Your Product Branding Is Not the Same as Your Company Branding
People often mix up product branding with company branding, believing they are the same thing. As a result, they end up presenting their product or service in the same manner to everyone without doing the proper segmentation research first.
It can be confusing to know when to separate your product branding from your company branding.
Breaking Down the Confusion Between Company Branding & Product Branding
Not rarely do I meet people stating: "I've been confused by the relationship between product branding and company branding. My confusion led me to have different opinions of my product branding at times when I didn't see eye to eye with releases or new features coming out of our software development team."
More often than not, once you’ve established your company branding, people think it means one thing. That it only supports one product or a certain type of audience. And they try to push the brand in a certain direction that doesn't work for your every product. To create your core brand and product brands you need to first understand your target personas.
This is not to say that company branding, and product branding can't align. But just because they might align doesn't mean they should.
1. What is Company Branding?
Company branding is an umbrella that covers all the ways you communicate. Your company's image, ethos, values, and personality.
Company branding is more abstract and holistic. It captures an organization’s unique identity. Your company branding captures the entire scope of your organization’s identity. It will address and communicate with your entire pool of target personas. All your potential customers. Company Branding is your company's image, ethos, values, and personality.
2. What is Product Branding?
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Product branding takes care of how you package your product or service and present it to your audience. A specific way to talk about your product through storytelling.
Consider product branding as an investment that allows you to address specific target personas or customer personas or customer segments with a product-specific branding strategy. It grants your organization to create a larger pool of prospects while addressing each prospect individually through its own product branding strategy.
Use Personas to Develop Separate Brand for Each of Your Products
"Having my products and business be more distinctive has been on my mind for some time now. It’s a conundrum to keep the same identity for my company and have all my products have the same image. It takes a lot of money, time, and effort to communicate the message to people that I have multiple products and each one targets a different target persona."
With so much invested in making sure your brand is known it would be painful to spend even more money, time, and effort just to change or add another brand just so you can concentrate on customers with a different persona and different buyer motivation.
But, with the information you’ve already gathered from them, draw up an internal map that describes who these personas are inside and out. Once you’ve done this, create a persona for each brand you plan on creating. Once the personas exist, you can then start creating all your brands under one umbrella of your company name.
In the case of a multivendor e-commerce web store, you could have one main branding idea and design pattern. But inside that – as your own brands or custom brands – you will have multiple product brands. And depending on which is your main target persona they might follow different messaging guidelines.
The Best Brands are Built One Conversation at a Time
Company branding is kind of like the supporting foundation that makes everything possible. Products are solving the problem for your customers.?
Company and product branding are two different things. The former is a more encompassing umbrella that will cover the latter’s actions. When planning for your company’s branding make sure you give it equal importance to your product branding. It’ll only be effective if you make it that way.
Both of these need to be intertwined in a cohesive manner for them to work.
Always remember to answer these important questions when developing your strategy: