When starting a business, branding is often seen as just a small step in the process. However, it is much more than that. Your brand or product is the vessel that represents you and your company in the market, where perception is everything! In today's competitive and noisy landscape, having a strong branding is critical for success.
Think of branding like preparing for a battle in Medieval times – your brand is your armour and your weapon, all in one. It signals your intention, intimidates the competition and sets you apart from the rest. Your brand is not just a logo, it's a representation of your company culture, values and mission.
Just like the Vikings and Aboriginals had strong branding that marked their expression of intent and bonded their cultures, your brand can do the same for your company. It can create a sense of belonging and purpose within your team and build fanatic communities of followers.
Growth Branding is for the active brands that seek market dominance to scale faster.
Never underestimate the power of branding – it can make all the difference in the success of your business.
Branding for Scaleups
If you're a scaleup, your business has already taken off, and you're looking to grow even more. However, with growth comes increased competition and noise in the market making it harder to stand out. This is where branding becomes critical.
When you're competing with other businesses that offer similar products or services, a strong branding can help you differentiate and create a lasting impression. It's what sets you apart from the rest and tells your audience what you stand for. A well-crafted branding can also generate an emotional bond with your audience, like poetry, which translates into brand loyalty.
In fact, a study by Harvard Business Review found that customers who have an emotional connection with a brand are more likely to be loyal, spend more money and recommend the brand to others. Therefore, creating an emotional connection through storytelling with your audience is essential for business growth.
Be Deliberate
Your brand mark is the foundation upon which you will build a company for the long-term. It will evolve and grow, but rarely can a brand remake its image. As they say, the first impression lasts, good or bad, and it’s very hard to undo this impression later.
It's important to start out being deliberate in the impression you want your brand to have. Don't leave it to chance, and don't think that you can ‘get to it later.’ Start now, and you will grow your identity into the shape, style and form that best represents your brand. The payoff may not be discernible in the beginning, but the benefits over the long run are undeniable.
Your brand identity goes beyond a logo and colours. It encompasses your company culture, values, mission, and purpose. It's a visual representation of your story, and it's what your audience remembers when they think of your company.
It's essential to take the time to create a brand identity that tells your company’s story as well as any mission statement or written communication. Your branding should have a personality that is mirrored in its identity, a set of characteristics that powerfully come through in every identifier that crosses the consumer's field of vision.
Visual Language
Branding should be consistent across all platforms, from your website to social media to physical products. Consistency helps build trust and familiarity with your audience in the future, which translates into loyalty and community.
Most successful brands and ‘super brands’ understand the importance of creating a transformational branding that works across multiple platforms. They use visual or sonic cues intentionally to convey their unique identities from the moment a consumer steps into their world.
You need to ask yourself: “Does your branding align to tell your story as well as your vision and mission statement?” Consumers interact with your brand at the point of purchase, they don’t read your vision and mission statement first, so you only have a few seconds to grab their attention and excite them.
As a company striving for dominance on the market, you should have a clear vision of where you are heading and the agility to get there at all costs. Communicating your achievements to your community is also crucial. Orchestrating all of these aspects is challenging for any CMO/CEO or Founder and takes time to tune well.
Having a branding strategy that can speak for itself and sell itself is far more powerful than having to hard-sell all the time. It's essential to keep investing in building a thoughtful branding that tells your stories effectively to help you dominate the market.
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