategies with your broader business objectives seamlessly. In fact, an increasing number of businesses are realizing the importance of branding in marketing. Branding Helps You Outdo Competition In a market that is now stiflingly competitive, how do you stand out from thousands of similar companies that claim to be as good as you, if not better? The need of the hour is to realize that you’re no longer competing at a local level. With the advancements in online and offline technologies, the entire world is your marketplace, literally. The proposition that your organization can and should cater to a universal audience clearly implies that your growth potential is only limited by your own imagination. However, the one downside to that is that you need to outdo that much more competition, potentially on a global level. By establishing your brand and its credibility, you give your customers a valid reason to consider you before turning elsewhere. Research also tells us that people prefer to associate with organizations with a credible, reputed brand than those that don’t. Branding Builds Trust As your audience gets to know your business better, they will start trusting you more. However, in order to develop that elusive trust factor, you must shout out loud as to why they should try you out. Here, building a brand helps determine how your first few customers perceive the quality of your services. Combining subject matter competence with unmatched customer experience and a deftly-crafted social media presence will ensure that you cover all bases. You must relay the underlying message that every single initiative you take is to delight your customers and encourage them to keep coming back to you. Branding Opens Up New Revenue Channels Let’s face it. Most people just don’t have the time or interest in figuring out why they should care about your brand - even after you create a website. Thus, the onus is on you to ensure that the brand answers that all-important question on your behalf. For example, how can you tell your mates about the stunning golfing gear that you’ve found incredibly helpful if you cannot even remember the brand? Every organization needs to have a credible face – and very often, branding becomes the face that engages their potential audience, delights them at every touchpoint of their journey and eventually earns their trust – in that order. Building brand identity is arguably one of the most effective ways of spreading the good news about your business. Equally, it is paramount that your marketing efforts, logo design, social media communication, and reputation are congruent with each other to create a resounding impression on your audience. As that happens, you’re more likely to convince your audience to become your success partners, opening up new and sustainable revenue outlets. Branding Harnesses the Power of Emotions If you give your customers a good enough reason to feel strongly about why they should care about your business (which can only happen if you convince them about what it can do for them), they have a better reason to make the transition from fence-sitters to active participants – in other words, get one step closer towards making a purchase decision. This is an important point because, as mountains of research tell us, it is emotions and not logic that drives the purchase decisions of most buyers. As visceral emotional creatures, humans are fond of ideas, stories, concepts, and even products that touch that coveted emotional nerve in them. Also, emotions score heavily over logic when it comes to developing brand loyalty. This phenomenon was glaringly evident at the ads shown during the 2016 Rio Olympics. The most popular ads were the ones that combined emotions and universal experiences to build an indelible emotional connection with viewers. Similarly, PG&E’s “Thank you Mom” advertisement underpinned key themes emerging out of the stories from the lives of different athletes whose mothers shielded them from potentially fatal situations and raised them in the best possible manner. Here, branding becomes a means of making an emotional statement every time your customers stumble across your business or something that reminds them about it – through engaging storytelling - which engages your audience’s subconscious mind and builds an emotional bridge between the story and the brand. The human side of branding is something that will always remain universally relevant, particularly in times when all we have is a few milliseconds to emotionally engage with our audiences. Still have questions? Contact Brand Love Builders for more information on branding! Brand Love Builders - Building Love for Your Brand Through Digital Marketing 1-800-413-7010  Read Original Article By Entrepreneur Here.

Looking out into the world today, it's easy to see why brands are more important now than at any time in the past 100 years. Brands are psychology and science brought together as a promise mark as opposed to a trademark. Products have life cycles. Brands outlive products. Brands convey a uniform quality, credibility and experience. Brands are valuable. Many companies put the value of their brand on their balance sheet. Why? Well you don't have to look very far. When Tata Motors of India bought Jaguar and Range Rover from Ford, what did they buy? Factories? Raw Materials? Employees? No Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley helped Ford sell the brands to Tata for $2.56 billion, and the brands were worth more than all other ingredients combined. Likewise, when Kraft bought Cadbury for $19.5 Billion what did they buy? The chocolate? The factories? The recipes? The candy makers? No they bought the brands. And when Four Seasons Hotels, Inc., a Canadian -based international luxury, five-star hotel management company, sold itself to Bill Gates and and Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia for $3.8 billion what did they buy? Locations? Restaurants? Staff? Beach front property? No they bought the brand. The list goes on with many examples such as InBev acquiring Budweiser to add to their house of brands that includes Stella, Becks and Labatt. Or Geeley Motors of China acquiring cult Swedish Auto brand Volvo. Or Mahindra of India buying Ssangyong, Korea's third largest car company. Branding is fundamental. Branding is basic. Branding is essential. Building brands builds incredible value for companies and corporations. If you are still not convinced, let me give you another example. The dollar is a world brand. In essence it is simply a piece of paper. But branding has made it valuable. All the tools of marketing and brand building have been used to create its value. On the front you will find the owner of the brand: the Federal Reserve. There is a testimonial from the first President of the United States, George Washington . There is a simple users guide: "This note is legal tender for debts public and private." And if you're still not convinced, the owner has added the all important emotional message: "In God We Trust". The dollar is a world brand. It confers a uniform value globally. But as I said it's really just a piece of paper. Branding has made it worth something. I mentioned earlier that brands are more important today than in the past. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, the world has come online and there are many new markets and a growing middle class in places like India, China, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, Nigeria, Indonesia and in many more places. These consumers buy brands. They buy premium brands. The best branding today is based on a strong idea. The best brands have remarkable creativity in advertising to help them break through people's wall of indifference to create brand heat and product lust. Case in point the recent turn around of Chrysler and it's reliance on marketing and advertising . Or look at the reinvention of Levis. And a final example is this campaign by my own agency which has helped reenergize one of America's great iconic brands Jim Beam . Secondly, when we create new brands at my New York City advertising agency StrawberryFrog, we have fewer brand names to choose from. The Pharmaceutical Industry has patented everything under the sun for new medications. This makes existing brands, with their strong, well-known names and credibility more valuable. It also means creating a new vibrant brand is a challenge which requires a sophisticated strategy. It is not just about a product and a name, it's about a lot more. The sophisticated strategy is a cultural movement strategy. I believe that building brands now requires a cultural movement strategy as opposed to simply a brand building strategy. A cultural movement strategy can accelerate your brand's rise to dominance. Once you have cultural movement, you can do anything in a fragmenting media environment, maximizing the power of social media and technology. The world has changed. We are now living in the age of uprisings and movements. I have written about how to build a brand in this new age in my new book Uprising . Now building brands has become a lot less expensive and smart brands can take advantage of new tools and rocket up there globally, very fast. In the face of the current economic challenges, it's worth noting that brands do better in tough times compared to unbranded products. Brands outlive product cycles. And in these challenging times, there are still great brands being built. Brand owners still recognise opportunity and their brands will thrive in the years ahead. Brands such as H&M of Sweden, or Tesla a great new car brand, as well as new names such as Tom's Shoes, Honest Tea, and a rising brand from Florida called European Wax Center which Inc. Magazine named a company to watch. No branding, no differentiation. No differentiation, no long-term profitability. People don't have relationships with products, they are loyal to brands. In a movement strategy, brands have a purpose that people can get behind. Brands can inspire millions of people to join a community. Brands can rally people for or against something. Products are one dimensional in a social media enabled world, brands are Russian dolls, with many layers, tenents and beliefs that can create great followings of people who find them relevant. Brands can activate a passionate group of people to do something like changing the world. Products can't really do that. In today's world, branding is more important than ever. But you can't simply build a brand like they did in the old days. You need a cultural movement strategy to achieve kinetic growth for your brand. With that, the sky's the limit. Still have questions? Contact Brand Love Builders for more information on branding! Brand Love Builders - Building Love for Your Brand Through Digital Marketing 1-800-413-7010 Read Original Article By Forbes Here