Brand marketing means marketing through use of branding. This is a highly critical tool for increasing the visibility and awareness of any business, so ensure that you are familiar with the concept and precisely how it works.
A brand is a highly indispensable asset for any company. This is the thing that ties it all together and that ensures consumers will associate your products and services with a single business. Without a brand they would not know who was responsible for a specific product and so they would not know to seek out more of what you offer as a result. At the same time the brand is what allows people to learn about your company in the first place and to seek you out, and to instantly recognise other products and services that you provide.
Furthermore, a brand communicates to the audience what a company is about. It should incorporate a mission statement – which acts as a mission of intent and helps to ensure that everything that company does is true to a singular message and objective. In other words a brand is the public face of the company – the logo and the name etc. and this is what facilitates marketing and broader strategies for promotion and diversification etc. But it is also incorporates the deeper purpose of that business and the reason it came into being in the first place. All this is also called Brand Management.
What is a Brand?
If you have a company then you will have a brand whether or not it is a particularly strong one. This is your logo, your company name, the colors associated with your business, and generally what people think of your organization. Even if you are a sole trader, then you will have a brand. In this case, the brand is your own name and everything that this name carries with it. We have brands in our lives outside of business too then – these are the reputations that precede us and the things that people know us for.
Great brands include Virgin, Apple, Nike and CocaCola. All of these are instantly recognisable and have a strong sense of cohesiveness throughout their products and services. We know not only what to expect when we use their products and services but also what they stand for and who they are for.
To mimic this success, you need to be clear about who you are, and you need to make sure that your mission statement somehow ties together all of the aspects of your business. You then need a logo to represent this. If you currently don't have such an overarching strategy, then start thinking about how all the pieces of your business fit together and what it is you want to achieve – then come up with a logo to reflect this.
Designing a Logo
Designing a logo is one of the most important steps in creating a strong brand. Here are some tips to help.
Color Scheme
First of all, you need to think about the color scheme of your logo. This is a highly important thing to consider for your website because it is going to likely dictate the color scheme of the entire site in order to strengthen the impact of the brand and in order to create a more cohesive feel to the website. While the colors in your site and in your logo don't have to be the exact same, if they don't at least go well together it will be like wearing white socks and black shoes and it will be jarring for visitors who notice.
So then think about the colors you want for your website and for your logo together, and choose something muted and pleasant on the eye. Meanwhile though do think about ways that you can get your brand to stand out in an advert or a banner.
Feel and Message
Think too about what your colors evoke and what you want them to say about your business. Greens for instance might suggest an eco-friendly organisation which is of course a good association to have. Meanwhile red might suggest you are bold and out there. Likewise consider this with your actual logo design as well; do you want gentle and curved lines or something sharp and impactful?
If your logo ideally serves its purpose, then the moment someone looks at it, they will know whether or not that brand interests them. If you have a fitness brand, then it will likely be aimed at a certain part of the fitness community: maybe crossfitters for instance, or perhaps bodybuilders. Your logo should instantly appeal to that group.
Simplicity
A good piece of advice is to ensure that your web design as simple as you can possibly make it. This is very important because you are going to have to reproduce the logo many times over and in different ways, so you need to be able to recreate it almost perfectly. This is part of the success of the Nike Tick which is one of the best-known brands -it's simple enough that anyone can recreate it and it's actually quite fun to draw too meaning that often they want to. Every time someone doodles your logo onto their notepad you have achieved free marketing.
You also should go for a simple design because it will shrink down more easily. Bear in mind that you are going to use your logo in a variety of places and it is likely to be a variety of different sizes. You need then to choose something that looks equally good whether blown up onto the side of a building or etched onto a grain of rice. One way to make this possible is to ensure that you use a vector file during the design process. This is a file that uses instructions rather than a map of pixels and can therefore be blown up or shrunk to any extent without losing any quality. Adobe Illustrator is one powerful tool for designing these kinds of images.
Brand Management
Brand Management means creating and managing a brand to represent your business in the best possible light. This could be among the most important forms of marketing for any business, so read on to discover how to make use of it.
Brand management is one part branding and one part reputation management. This means assessing the strength of your brand, your brand visibility, your public relations and your brand perception. It then means making sure that all these fairly intangible metrics continue to move in the right direction and that your business continues to go from strength to strength. The objectives of brand management then, are to help a company first create and define its brand and then ensure that said brand is well known and has the right impact on the audience as intended. Please also check our article about Brand Monitoring.
