The brand of a business is very often what makes the difference between success and failure. Your sales, and your ongoing growth, are reliant upon your business being perceived in the right light by the right people. That’s the role that branding plays, and a successful business is one which has married its branding with its aims in such a way as to encourage people to have a certain image in their head. You want people to feel like they know you business intimately, like a close friend, and that means developing your brand in a strong, consistent and bold manner. But what are the actual ins and outs of brand development? Let’s take a look at some of the essential things that you need to know.
Definition
Before you start actually trying to encourage people to see your business for what it is, you need to know what that is yourself. A lot of people try to brand their business before they have a strong idea of what the business is really all about. The folly of doing this this way round should be clear to most people. If you want a strong brand, you need to have a strong idea of what your business is about, how it functions, in a sense what its personality is. This makes the process of defining your brand much simpler, and you know what it is that you are meant to be assigning a brand to. The definition is one of the most important stages in the process, but bear in mind this is just for you and your close colleagues. The definition is what you work with to produce the image – and that is what the general public see.
Image
The company’s brand image needs to achieve a number of things all at once. The ideal brand image gives a sense of a business as though you have just met someone for the first time; it portrays something of a character. But more than that, it portrays a character which elicits some kind of emotion. You are looking to produce a certain response in your audience, one which makes them immediately understand the inherent value of what you are proposing as a business to do for them. This is difficult to achieve, but it is mostly just a matter of practice. Often, creating your brand image means knowing what reaction you want to have first, and working backwards.
Style
It helps if your brand image has a sense of style, something which carries it forward no matter where it appears. In an ideal situation, your brand image will work perfectly no matter where it might be seen. To achieve this kind of symbiotic cohesion, you often need to put a lot of hard work in. To begin with, it might be worth considering playing around with styles and using focus groups to test them out. That way, you can get real opinions from real people and figure out how effective your brand is actually likely to be.
