What is branding anyways? What’s your first thought?
You’re probably thinking about the Nike Swoosh or the McDonald’s golden arches. An awesome logo that is recognizable everywhere. That’s branding right? Well, yes that’s part of it but branding goes so much deeper than just your logo. The easiest way to really think of a brand is what the conversation is around a company. How does that company make you feel? What are it’s values, what do you get when you support that brand.
Nike is less about the iconic swoosh and more about bringing people together with sport. Empowering people to push themselves and achieve things they never thought possible. Porsche isn’t about their cars, they are selling luxury and a signal that you are someone of a higher status.
How is this achieved? You can’t exactly control what people think and say about you but you can arm them with as much information as you can to guide them to your values. The thing is you can’t fake it, it needs to be a genuine thing. Think about your business. What values do you stand for? What is your mission statement? Why are you doing this? Once you have the answers to these questions you can use that to start informing your brand. This is done through your marketing, your business practices, your customer service, the words you use in your communications, your company culture and of course your logo, colours, fonts, graphics. They all work together to communicate who you are and when done properly it’ll be so much easier to connect with your customers in a meaningful way.
In the upcoming weeks we will put together a worksheet to go over all the things you need to create the foundation of your brand! Stay tuned for that!