Over the last few articles we have talked a lot about #branding and how branding helps users to connect emotionally to your brand or company. We say that branding is a process of building a brand and we also saw that a brand means emotional attachment and not just the visual aspects of your company.

When we talk about branding, mostly users mainly think of brand visual elements like a good logo, packaging, neat and clean website etc. and that with good branding they can achieve better revenue, results and image in the market. While Visual identity plays a very important role in branding and success, this alone isn’t sufficient and should be combined with proper marketing and service experience in order to properly ace your market.

But the problem is that we have people with different mindset about business working together to run a company and most of the time they don’t agree with each other and hence most brands(I hope not yours) are failing. The few problems that I find relatable with most brands that @thecrisdo and  @themikelawson shared on their instagram page are:

1. Management thinks branding is just a logo with a new tagline

2. The people in the company don’t know why they do what they do everyday

3. The sales and marketing team don’t value each other enough

4. Management doesn’t see the value in a brand identity

5. Management do not understand who their target audience are

Check out the original post here.

If we look on the whole, we can divide your brand into 3 main components. These three are different but should work in cohesion in order to achieve better results:

1. Brand Marketing

2. Brand Identity

3. Brand Service

Before we go into each topic let’s first understand what’s the main thing that binds all these together and without it they are just three different components working in very different directions.

Branding Strategy: A branding strategy is a long-term plan to achieve a series of goals that ultimately result in the identification and preference of your brand by consumers. A branding strategy revolves around all the intangible elements that over time drive brand awareness, brand equity, and brand sentiment. (Source: Bynder)

This Strategy or plan is the core element that binds and directs them together to work on the same goal as planned in the strategy.  Based on this plan and strategy we can now understand the 3 main components that we were talking about.

Brand Marketing: Brand marketing is marketing combined with your branding strategy.  For most of the brands this would be the first step to get customers to know your brand and buy the products. This could be through Digital marketing on social media, Ads campaigns, sponsorships or physical marketing etc. 

The idea of brand strategy is that your users can emotionally connect to your brand and similarly in marketing as well that when your potential audience interacts with or view your ads or post etc., they can relate that to their life and connect to it. This will encourage them to take the next step i.e click on your ad, visit your store or share that with someone else. Without them relating and connecting to your marketing they will just scroll away and won’t even notice a thing.

Brand Identity: Brand Identity is sometimes considered as the only thing when we talk about branding, which is not true but identity plays a very important role in how you represent your company to your clients, stakeholders, audience and market etc.

Brand identity is the visible elements of a brand, such as colour, design, and logo that identify and distinguish your brand in consumers' minds. A brand identity should be focused on how it can fit into the minds of your user for which we combine identity with strategy insights and plans from the branding strategy we talked about earlier.

A proper cohesion of brand marketing with brand identity leads users to trust your brand and its products and increase in sales and revenue.

Brand Service: A lot of guys think that getting a sale is the final result and you are done with your customer. But there is a lot more to it. You see, till the sales your customer trusted you, your marketing and your Identity which create an hope or image that your service or your product will also be good and so they purchased it. 

Post purchase there are a lot of things, first is that the product or service is really good and upto the mark that your customer has trusted on you. This will come back to you in the form of feedback, testimonials, repeat purchase, referrals etc. This can create Loops and new branches to sell more or it could break because of your bad service or product.

Maintaining or keeping your clients is the main part of trust. For there is trust, there will be more sales and revenue and your overall brand image will increase in the market and will also help you overtake your competitors gradually.

Ofcourse in order to achieve this, you need to again bind your services with brand strategy and with proper brand marketing and identity.

Conclusion: In order to have a successful brand, you need to have a strategy planned considering your goal and your target audience. This strategy should be combined with your marketing, identity designs and services to achieve the common goal of your brand.