What is Branding?

Small businesses looking to succeed and be sustainable long term need to connect emotionally with their audience. The competition is fierce, the arena crowded, but a strong brand stands out. Your brand is your story, and people fall in love with stories, trust them implicitly and pledge loyalty to them. How an organization is perceived IS their brand and it affects success or failure.

To understand what branding is, you must first understand what a brand is.

What is a Brand?

Often a question like this is explained with more questions. As an organization, ask yourself, who are you? who needs to know? how will they find out? why should they care? These are the essential, foundational underpinnings of a brand. Well known brand expert and author, Marty Neumeier, sums it up like this:

“Brand is not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is.”

A brand is therefore a feeling, belief or association in the minds of your audience about you that is positive or negative. Because it rests in the minds of your audience, you cannot control it. Whether you’ve implemented a brand strategy or not, you have one. Your customers have already formed an opinion. Once formed, it’s hard to change. There is no better argument why EVERY business needs to understand branding.

So Now What?

What you CAN do is influence perception. By changing or encouraging a certain perception, you can affect behaviour. By affecting behaviour, you can increase performance.

The act of branding then, is a detailed, disciplined process that fosters recognition, trust and loyalty. It requires leadership, focus, accuracy and readiness to invest in the future. It can be considered reputation management, but it is pro-active, not re-active.

The result of the branding process is a positioning platform that makes crystal clear why you’re different than everyone else. It focuses on your target audience exclusively. It abandons trying to be everything to everyone. With your core purpose and values exposed and simply-stated, knowing what to say and to whom, becomes obvious.

Branding makes it easier for the customer to buy and positions the organization for growth and sustainability. Branding makes it easier to sell by communicating a strong, clear, intelligent message. Finally, branding makes it easier to build brand equity. Future success is dependent on public awareness, and long-term attention to a strong clear message is just the ticket.

What About Logos and Websites?

It’s important to understand that branding is NOT logo design or web design or any kind of design for that matter. Neither is your logo your brand. Branding is the process that provides concise, clear direction and motivation for all your brand touchpoints.

Touchpoints are the places that your audience interacts with the brand. Designing your brand identity and various other touchpoints is the next step in your marketing. Deciding which touchpoints to address and what they look like however, depends entirely on your positioning platform.

If you’re still wondering whether small businesses need branding, I ask this simple question:

Your audience will build your brand without your input. With no direction from you, will you be happy with their perception?

Tags: brand, branding, Positioning, small business, story, strategy