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Brandingbyexperts.com Promises To Increase Sales, ROI and Organic Traffic By Using Sponsored Posts

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Sourced from Marina Times

Before understanding how building brand equity can increase your sales, let us first understand what exactly is brand equity and what does it mean for your brand.

In the world of marketing, brand equity is something that refers to the value of a brand which is predominantly determined by how your customers perceive your brand. It can either be positive or negative. It’s all about how you present your brand or how you advertise it to the world. If your branding is good, and it is pretty famous among the customers and they regard it highly, then your brand equity is high, and thus positive.

But if not that, then it is termed negative. Meaning that if a brand fails to consistently deliver, fails to live up to the expectations of the customers, and also manages to get loads of negative word-of-mouth it has a lower brand equity or lower brand value. So, to put it in the simplest words, brand equity is the reputation of a brand. A good reputation garners good equity whereas a bad reputation garners negative equity.

What is Branding?

Branding is basically the way in which you characterize your business to yourself, to the business partners, and to your clients. Marketing alludes to giving an extraordinary character to your business that is substantially more than only addressing your organization’s name and logo. The brand character characterizes what’s really going on with your business and how it makes an incentive for other people. With a market that has developed brilliant enough to see through glossed over promoting methodologies, the requirement for a solid and veritable brand character is clear.

Branding is huge in expanding deals for a business. It works as a booster for the growth of revenue. If a brand customizes the experience for the clients, the clients associate with the brand emotionally. A solid brand personality increments client dedication and trust which thus builds the deals for your business.

Here are the key factors that influence how buyers see a brand. At the point when you dial in this large number of pieces, you can further develop brand discernment, drive deals, hold clients and increment references:

Brand message:

How buyers see your image relies a ton upon what you say and how you say it. Ensure you’re reliably conveying your brand image’s worth, vision and novel selling recommendation in a way that reverberates with your objective market across all client touchpoints.

Extraordinary items or administrations:

Make sure your items are top-notch and pertinent to your optimal clients.

Client support:

Try and establish good and strong connections with your group of clients across all channels (e.g., email, telephone, web-based entertainment, visits). This will fundamentally affect how they see your image. Convey a consistent and predictable client experience that lines up with your brand image across all touch focuses.

Trust identifications:

When selling on the web, fabricate trust and believability with customers. Sites with trust identifications cause clients to feel more certain while sharing their data (e.g., during checkout).

Virtual entertainment:

Offer client assistance via web-based entertainment stages. Furthermore, many ask their companions so that suggestions or search via virtual entertainment might see what others are talking about a brand.

Brand Equity Increasing Your Brand Sales Value

Good brand equity increases your sales. Brand equity is nothing but the financial or commercial worth of your brand based on the perception of your brand name amongst consumers or clients. If you build a good brand by indulging in various branding methods and techniques your brand equity rises and thus your sales rise as you are able to sell your product at a higher value.

Your painstakingly built brand makes a visual, profound, and social association among clients and your organization and thus builds trust. A consumer is always ready to pay a comparatively higher sum if he/she trusts the brand.

There are many examples of brands that have built a name and inculcated a trust factor amongst clients thus generating higher brand equity which in turn increased sales.

Sponsored Posts Strategy

Sponsored Posts Strategy is a sure short way to gain a lot of traffic for your brand and your page. This strategy helps you to collaborate with publications having a high amount of traffic and featuring your blog or product on their websites. This strategy is responsible for drawing a major chunk of organic traffic to your page. Sponsored posts are not like irritating ads that are dripping with sales language. Instead, these posts are finely articulated and informative posts which show your potential target audience a solution for their problems. Sponsored Posts touch the right nerve and address the issues and showcase your brand or product as a good fix for all the issues faced by your potential consumer.

BrandingByExperts

Branding Experts , as the name suggests a branding agency run by experts in the fields of digital marketing, PR and branding.  The company is dedicated to learning and understanding your business. By building a relationship with each of your clients, the company ensures that they build a marketing strategy which focuses solely on the nature of your problems and then on solving them. Each of their marketing campaigns is built with the client’s needs in mind to solve all the marketing obstacles.

The team’s expertise lies in building brand equity and formulating a reliable sponsored posts strategy to add up to the advantages of the client. This causes your sales to boom right up and increases your market value. The agency uses analytics to bring about a positive metamorphosis for your business.

The company builds your brand by distributing a press release to prominent outlets such as many local news affiliates. They give your brand in-content white hat links by reaching out to bloggers with high traffic and reach.

For more than 15 years, the platform has been providing branding solutions for businesses wanting to expand their online presence, increase leads and grow their revenue.

If you too are waiting then your wait ends here. Reach out to BrandingByExperts.com  today and increase your sales by leaps and bounds.

Sourced from Marina Times

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How To Build Your Business Brand in the Metaverse

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By Zaheer Dodhia

Is your brand ready for the metaverse? It can be a complex question — for one thing; the answer depends on what “the metaverse” refers to for you as a business owner. For another, it can depend on the type of business that you run. But, ultimately, brand owners want their companies to be ready for anything — and active growth is often top on the list.

What Is The Metaverse?

The answer to this question depends on who you ask, but a simple definition is “a collection of technologies that allows us to interact in a virtual universe.” Most commonly, those technologies involve augmented or virtual reality and video.

Technically, our ability to interact with AI or with avatar representations of others on social media is an offshoot of what the metaverse is intended to be. The function of the metaverse is to meld the physical and the virtual into one.

As technology advances, experts and innovators predict that we’ll spend more time in this digital universe than we do now — and maybe more time in our virtual world than we do in the real one. With the heightened focus on digital communications and ecommerce during the past two years, this doesn’t come as a surprise. Statistics already show the rise in interest — in 2020, almost 84 million people were using AR/VR regularly in the United States alone, with that number projected to rise to 110 million next year.

There’s endless scope for the imagination with the metaverse concept — not to mention endless scope for business growth. Big companies like Microsoft and Epic have already invested in the metaverse, aiming to stake a claim on their virtual brand. As a result, the market for augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality are projected to reach 300 billion dollars yearly by 2024.

There’s no doubt about it — the metaverse is the next significant shift in the digital world, and it’s best to be ready to take advantage of it!

Here are the top three ways to build your business brand in the new digital movement known as the metaverse.

Unified Branding

Branding is always one of the top keys to building a business. Branding not only identifies who your company is but connects it with core values, products and services on offer, and even your audience.

“Just make sure you have a brand” isn’t really the best advice, though, because inconsistent branding can actually be detrimental to your overall brand. Inconsistency can cost — 90% of consumers expect to have a consistent experience with a brand regardless of the platform, and consistent brands are more likely to have strong visibility, whereas if consumers are less aware of a brand and have less of an impression of it as a whole, they’re less likely to notice the company — and therefore less likely to engage or invest. Neglecting your colour scheme or making a logo design mistake can have serious consequences.

Along with consistency, specific elements can help with solid branding. For example, using a signature colour can boost a brand’s recognizability by up to 80%. That means that customers would be 80% more likely to recognize and interact with your brand in the metaverse if they see your signature colour.

Leitmotifs, or sonic branding, are also valuable to a complete branding package. Some statistics suggest that using audio — think jingles or recurring notes, like with MacDonald’s ba-da-ba-ba-ba — as part of your branding can increase recognition by up to 46%.

In the end, the numbers show the importance of keeping your branding steady as you move into the metaverse with your brand. Unified branding across all platforms, including print, storefront, social media, and website, has been shown to increase revenue by up to 23%. That’s significant growth, especially for a small business.

Virtual Experiences

The metaverse is all about virtual reality, and adding virtual experiences into what you offer your customers is an excellent way to get them ready for the metaverse even now. In addition, you may be able to leverage the rising sales of VR headsets, which is one of the most popular ways to explore the metaverse concept. From just under five million sets sold in the US in 2020, sales are projected to reach more than 14 million yearly in the US by 2024.

But VR headsets aren’t the only way to craft a virtual experience to share with your customers and attract them to your business. Build a digital storefront that mimics your brick-and-mortar store. Create digital tours of your products. Ikea is an excellent big-name pioneer of this, already demonstrating how to use the metaverse concept to grow a particular aspect of a brand. With virtual room design, Ikea customers can see what furniture and features will fit, how the colour scheme will turn out, and how frustrated they may get while figuring out how to put it all together.

Okay, that last part isn’t actually a feature of Ikea’s virtual experience. But it’s only a matter of time.

Video Production

A final and significant way to build your business brand in the metaverse is to incorporate videos in your marketing, website, and social media posts.

The importance of video isn’t anything new. Approximately 85% of marketers already leverage video use as an essential part of their strategy, with 92% of that number labelling it as essential to their work going forward. Video nets the most engagement on social media, especially Instagram. More than 90% of businesses point to social media videos as a key that has garnered new customers and directly caused conversion.

But with the metaverse being focused on virtual/augmented reality and video, video production is even more of a recommendation for brands that are looking to grow. Not just for marketing purposes, either — other popular kinds of videos include how-to or explainer videos and social media videos, both of which puts the focus on entertainment and education.

The more value you can provide, the more likely you will attract new interest. And with new interest, your brand is sure to grow.

To the Metaverse and Beyond

It’s challenging to get a consensus on just what the metaverse means and how far it will take us. But one thing is for sure — we’ve been spending more time in the virtual world than ever in the past few years, and it’s almost guaranteed that the trend will continue.

With essential brand-building methods, your brand will be ready to grow in the metaverse and whatever comes next.

Feature Image Credit: Julien Tromeur; Unsplash

By Zaheer Dodhia

Sourced from readwrite

 

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Why it’s a bad idea for start-ups to make their branding distinctive

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By Saskia Ketz

Fluid design is having a moment—and embracing it will save start-ups time and money in the long run.

When Google Chrome revealed its first logo refresh in nearly a decade earlier this year, the internet was left scratching its head. The change was so slight, the new logo so simple, merely removing the highlights and shadows to completely flatten the logo, slightly adjusting the proportions, and saturating the colours.

[Images: Google]

As someone who has worked in branding for more than 15 years, I don’t think this subtlety was a failure—it shows that the company is paying attention to where the design world is going. If you look at the major rebrands of 2021—from Burger King to GM—almost all of them involve paring down, flattening, or simplifying a brand’s look.

 

The driving factor is more than just a trend in our visual language—it’s about adjusting to our new normal as companies and consumers. As we’re all too aware, the world is changing at an unprecedented pace. Brands are looking for simple designs that give them flexibility to adapt across new platforms, appeal to new audiences, and pivot as things change around them. And—jokes about Chrome’s new logo aside—consumers are craving simplicity in an increasingly complex world. A 2021 study by brand strategy agency Siegel+Gale found that 76% of people are more likely to recommend a brand that delivers simple experiences.

While this shift is important for all companies to pay attention to, it presents an especially exciting opportunity for start-ups, which are constantly changing by nature. When done correctly, approaching branding with simplicity can help start-ups more easily align their brand with their strategy—and save a lot of money in the process.

Why distinctive branding doesn’t work for start-ups

Company branding used to feel permanent: You spent a lot of time and money getting it right and then didn’t change it for as long as possible. Take American Airlines, which didn’t change its branding for 40 years. While the original branding was classic, it ended up looking a little too patriotic as the world became increasingly globalized. When they addressed this issue with a major rebrand, they faced some pushback for such a drastic change. And yet, too many founders still adhere to a mindset where they see branding as a boxed-in solution that will last, even if their business changes.

The reality is exactly the opposite. There’s no way to create strong visual branding without a solid understanding of a company’s core product, purpose, and audience—something start-ups are still figuring out in the early years. As start-ups pivot their strategy to find product-market fit or appeal to different audiences, branding that used to work might not anymore. I’ve even seen designer friends work on projects where the brand is already dated by the time they’re exporting the final files (no exaggeration!) because of the speed at which the client is pivoting.

The more distinctive a brand identity, the more exaggerated this problem becomes. Foursquare is a great example: They launched over a decade ago with complex, consumer-focused branding and have had to significantly rebrand every few years as they found their footing and eventually expanded to include a B2B business model.

The evolution of Foursquare’s branding. [Images: Foursquare]

A more fluid way forward

Looking at Foursquare’s latest rebrand, you see how simplicity helps solve these issues. The company stripped its branding back to a wordmark and a few basic colours, describing the new approach as a “simple, scalable system” that allows them to appeal to the multiple audiences they’ve grown to serve.

 

[Images: Foursquare]

Simplicity not only helps growing brands be more things for more people, but it also gives them more flexibility to tweak things as they grow and evolve. I like to think of this approach as “fluid design”—start with something simple, and make subtle updates as your strategy changes or you learn more about your audience.

 

Chat app Discord took a fluid approach last year in a brand update they described as “not too different: just a little friendlier”—a move to make the product more welcoming as they expand beyond the gaming community.

[Screenshots: courtesy of the author]

Dropbox has seen a similar fluid evolution, starting with a simple logo that has seen small upgrades over the years, and more recently adding pops of colour to their traditional blue branding in order to appeal to a more creative audience. It’s still obviously the Dropbox brand—just more playful.

Save money on simplicity

So, why am I talking about this approach when there are plenty of brands—big and small—that already do it?

For one, there are still plenty of start-ups taking the old approach, looking for trendy or flashy design to help them stand out, when they should really be seeking a simple brand that gives them flexibility while they find product-market fit.

The other issue is that start-ups are hiring branding agencies at all—at great cost. Top agencies for early-stage companies typically charge $150,000–$500,000 for their branding work; even entry-level agencies often start at $50,000. At that price, growing companies (that barely have that money in the first place) feel pressure to get it perfect and never update their branding.

Instead, young companies can DIY a simple design system, with a sleek wordmark, professional fonts, and a basic color palette. Moreover, when they take the fluid approach, there’s no pressure for this early branding to be perfect: Tweaks can and should happen along the way.

I’m not saying that the work brand designers do isn’t valuable—but it’s only valuable once a company feels secure in what it’s doing and who it’s marketing to.

So, my advice for start-ups: Take advantage of this simple design trend to create something that’s good enough for now, make perhaps imperceptible changes as you learn along the way, and spend the bulk of your resources getting your product right. Once that’s in place, you can pay for all the fancy design work you want.

By Saskia Ketz

Saskia Ketz is the founder of MMarchNY, a New York City-based branding agency that’s worked with brands like Netflix, IKEA, Timberland, and Mojomox, an online wordmark builder that allows start-ups to create dynamic, professional-looking logos themselves.

Sourced from Fast Company

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How to Create Content for Different Purposes: Branding, Sales, and Retention

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By Tom Gil

Different parts of the sales funnel need different content types. Here’s how to make them.

We often talk about content creation and repurposing it using different channels, like blogs and social media. What isn’t often mentioned is how to create different types of content for different stages of the sales funnel: branding, sales, and retention.

Every end goal can call for a different kind of content. For example, you might need content that’s designed to move people closer to a sale, make you more memorable (branding), or help you maintain clients (retention). Usually, in your marketing funnel, your target audience is within one of these three stages:

  1. Awareness (made aware of your brand)
  2. Consideration (considering your solution)
  3. Decision (moving towards buying from you)

What content the customer needs to consume in each stage differs. But the first hurdle, as Devin Reed, head of content strategy at Gong, notes, is simply making all your marketing messages relevant to the consumer: “When it comes to actually creating engaging content, it needs to be relevant, insightful, and actionable. This is critical if you want to grab — and keep — their attention. Unfortunately, most B2B companies focus on themselves, specifically their product/service, and as a result, their content is boring and fails to influence how their audience thinks or acts.”

Retention

Your end goal shouldn’t be to simply make a sale. Instead, it should be to create loyal, long-term customers. Here are three methods you can implement today for better retention content:

  1. Use storytelling in your marketing: Customer-focused stories win. Describe how your product or service empowered a business with a solution that yielded results.
  2. Publish quality content consistently: Creating a blog is crucial nowadays. Aside from helping you rank higher on search engines, it enables you to build trust with your ideal customers and craft a unique voice for your brand.
  3. Continue to educate your audience: Having a separate section for unique studies and stories (not blogs) is a way to stand out, and is one of the best ways to show up for your audience consistently. Try different mediums, like podcasts, vlogs, guides, and case studies.

Now, let’s focus on a topic that is often ignored. Retention branding.

Are you pleasantly waving customers good-bye when they choose to leave or are you pointing a sword at their backs, making them walk the plank while they gaze at sharks below?

Even after you lost the battle — when a client cancels their membership or unsubscribes — the psychology of user offboarding is paramount. Just like the aftertaste a drink can leave you with, the offboarding experience can make or break your brand’s reputation. An unreasonable layer to a journey’s end can cause friction and leave a bitter taste.

Making it hard for customers to leave your product is unethical, and usually does more harm than good. There is a way to make a person smile even as they’re about to unsubscribe. AppSumo‘s messaging around cancelling a subscription is a good example: The unsubscribe screen says “It looks like you’ve had enough of us (tough but fair).” A small thing like that can take a stressful process and make it more enjoyable. It’s a reminder of what brands should do: let you leave with a smile, remembering them positively.

That’s retention branding. If you still want to leave, at least you left smiling. If you changed your mind, you stayed smiling. You smiled either way, and that matters.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Tom Gil

Certified real estate copywriter & marketing consultant

Sourced from Inc.

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Branding’s Perfect 10 – The PR Afterthought

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By Glenn Matchett

When considering the future of branding and brands, it is important to properly understand that Communications is now a fractured, complex, and diverse discipline. The challenge for a PR and brand team – and, indeed, for an entire business – is to get everyone working as one. The overarching task is to impart and nurture genuine empathy and understanding for what a brand stands for, along with the overall business goals. The next step is to plan on how that gets communicated effectively to the outside world.

In Communications, working in silos doesn’t cut it anymore. It requires complex, interwoven, and often co-dependent messaging played across advertising, branding, packaging, PR, digital, customer service, and more. Symbiotic, interlocked, and constantly evolving, there is no solitary lens for PR. Instead, there is a brand kaleidoscope that acts as an ever-changing window into how a brand is perceived through the entirety of its communications.

Social media perfectly illustrates how interlocked communications channels can be for brands. A misplaced tweet or a tone-deaf post can quickly catch fire as a PR disaster that can lose customers or have a negative commercial impact on a business. When Dulux became the sponsor of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club this year, one of the first things the paint brand’s social media manager did was engage in some Twitter banter about the club’s lack of trophies. This quite quickly whipped up into a PR storm about how a new commercial partner was making a major faux pax by denigrating its new partner. There were questions asked about the suitability of the partnership and it has resulted in the commercial relationship getting off to an unsteady start.

With an improved lens on PR, the brand would have anticipated the potential problem here. In a future, more perfect world, PR fails can be mitigated by ensuring those who are in charge of social media are adequately briefed and aware of the power of social as a communications channel.

In a future world, this sort of mistakes would be stopped at the source because companies would understand how interlocked all their messaging is with the perception of their brand. A misjudged post on social media has the potential to be just as damaging as Gerald Ratner’s quip in 1991, that the jewellery he sold was “total crap”. His tongue-in-cheek remark in front of the Institute of Directors promptly wiped £500 million from the jeweller’s valuation and nearly took the company to the wall. Reflecting on the incident in 2021, Ratner tweeted, “It is 30 years today when I made ‘that’ speech. It seems like yesterday. I wish it was tomorrow. I would cancel it.” A PR blunder can have a lasting impact. Lessons for the future are often gleaned from what has happened in the past.

In a perfect future vision, PR would always have a board-level seat at any business – helping inform and shape decisions as they are made. PR is not an afterthought. PR is not the red phone to ring in a panic when the shit is about to hit the fan further down the line. Nor is it a cherry to stick on top of a cake with a positive business announcement or new launch. It is not enough to position PR and marketing at the end of a business process. That does not work anymore and brands who do it will often come unstuck or fail to properly connect with their customers.

Another great example from the world of football this year is the abortive launch of ‘The Super League’. As the breakaway scandal unfolded, it was revealed that the organizers only decided to appoint an agency to look after PR on the day of the announcement. What they fundamentally misunderstood is that PR cannot be an afterthought. It’s not about managing a few negative headlines with the belief that today’s newspapers will be tomorrow’s chip papers. PR is vital to monitor the pulse of a brand or an idea. It is about fully understanding and communicating effectively with your customers.

PR is a pre-emptive tool that is as much about anticipation as it is about activation. Like the tip of an iceberg, with PR there is much more to it beneath the surface than you end up seeing in public. As soon as the tsunami of negative responses hit, The Super League brand was dead in the water. If the clubs had effectively engaged PR earlier in their process they would have realized the whole shebang was a bad idea a lot sooner. This whole episode serves as a lesson on why engaging with PR early is a necessity for any brand.

In recent years, technology has seen brands become more and more efficient in how they target their audience. Data-driven intelligence hoovered up from our online activities means that advertisers often seem to know us better than we know ourselves. In the early days of this tracking technology, this was hailed as new nirvana. We’d be served better because we’d get shown what we want rather than things that weren’t relevant and of interest to us. We were heading to a perfect world of branding and advertising. With minimum wastage for advertisers, you would only see the products you’re interested in.

More recently, however, that dream has turned somewhat sour. The dystopian vision in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, of being relentlessly targeted with ads, looms larger like a tangible reality. Documentaries like Coded Bias, The Great Hack, and The Social Dilemma each portray a dark and damaging heart at the center of this technology, purely focused on milking and manipulating consumers for all that they are worth.

From a PR point of view, consumers are waking up to how their data is being used and brands need to be mindful of this. Customers don’t like it and the resulting bad PR for their brands may be commercially damaging. From a brand perspective, we may end up shifting in a different direction, with more organic, transparent, and authentic connections being a prerequisite of brand communications. Privacy controls will be placed back into the hands of the customer and, as a result, the PR wildfire that is burning about privacy and data may start to recede. We’ve already seen this come to light with Apple’s new privacy feature, intended to put the brakes on the sharing of customer data across multiple sites. By preventing the targeting that is the bread and butter of many brands online, its introduction may be a catalyst for a dramatic change in the entire online advertising industry.

From a brand perspective, we may end up shifting in a different direction, with more organic, transparent, and authentic connections being a prerequisite of brand communications.

Brands need to continue to adapt and change in step with the world in which we live. Many cultural commentators believed that, after COVID-19, the consumer’s relationship with brands might change dramatically. Our values would shift away from a disposable, frivolous culture and brands would need to follow. The jury is still out on whether this will, in fact, come to pass. If the queues at the UK’s high-street stores, when the lockdown was lifted in April, is any barometer of a new consumer consciousness, it may not, in fact, be the case at all. The hunger to spend on a wide range of goods still appeared to be firmly intact.

It is fair to say though that brands continue to become more socially aware. As part of a brand strategy, CSR is often now firmly embedded into many companies. However, CSR is only really effective when it is integrated properly and not just used as a PR badge to appease a target market or drive sales.

In the future, unpicking the relationship between CSR and PR will be a great step forward for brands. If you consider a brand like Dove, which has ‘body positivity’ at the heart of its brand purpose, you can see how powerful this can be – not just part of a marketing strategy but an entire business philosophy. It’s not just a PR badge adopted in order to shift their products.

In summary, I feel that it is worth addressing the elephant in the room.

“What is the perfect future version of branding and brands?”

Well, there isn’t one, of course. We live in an imperfect world and nothing ever stays still. When Brandingmag launched, 10 years ago, the world was a very different place. Fast forward 10 years from today and I expect, fuelled by technology, that change will be even greater. PR, as a profession, continues to evolve and it is now part of a larger, more integrated, communications ecosystem. The days of fluffy ‘Ab Fab’ PR – with boozy lunches and ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’ dynamics of doing your job – are long gone. The future vision for perfect PR and brands is to refine and adapt to the broader, interlinked way in which communications operates. It’s also imperative for PR to be positioned at the heart of every business operation. Perfect? No, it will never be perfect, but that’s what keeps the craft of communications such an engaging challenge.

By Glenn Matchett

Sourced from Brandingmag

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Branding’s Perfect 10 – The Enemy of Action

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By Chloe Schneider

Perfection is death. Reserved for gods, not mortals.

David Foster Wallace, a perfectionist, wrote a book that features a film called ‘Infinite Jest’. As a piece of perfect media, it is so soothing and answers every desire, that it is impossible to switch off. It fully absorbs the viewer’s attention so they just sit there, sunk in their seat. They watch until they die. The lesson here appears to be that even if perfection were attainable, it might lull us into inaction.

Perfection is the enemy of action.

Action is vital

There are plenty of clever abstractions in branding – and hot air. Acting and applying ideas in the real world is so often where things fall apart. Branding needs a closer resemblance and connection to life.

Applied brand strategy is essential; strategy that can be made reality, designed to take shape in the world. What’s important is not perfect brands and notions, but distinctive brands that make meaningful contributions to culture. A future where all brands act, and specifically act with a social and cultural conscience.

The climate crisis has taught us that, if the status quo isn’t working, if we don’t like what the future holds, we can’t sit around and wait for perfect, ideal solutions. Where we can start to act thoughtfully and with purpose, for environmental and social good, don’t delay. Think hard before you act, but don’t overthink it. Don’t be anxious about having to be a brand with all the perfect answers. Every active step counts.

Often, the issue is about creating cultures, rather than being passive recipients of a future or system that someone else decided or designed. Pursue a radical or reformist agenda in why, how, and what you create.

The process, how brands make things and live on in the world, is as important as the final result.

‘Perfect’ comes from the Latin for ‘completed’. It is unrealistic and dull to think of brands as complete, not as living and responsive parts of culture. It is too narrow to think only of a brand’s end product or service, its final form in isolation.

What was unusual about a Rodin exhibition at the Tate Modern this year was how few of Rodin’s perfect marble sculptures of the human body were on display. Instead, room after room was filled with plaster casts, pencil marks, and the artist’s experimental works. The exhibition firmly insisted that Rodin’s brilliance lies also in the process of creation, in the ruptures, messy complexities, and uncertainties.

“It is unrealistic and dull to think of brands as complete, not as living and responsive parts of culture. It is too narrow to think only of a brand’s end product or service, its final form in isolation.”

Brands shouldn’t be divorced from their making. They should be connected, responsible, and transparent about how something is made, materials sourced, produced, and distributed. Brands should take an empowering and caring role in the communities they draw on and are made in. Norlha is a slow, sustainable, and ethical luxury fashion and homewares brand selling items that are handwoven from Yak wool by nomads turned artisans in Tibet. Rooted in Ritoma’s community, the brand has organically led to the continuity and flourishing of craft and culture, giving people livelihoods, new futures, and a voice in a time of change.

The arts and crafts movement spoke of the joy to be found in labour for a craftsman. In The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin looked at the rough and vivid carvings of Venetian buildings and envisaged ordinary workmen being left to their own imaginations. Whether his observation was right or not, I do think that the more everyone involved in making a brand can take pleasure, pride, and creative satisfaction in their work so much the better.

The power of making something real and its impact can’t be underestimated. But it shouldn’t be limited to the brand managers, marketers, and creative agencies. Make better, empower everyone involved. How a brand gets there – the people that make it, the community it feeds back into, the creative and productive conversations had – matter as much as the final result.

There is also the question as to what ‘perfect’ branding is trying to achieve.

Infinite growth should be dethroned as an aim

This focus on good actions and on the process and getting it right help us to reprioritize.

However, the “perfect” brand and strategy are almost invariably directed towards growth. The electrifying Silicon Valley mindset of shooting into space. Does growth always have to be the goal, the pinnacle of success? Branding certainly seems to be addicted to the idea.

I can’t help but think it misses the point. Growth at the cost of what? Never-ending growth is no longer viable. It’s unsustainable. We need to be willing to sacrifice profit for the cost of building better. It is crucial that more brands act on their philosophies, and stop making empty environmental and social promises.

I’m relieved that brands like Karma Cola exist that are focused on people and the planet, on ethical behaviour, versus world domination. The brands mentioned in this article are relatively small, this enables them to maintain the integrity of their actions and be agile.

In short, be more human, not god-like in the pursuit of perfection.

Take actions that do good in the real world, and don’t be seduced by the dangers of omnipotence, omnipresence, and the divine glory of being absolutely perfect.

—
As Brandingmag reached its 10th anniversary this year, we’re putting together an original series that envisions a perfect future for branding. Ten articles will explore ten different sides of branding, each one through the eyes of an expert on the subject. Join our celebration and stay tuned for the next installment in the “Branding’s Perfect 10” series.

Feature Image Credit: Rostislav Uzunov

By Chloe Schneider

Chloe Schneider is a strategist and semiotician at Here Design. Her expertise is in analysing culture and its artefacts — objects, brands, art, films, media, spaces, iconography, and words — to inform and develop brand and design strategy.

She has unlocked new ways of thinking for Allpress, one of New Zealand’s best-loved coffee shops, Glenfiddich, one of the most globally iconic alcoholic spirits, and The Fife Arms, a hotel from the co-founders of acclaimed gallery Hauser & Wirth. A background in consumer insight and cultural strategy ensures her provocations are grounded and relevant.

Sourced from Brandingmag

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The Importance of Building Your Brand as an Entrepreneur

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Sourced from The Network Journal

You probably hear the word “branding” thrown around a lot. Branding has become a common topic of discussion in entrepreneurship – and for a good reason. Branding isn’t just a memorable logo. It’s vital to your online presence and the success of your business.

What exactly is a brand?

Put simply, a brand is a promise of a specific experience that you create through the sum of different elements, including your logo and tagline, messaging, promise, a specific personality, and visual elements.

Building a brand helps you cultivate trust in your target market, build a community, and showcase yourself as an authority in your field.

Here are additional reasons why you should build your brand as an entrepreneur:

Instant recognition. As an entrepreneur, much of your business growth depends on your getting out there and marketing. With the number of entrepreneurs on the rise, it can be hard to distinguish yourself. Wouldn’t it feel nice for people to know your company without your ever having to introduce it?

A logo is one of the key components of your brand. As the “face” of your business, it’s what people will instantly recognize. A professional logo design should be simple enough to be memorable but powerful enough to give your business the desired impression.

Increased client attraction. Do you find yourself chasing clients? Perhaps they vanish into thin air after your initial meeting. Don’t let this happen to you.

A strong brand is like a magnet for your business. When you focus on building your brand as an entrepreneur, you become exposed to a larger audience. People can find you online and interact with you easily, attracting more business than you know what to do with.

More than regular clients, your brand attracts higher-quality ones. Successful people want to do business with other successful people.

Enhanced credibility. Many smart entrepreneurs struggle to get their big break simply because they have no idea how to position and present their know-how, skills and experience. They lack credibility among those outside their traditional circle of influence.

Credibility is extremely important for entrepreneurs. The more credibility your business has, the more likely people will buy your products or services. A brand is a strategic representation of everything you embody. It expands your circle of influence and boosts your credibility.

Ability to charge more. With increased credibility, you’ll be in a better position to charge more for your product or service.

As an established brand, you may have a limited amount of time in a day to do all the work your business demands. As demand for your skills, expertise, and time increases, you can start to charge more for your time.

Charging more allows you to decide how much you want to work, meaning more freedom.

A better network. You may have heard it said, ‘who you know is crucial if you want to make it in business.’ This couldn’t be further from the truth.

As you grow your brand, you will develop an ever-growing network of heavy hitters in your industry. This network can come in handy when it comes to growing your business. It’s a beautiful cycle.

Whether you want to release a new product in the market or try another route in your business, having a network of people at your disposal can prove to be very valuable.

Inspires employees. Your employees need something to work towards – something more than work and salary. When your employees understand your business’ mission, they’re more likely to feel that they’re part of something bigger and more likely to work to attain the goals you set.

Building a strong brand is like turning the company logo into a flag your employees can rally around.

What are the best branding practices?

Become familiar with the best strategies to avoid common pitfalls when you begin to build your brand.  A single misstep can hurt your reputation and set your brand back.

Here’s how to avoid that:

  1. Harness your personality. Your personality is the most unique thing about you, setting you apart from your competitors.
  2. Believe in yourself as a brand. You become a brand the moment you start your own business.
  3. Know and embrace your strengths and weaknesses. If you want your brand to come off as authentic, you have to own your strengths and weaknesses.
  4. Build a website for your brand. Unlike social media profiles, your website is something you own. Use this personal platform to share blog posts, digital products, webinars, and any other content you deem appropriate for your audience.
  5. Provide value at every chance. The people who follow your brand are interested in learning what you already know. For this reason, try to share content that provides value for the reader.
  6. Foster relationships with other popular brands. Interacting with other well-known brands in your industry is another way to build your brand. Your competition is not always the enemy. You can find success when you partner with your competition on specific marketing campaigns.
  7. Keep reinventing yourself. If you commit mistakes while building your brand, reinventing yourself will help to present a new persona to your online audience.

Branding is not something that occurs overnight, and it’s definitely not something that you should leave to chance. If you really want to stand out from the crowd, concentrate on building your brand.

To build a successful brand, start by understanding the branding best practices. Brands do not exist in a vacuum. Build relationships with movers and shakers in your niche to stay ahead of your competitors.

Sourced from The Network Journal

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The Rebrand Trend of 2021? Acting Your Age

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By Rachel del Valle

This year, heritage brands looked to their pasts to create visual identities for the multi-platform era

In a year packed with change, a certain shade of nostalgia has taken hold of branding design. A number of legacy brands, from Burger King to Campbell’s Soup to Colt 45, ABC, Zagat, and Peugeot, drew on their archives to create new looks. The unfussy lettering, crisp lines, and pared-down color palettes of these rebrands look like stylish cartoon versions of the original logos. They have the visual efficiency, if not exactly the style, of Hanna-Barbera’s golden age.

“There is something that changed this year that made this aesthetic and this approach not just acceptable, but really successful in the marketplace,” says Armin Vit, co-founder of UnderConsideration. Vit says Jones Knowles Ritchie’s Burger King rebrand, which made headlines in January, made consumers want to engage with the brand in a way that they hadn’t felt the need to before. While Vit agrees there have been more archive-referencing rebrands since then, he says it’s hard to know how many of them were already in progress before Burger King’s fresh-but-familiar look became a hit. It should be noted that despite media coverage to the contrary, JKR’s executive creative director, Lisa Smith, doesn’t characterize the rebrand as an homage to the restaurant’s glory days. While the new logo is a take on the longstanding previous Burger King sign, other elements—from the Kraft paper packaging to the elegant favicon—are entirely original.

A product shot of Burger King meals in minimal, colorful packaging against a red background.
02
Burger King rebrand by Jones Knowles Ritchie.

This trend is one part practical, one part cultural. Midcentury graphic design, which straddled the print and emerging digital worlds of its time, had technical restrictions that resulted in simpler, more abstract work. Accents like drop shadows and gradients had to be done by hand. There were far fewer typefaces to choose from. So by default, most logos created between the mid 1950s and 1970s were what we now call flat design: two-dimensional, characterized by blocks of color and a general lack of filigree. While the textured visual identities of the 1990s and 2000s—think the glint on Windows 2000—don’t translate well to small-scale digital screens, the unadorned designs of the midcentury era lend themselves well to today’s multi-platform landscape.

Modern brands live in lots of places. Social media accounts, digital ads, and apps add a new dimension to the world of storefronts, websites, and print. That increased exposure, along with the forum for superficial nitpicking that the internet provides, has made consumers—and brands themselves—care more about branding than ever before. Vit pinpoints mainstream interest in corporate identity back to 2010. That year, the Gap unveiled a new logo: a black Helvetica wordmark, layered over a gradient blue box on the upper-right-hand corner. Since 1986, the retailer’s logo had been a narrow, white wordmark in a navy blue square. It was a big, unpopular change. The backlash, which played out via customer comments on Twitter and Facebook, garnered media attention. The sites that covered the debacle read like a who’s who of digital media circa 2010: Slate and Refinery29 blogged about it. Gap chairman Bob Fisher posted a response on Huffington Post. A week later, the company reverted to its former logo. While brands have long known that consumers are wont to grow attached to visual identities, Gap’s snafu showed that in the digital age, every change is subject to mass approval.

03
Colt 45’s rebrand.

While in recent decades legacy brands attempted to use design as a way to communicate their immediate relevance, the tide seems to be shifting toward visuals that convey a more timeless presence. Put another way, established brands have always had the advantage of age, but it’s only recently that they’ve started to embrace it. But is the recent spate of nostalgic rebrands simply a trend, or is it indicative of a larger shift in corporate identity among older brands? After all, zhushing up a logo from the last century is a power move that’s not available to venture-funded competition.

Most brands launching today believe that establishing an emotional connection is essential to their success. Older brands can do this simply by reminding consumers how long they’ve been around. A page from ABC’s recent internal “brand evolution” guide reads: “We have something every brand dreams of: an iconic logo. Since being crafted by the legendary designer Paul Rand in 1962, our logo has experienced many different treatments and variations as tastes and trends change—from glossy and shiny to sleek and sophisticated. Now, almost 60 years later, we’re taking this opportunity to return to our roots—redrawing, simplifying and strengthening ABC.”

Logo featuring ABC on a blurred black and white background
04
ABC’s rebrand.

Creating a connection with the past, if not your past, is also particularly appealing for up-and-coming brands that need to rationalize their existence in a market that feels like it’s expanding at an exponential rate. So says independent designer Elizabeth Goodspeed. More and more, “the brand is the story.” Being able to tie that story to something larger than a set of products or services imparts significance into otherwise redundant offerings. Goodspeed says her work has always been “nostalgia influenced,” but she’s found that inclination has been especially in demand as of late. “There were a couple years where everyone was like, ‘This is too retro,’” and now, she says, “I’m getting told, ‘It’s not retro enough.’” Goodspeed says that a vintage-inspired brand identity lends credibility, especially to new companies. “It feels counter-DTC, which often gets associated with low quality. So being able to say, ‘No, no, it’s craftsmanship, it’s heritage,’ gives it that sort of oomph.”

The prospect of what’s to come is seldom as comforting as the memory of what’s past. In future-oriented design, a sense of familiarity is replaced by possibility. But these days, branding that evokes the past seems like a surer route to a positive emotional connection than gesturing toward an amorphous future. In 2022, we can look forward to more looking backward

Feature Image Credit: Illustration by Beatrice Sala

By Rachel del Valle

Sourced from AGA Eye on Design

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Branding Is More Than an Accessory: It’s the Foundation of Any Business

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Developing a strong brand is crucial to a business’s success. You run the risk of losing your company’s identity without a branding strategy.

Your brand identity is the mortar that holds your brand together. Consistent branding is key to creating a brand that is memorable and easily recognizable to customers. Effective branding involves sculpting a brand identity that carries through across all of your marketing platforms and consumer touchpoints. Everything from graphic design to content development, web design to email signatures should subscribe to your brand identity. That way, from first to last impressions, your customers will know exactly who you are as a brand.

Why is branding necessary?

Branding isn’t just an accessory: It’s foundational to business. Consistent branding generates memorable, lasting impressions.

Take Airbnb, for example. The popular holiday-home hosting and rental service has defined a space for itself in the travel and tourism market with monumental success. Airbnb’s branding is consistent and ethos-driven. A winning combination.

Everything from imagery to content promotes active living, adventure and limitless possibility for everyone from beginners to seasoned travellers. Airbnb is recognizable, accessible, consistent, contemporary and oozing personality.

Everything contained in your brand book from logo design to value prepositions should communicate who you are, what you do and your fundamental brand personality to the customers who encounter your business. A successful and memorable brand image is one of the best ways to differentiate yourself from the competition and ensure that customers come knocking on your door.

Brand-guide creation is the first place to start. One of the best things you can do to create and maintain a consistent brand identity is to create a brand book. Here at Valux we help businesses establish robust brands with a comprehensive brand-building process covering everything from digital marketing to public relations and integrated sales.

Brand opportunities versus challenges

Branding is an opening to so many business opportunities.

A robust brand strategy will help you:

Establish your brand as a credible market leader

Building customer trust is a natural by-product of great branding. Unified branding establishes a business’s credibility in the market. In turn, this tends to increase market receptiveness and brand loyalty in the process. Consistent marketing messaging that delivers on its promises shows customers what they can expect from your businesses.

Look professional and trustworthy to prospective customers

Consistent brand imagery and messaging makes a business look professional. The best way to adhere to a unified branding strategy is to create a set of branding guidelines (a.k.a a brand book). Your brand book will contain key criteria including brand name, story, ethos, logos, icons, fonts, colour schemes and imagery.

Increase customer loyalty and customer referrals

If customers resonate with your brand ethos and story, then they are more likely to buy. What’s more, they’re more likely to buy again and again, and they might even tell their friends and colleagues to check out your business too. Great branding is a recipe for increased sales, customer loyalty and referrals. Strong and consistent messaging is the key to attracting a loyal customer base.

Stand out in competitive markets and industries

Branding gives every business the opportunity to stand out from its competitors. As a business, you can use your branding strategy to differentiate yourself from those around you. That could be by creating a striking image that immediately speaks of your business or tailoring your band messaging in a way that speaks directly to your target personas.

However, successful branding does not come without its challenges. Branding isn’t something that just happens. Maintaining brand relevance requires a consolidated effort. Your branding must be synergistic and respond quickly to market fluctuations.

Responding quickly to social, economic and political changes and trends improves customer perceptions of an organization. Take Nike, for example. In 2020, Nike took a clear stand against racism and voiced its support for the BLM movement.

The most successful brands don’t just build their branding outwardly but inwardly too. Nurturing your brand internally is imperative for a successful, integrated marketing campaign. Your people should be as invested in your brand identity as your customers.

And Nike did just this. Following on from the company’s campaign, Nike’s Chief Executive John Donahoe demonstrated that his organization’s commitment to the cause went beyond just “hot air” and virtue signalling by implementing internal changes to nurture a culture of anti-racism throughout the company. Donahoe pledged to commit $40 million to support black communities and fight systemic racism.

Clear and consistent branding is a must for all businesses. A concerted effort towards improving your branding strategy will help you stand out from the competition and gain industry credibility, consumer trust and loyalty. In today’s fast-moving consumer ecosystem, the ability to maintain an ethos-driven, authentic and timely brand image is imperative.

By

Entrepreneur Leadership Network Contributor

Jessica Wong is a digital marketing expert with more than 18 years of success driving bottom-line results for clients through innovative programs aligned with emerging strategies. She is the founder and CEO of Valux Digital.

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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Branding 101: Design Elements, Examples, and Everything in Between

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Getting your colours right, having a clean typeface, and everything else you have heard about branding is probably, mostly correct.

However, this is where many entrepreneurs and brand designers fall short: aligning everything to form an identity. There is a difference between creating a memorable logo or colour palette and the concept of Brand Design – the intersection of ‘Branding’ and ‘Brand Identity.’

Brand Design is what bridges the elements of a brand with the way it is perceived in the market – its true meaning among consumers. Let’s take a closer look at branding 101 and these various definitions.

Brand Identity vs Branding vs Brand Design

Branding

The concept of branding is more than just a logo or colour palette – it’s a sum of all those parts and more. Branding is an ingenious collaboration of all the components: logo, tagline, typography, colour palette, website design, and visual communication tools, that form a recognizable depiction of your business.

Brand Identity

One of the best and closest definitions of a brand identity is given by Marty Neumeier in his book The Brand Gap.

“A brand identity is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company. You can’t control the process but you can influence it”.

It is all about what your target market thinks of you, which is based on your branding efforts. You need to be authentic with your branding efforts and strategies; in order to grow in the long run in today’s competitive and ever-growing world, it is important to stand your ground and connect with your audience.

Brand Design

As discussed, brand design is the common ground that connects brand identity to branding and leaves an impression of a brand in the minds of the respective target audience. It represents the holistic personality of the brand.

In order to create an effective, unique, and consistent brand identity, it is essential to lock in the basics of brand design elements which will be used in all the components of your brand, such as a logo, website, billboards, social media pages, etc.

Elements of brand design

You have likely come across phrases such as ‘less is more,’ ‘be unique,’ ‘design to be memorable,’ and many more. While following these is certainly a great idea, it all boils down to brand design. The more well-thought-out and assembled the elements of brand design are, the better all design decisions will be. Eventually, this will lead to a better brand identity.

Elements-Of-Brand-Design

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Logo

Of course, this is one of the most obvious and known design elements; even confused as the brand identity itself (which, of course, is not true). Be that as it may, with logos being the foremost of brand identifiers, it is important to be highly attentive when it comes to designing your logo.

Typography

When it comes to typography, also known as font styles, I would suggest you select the main font – this could be the font you use for your logo or major headings – and one or two secondary fonts. This may not seem as crucial, but if you want to set the style of your brand from scratch, it’s important.

Colour Palette

As typography sets the style and tone of your brand, the colour palette is what sets the overall mood of your brand and its graphics. In order to get this right, it is important to understand how different colours have different effects on people. After a bit of research concerning colour psychology, you can come up with a colour combination that aligns with other brand design elements.

Photography

Now, this may seem a bit out of the ordinary, but integrating a photography style with your brand can bring out excellent results. After all, photography is a bit more real than all others. Therefore, when it comes to making your target customers feel associated with your brand, this is quite an underutilized design element.

Iconography

This is by far the most flexible brand design element. From an icon of a gaming console to an arrow, there are generic icons for numerous things. Selecting a style of icon to be used specifically for your brand is an extra mile that many brands don’t take. One of the best examples to prove this are Apple products, from its laptops’ keyboards to its different set of stickers and symbols, the brand shows that it doesn’t shy away from going all unique while being relevant.

Illustration

This is not for everyone. Not that it cannot work for everyone, but most brands go with either an illustrations style or photography style. Having said that, illustrations have been acing design elements recently, especially when it comes to the IT, entertainment, clothing, health, and FMCG industries.

Audio and Video

As people are experiencing brands in different ways, which is changing faster than we notice, exploring audio and video as visual communication tools can hardly go wrong. Elements such as podcasts and YouTube videos are only going to be increasingly important from here, but it is also important to know when is the right time to get on board with this. As these are capital-intensive strategies, I would suggest keeping these at a medium on your priority list.

Pattern

More often than not, we interchange the meaning of patterns and textures with each other – somewhat, at least. Consequently, we presume that pattern plays an important role in design only when a product is involved. Nevertheless, this is one of the most flexible brand design elements.

Motion and Animation

With the digitization of the world, experiences, and branding strategies themselves, there has been an unbelievable growth in brands getting online. The more they focus on the online presence, the more interactive websites and applications tend to be. Besides websites and applications, there are several other opportunities for brands to add animation; these may range anywhere from animated characters to the use of motion graphics for your logo design in your videos.

While the above-mentioned elements of brand design are all about tangible aspects of your brand, it is not all that encompasses brand identity. You should consider brand positioning all throughout your brand design decisions.

Some questions to help you address the positioning of your brand:

  • Which unique market do you dominate (or plan to dominate)?
  • How are you better than your competitors? (Answer this positively by understanding and communicating what you bring to the table that is exclusively associated with your brand)
  • What are the benefits of your products and services?
  • Is there is any proof to your claims to increase credibility?

To conclude

There are a few things that you need to know before diving into brand design:

  • It is the powerhouse of your brand. While quality, marketing mix, and all other aspects are important, your target customers will never care unless it feels right to them. With well-structured brand design, you can lay out your brand identity to your customers, and welcome them instead of vigorously advertising.
  • Storytelling never gets old. From ancient wall scribbling to today’s storyboards, stories are the most engaging and effective manner to represent your brand. With the help of all brand design elements, you can tell your brand story, your customers’ stories, your opinions, and everything else to be more inclusive of your target audience.

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Guest author: Manas Chowdhury is a Digital Marketing enthusiast with a PG in Economics and a specialization in Finance. He is an entrepreneur who has a keen interest in stocks, bullions, gaming, and blockchain technology. While he runs his own startup, he also enjoys writing on a variety of topics. Being a philanthropist, he is also involved in various activities contributing to the betterment of the environment and society. You can connect with Manas on LinkedIn.

Sourced from Jeffbullas.com

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