What is branding and why is it important?

By Lcid Crescent Fernandez

Branding is easy. All you need is a good name, an aesthetic logo and a tagline, right?

Well, not exactly.

It is simple to define, but a bit complicated to encapsulate in practice. Branding is the aggregate identity of your business. This means that everything that relates to your business (what it is, what to expect from it, how it’s supposed to make people feel) is your brand. Taking all the attributes that your business has, how is it now perceived by different stakeholders? That’s what your brand is.

In essence, branding is the backbone of your entire marketing process. Without identifying the brand you’re trying to build, the process becomes a shotgun method of just trying to yell at people to buy your product or service without any sense of consistency. There may be chance opportunities for sudden ROI, but your short-term success will be difficult to duplicate in the long run, especially with multiple products or services.

Your branding sets the tone for what your audience can expect every time they interact with your business. It becomes immensely important to then design and build this brand as meticulously as you would a home or a building. It creates the experience for your audience. What should they think, feel, or do when they come into contact with your brand?

To illustrate the importance of your brand, let’s take a look at the usual consumer journey. When you go out to buy toothpaste, how do you choose? You don’t google “What’s the best toothpaste?” You simply recall your experience and interactions with different brands to make that decision.

Did the packaging look like it would house a toothpaste worth my money? Does it foam enough to make me feel like it’s cleaning my teeth? Does it feel minty inside my mouth? Who’s endorsing the toothpaste?

The answers to these questions are what we call “brand experience”. If a person has positive brand experience, then they’ll continue to purchase from that brand. If the brand experience is negative, however, then they’ll avoid it like the plague.

Now, let’s take a look at the consumer journey of buying a car. This time it’s a much higher consumer involvement purchase than toothpaste. How many times have you heard someone talk about how tough Ford cars are or how good the after sales experience of Toyota is? How many times have you heard someone say that a person must be doing really well in life if they’re driving a BMW?

These interactions are all products of a well-designed and well-built brand. You create experiences that communicate your identity to ensure the right audience or target market is drawn to your business. It creates exponential potential for your marketing communications and curates the perception of your business.

Most traditional business owners won’t invest in designing and building their brand, as there will not be any measurable short-term ROI. Designing a good brand is, after all, the fundamental first step to building a cohesive marketing plan. It’s not sales marketing, so it won’t immediately see huge returns. However, consider the consumer mindset we outlined in the earlier examples. A well-designed brand will bring in heavy returns in the long run, even if you don’t feel it in conversions in the first few months. In fact, I’ll illustrate an alternative example.

Dwyane “The Rock” Johnson is one of the most profitable personalities in the world today. He’s endorsed and built multi-million-dollar companies just based off of his brand and the experience his audience has had with him. It’s important to highlight this one aspect: the audience loved his identity and he captured hearts and minds before he was ever approached to endorse anything and before he launched his business. If he just launched his business and focused on selling himself before he built his brand, he would not have had the same success that he has today.

In conclusion, your brand will be built whether or not you design it. It’ll be embodied in the way you conduct your business and the communication that you use. It will be building a skyscraper without understanding what it looks like and simply reacting to the day-to-day. Failing to design and embody that brand well will also lead to a chaotic and diluted brand. Frontline employees who fail to give your customers the experience your brand embodies is one such danger. This then causes mixed perceptions on your business which leads to you failing to capture the market.

We’ll discuss more on how to build brands both for your business and individual professional use in a future column, but I hope I was able to sufficiently discuss what branding is and why it is absolutely vital for business. Do you have thoughts? Shoot me an e-mail at lcidfernandez@prometheus.ph!