How Branding Enhances Business vision and Visibility
Matured business minds understand branding as a very important aspect of business success. This article focuses on T, we’ll be able to have a unique perspective on the following:
It’s important to note branding is such a huge topic that’s takes more time than we’re afforded at the moment.
- What’s Branding
- How it enhances your Business Vision and Visibility
- The Colour Element of Branding
- Great Nigerian Branding Examples
What’s Branding?
The simplest way to define a brand is to call it ‘personality’. A brand is simply a personality. When you meet someone with a great personality, you feel excited, motivated and recharged. The major quality of a brand is to affect perception: customer perceptions.
A personality refers to a particular way of doing things. A brand is like a feeling. By perception, we are talking about how you make people/customers feel. To wrap it up on the defining a brand or branding, is paying attention to your business image and personality and how it all comes together to create positive feelings that endears customers.
Branding is an inside-out process. Branding enhances Business Vision and Visibility. It’s often said that customers buy for emotional reasons, how they feel about a product or service, and then later justify their purchase with logical reasons.
Branding and Vision
When you meet someone with a poor personality, we’re likely to feel disturbed, negligent or fearful. A typical vision statement for a company, for example, Sterling Bank goes as follows: To be the financial institution of choice.
Certainly, it has to create a personality that’s befitting of a financial institution of choice. That’s basically branding at work to activate the vision. The branding question or task is how we can make the customer feel that we’re truly indeed the financial institution of choice.
We’ve often heard the saying: fake it till you make it. Another way to understand how branding aids your vision is to understand that you are addressed the way you’re dressed.
How’s your business dressed? Those it reflect the vision of your business? Product/service quality, Business location, employee/talent efficiency, operational excellence are some of the aspects you must consider to have a favourable brand that customers can trust with their hard earned money. If you want a big business, you have to look and function as a big business would.
Branding and Visibility
As regards business visibility, what we are really talking about here is brand recognition. If customers can’t easily recognise your brand, your sales is bound to suffer.
In any industry, there are known and unknown names. Creating a personality that attracts customers is a key focus of branding. Popular brands reign only because they are selling the right character and attributes that attracts attention.
According to Josh Kaufman, any business that fails to succeed at marketing is a Flop. In a community of people, some easily standout, not because they have two heads. A lead character or Superhero in a movie is loved by many for his/her unique personality.
Branding is what elevates your business visibility due to its capacity to impress customers with a unique personality.
The Colour Element of Branding
There are various elements of branding which includes Purpose, Logo, Products, Colours, and Copy Writing. You can find more details on elements of branding here: https://pocarti.com/branding-101-by-paschal-agonsi/ . For today’s class, we’ll focus on the Colour Element of Branding.
Research in color psychology tell us that some colours are better suited to some products. The following illustrations explain the emotional and psychological impact of colours as regards customer brand perception.
Financial services and corporations use a lot of blue. Selling men products such as shaving sticks in Pink Packaging may not appeal naturally to them. Most food brands use red as it identifies with hunger.
When picking colors for your brand, you need to pick a colour that relates more to how you would want your customers to feel. Green is associated with growth and balance as well as nature. Farm brands and herbal products often choose green to aid their brand communications to attract customers.
According to The Ries in their bestselling book “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding,” you can choose another colour if there’s a dominant competitor owning a colour in the market. In the Cola soft drink industry, Coca-Cola dominated the red colour which is synonymous with food. Pepsi chose blue with a touch of red to differentiate its products in the market.
This difference in colors is deliberate to create contrast in the minds of the customer. In the Nigerian Telecommunications Industry, Airtel is red, MTN is yellow and Glo and 9mobile have different shades of green. Here, we can see a similar pattern of colour differentiation among brands competing in the same industry.
Once you recognise the market leader has dominated a colour, its best you choose a separate color to separate/differentiate your brand in the market. Remember the goal is brand recognition. Don’t be a lookalike. Customers don’t want that.
Unique branding examples
We know that calls with family and friends consume more airtime than anything else in this life. Especially family calls. Airtel recognised this and started a campaign to validate this behaviour and establish their brand as the preferred network with the best call rates.
It’s important to note that when you’re done with a great branding strategy, others will imitate. Remember that people always copy the brightest kids in class. Globacom had a somewhat lookalike. Etisalat too.
Sadly, there’s nothing you can do about this but to continually refine your brand in such a way that’s it’s hard to replicate or imitate.
Great Branding shows vision. As more middle-aged and older people reduce their consumption of soda drinks, Pepsi is aggressively pushing their brand to youths using their music idols and celebrities to create awareness.
Summary
Branding indeed is a great tool for enhancing business vision and visibility as it incorporates business values to create the trust and believe customers must have before they make a purchase decision.
Here’s some key points to remember:
- the goal of business is customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Without branding, a business may fail to communicate it’s strengths to its target customer
- Awareness is the first step to making sales
- A business must take full advantage of branding by understanding its customers and creating a unique personality that will attract them
