How effective is your branding?

Despite the fact that branding is considered your business ‘identity’ it’s not all about how it looks – it’s about how it works.

The thing is, branding has changed. It used to be that striving for an iconic logo was the key to successfully building a brand, that combined with big-budget, idealistic advertising. Today, branding is about connecting with people. In today’s society, it’s not enough to be everywhere and in everyone’s faces, it’s about one customer having a personal connection with your brand. So what does that mean for brand identity? It means we have to create honest, value-driven branding that truly reflects our business goals and our reason for existence.

With all of that in mind, it doesn’t make much sense to start with a logo, or any visuals at all really. Instead, it’s important to clearly define what you do, how you do it, WHY you do it and who you are as people. This exercise will give you the foundations to build everything else: a mission statement, tone of voice, marketing strategy, audience profiles, visual identity, a logo. This is the most effective way of ensuring your brand is consistent and effective in its messaging and representation of your business.

So what about your business? How effective is your branding? Let’s find out.

Your Mission

It may sound trivial to some but defining the mission of your business is like giving your company a destination or a finish line. Whether or not you reach it isn’t important. It’s about striving for that goal each and every day your business is running. If you’re a baker and you set out on a mission to ‘bake the best bread in the world’ then that’s the thing that should motivate you. That should be THE most important focus for your business. Everything else should follow behind it.

And remember it’s not only you that can benefit from a clear vision. Your staff, suppliers, colleagues, anyone you work with that needs to understand what your business is all about, needs to look no further than your mission statement.

Your Values

If your mission is your foundation, the base on which you build your brand, then values are the floors and walls within. They are the constraints we create to house all of our business actions. Because they act as constraints we need to keep our values broad yet accurate. The best way to do this is with words.

Using single words as our values we can reach the emotions and meaning we want to achieve without turning them into specific rules. For example, our baker’s mission is to bake the best bread in the world. So a value might be ‘baking perfection’. This, however, is very specific. If we use our one-worded approach instead this value might be ‘quality’. Now, instead of creating a rule, the baker has a word to apply to everything they do which can be scaled should more people come on board.

At Redefine, we use a method devised by branding expert Wally Olins called The four vectors of brand tangibility.

“Perhaps the clearest way to understand how the brand makes itself tangible is to look at it through the four vectors through which it manifests itself. These are product, environment, communication and behaviour. They are the brand’s four senses.

Product – What the organisation makes or sells.

Environment – The physical environment of the brand, how it lays out its stall

Communication – How it tells people, every audience, about itself and what it’s doing.

Behaviour – How its people behave to each other and the world outside.

The significance of each of these four vectors varies according to the marketplace in which the brand performs. Sometimes each vector is of equal significance in contributing to the overall brand personality. Sometimes one or two dominate” – Wally Olins.

Try to find words that suit these four corners of your business. From there you’ll have a solid set of one-worded values to shape everything you do as a brand and a business.

Your Competition

Whether it's local competition or a business on the other side of the world, our competitors can help us shape and shift our offering to make sense to our customers and differentiate us where necessary. Checking out what the competition is doing is an age-old tradition in business but believe it or not, it's not getting any less useful. Try and find 2 or 3 of your closest competitors. Maybe one local or regional competitor and one whose offering is closest to yours. Write them down, keep a note of their website so you can always clarify your offering should you need to.

Your Audience

Your customers are key to your whole business, not just branding. It’s crucial we’re learning about our audience every day and steering the ship to suit. With every new project, we ask our clients the below questions. These are critical in helping us understand what matters to their customers and how we can shape an effective brand identity.

1. Describe your most common type of customer

2. Where do you engage with customers the most effectively?

3. Why do your existing customers choose you?

4. What other brands would you expect your customers to resonate with?

5. How will rebranding / creating a new brand impact your audience?

The first four questions can be asked as frequently as you want to keep your business goals and offering on track.

Your Brand Touchpoints

Finally, before getting stuck into the visual side of your brand, make sure to outline the touchpoints your brand will inhibit in the real world. Brand touchpoints are the bits of marketing and advertising that your customers react with. Whether it's a business card or a Facebook page, everything your brand touches has the potential to reach a new customer.

Some touchpoints we tend to focus on are:

? Website

? Third-party Websites

? Social Media Profiles

? Email Signatures

? Email Campaigns

? Phone Calls

? Printed Media (Brochures, Business Cards, Menus)

? Uniforms

? Face to Face Conversations

? Vehicles

? Interior Design & Signage

? Packaging

The key to effective branding is creating consistency across all of these touchpoints. This way we can easily understand how our customers are reacting to our marketing campaigns/strategy.

Mission, values, competition, audience and touchpoints. These are the five most important elements to focus on whether your brand is working or not. Building these into your brand from day one is ideal but not always realistic. That’s why we’ve tailored our process to help businesses rebrand into mission-driven, value-led forces to be reckoned with.

If you’re considering rebranding or would like more information on how to approach it, get in touch today with our Design Director and Founder Tom Woollam at [email protected].

And remember, branding is about how it works not just how it looks.