Corporate Branding Archives

BY CHRISTINE WETZLER, EDITED BY KARA MCINTYRE

Encouraging and supporting your employees in their personal branding efforts is not just a strategy for individual growth, but it’s also a forward-thinking business approach to elevate your company in a competitive market.

Key Takeaways

A total of 81% of consumers admitted that their trust in a brand significantly influences their purchasing decisions, with 77% preferring to buy from brands they follow on social media.
The reputation and credibility of a company’s CEO and employees sway the buying choices of 65% of consumers.
For a corporate brand to truly resonate and lead to tangible sales results, the personal brands within it need to be strong and clearly defined.

The intersection of personal branding and corporate success is increasingly apparent as we experience a revival of person-to-person connection. Traditionally, individual and corporate branding have been seen as separate entities, each with its strategies and goals, and at times, they may even appear to be in direct conflict. However, a significant shift is underway due to the growing demand for personalization.

Companies are finding that leveraging the individual brand strengths of their employees can achieve greater reach and awareness. A staggering 81% of consumers admit that their trust in a brand significantly influences their purchasing decisions, with 77% preferring to buy from brands they follow on social media.

The impact remains robust across both B2B and B2C sectors. Interestingly, the reputation and credibility of a company’s CEO and employees sway the buying choices of 65% of consumers. These statistics underscore a crucial point: Brand credibility plays a significant role in sales efforts. For a corporate brand to truly resonate and lead to tangible sales results, the personal brands within it need to be strong and clearly defined.

Having been immersed in communications since the late 1900s (and yes, I find it amusing to say that), I’ve witnessed many branding evolutions — from the advent of email to the rise of social media and, now, artificial intelligence. However, in my view, no technological advancement can ever replace meaningful human interaction; it only redefines what sales groups consider meaningful. You can use AI to generate leads, but if they aren’t the right fit or meaningful to your business, do they truly count? The key lies in a strong corporate brand that invites individuals to join in its journey.

There is a synergy between personal and corporate branding

The above concept isn’t new. We’ve all seen or worked with a “unicorn” employee at some point. What makes them a unicorn? Their individual brand. When employees establish strong personal brands, they bring authenticity and a human touch to the corporate narrative, making the company more relatable and trustworthy in the eyes of consumers.

This synergy not only enhances the company’s reputation but also drives engagement in the places where employees are active—be it in community events, on social media, or among their friends. Employees with robust personal brands naturally amplify the company’s visibility and influence. They become the ‘unicorns’ who direct qualified leads to your company. A LinkedIn social selling study even measured this phenomenon, finding that 92% of B2B customers are more willing to engage with sales reps who are recognized as industry thought leaders.

Encouraging personal brand development without losing control

Many businesses struggle with the idea of encouraging employees to amp up their personal brand, fearing it will diminish the quality of their messaging or they might lose control of their corporate story. Before I share a few tactical strategies to address this, I want to emphasize that your corporate brand must be solid and credible for this to be effective.

A strong corporate brand provides a stable backdrop against which individual employee brands can shine. It offers a cohesive narrative that aligns with the personal stories your employees are telling. Before you encourage your employees to engage in their own branding exercises, it is crucial to conduct some branding exercises at the corporate level. This ensures that your brand welcomes collaboration and instils a sense of pride in everyone associated with it.

You want all individuals to feel positive about being openly associated with your company. These characteristics are essential for personal branding efforts to be effective. Otherwise, you might end up helping individuals build their personal brands, only for them to take that strength to another company that is already well-positioned.

How to get the strongest individual brands without sacrificing consistency

The most fundamental way to maintain control of your corporate messaging while promoting individual branding efforts is to ensure a strong alignment between the company’s values and the personal values of your employees. Here’s how you can accomplish this without compromising the company’s branding efforts:

Define clear guidelines that outline how employees can align their branding efforts with the company’s values and objectives. This ensures consistency and prevents any potential conflicts or off-brand messaging. This is why it is important for you as a business to have your brand already developed — so you can communicate its characteristics clearly and provide guidance.

Offer training programs that help employees understand the best practices for social media and content creation, including workshops on writing, personal presentation and ethical considerations online. These can be both educational and fun, giving people permission and confidence to share your branding goals.

Encourage employees to become thought leaders in their respective fields. This can be facilitated through full support of speaking engagements, writing opportunities on industry blogs and participation in industry and online panel discussions. Thought leadership both boosts the individual’s brand and positively reflects on the company.

Highlight your employees’ achievements on your corporate channels. This will boost their personal brand and show that the company recognizes and values their contributions. One thing we have is an internal message board where examples of social posts are included with these announcements. We also send AI prompts to create social content when we ask people to share our content.

Regular monitoring and constructive feedback are essential to ensure that employees’ messaging remains aligned with the company’s brand identity. Part of our town hall team meetings focuses on the positive contributions individuals have made toward marketing. The feedback here should be consistent and mostly positive. If there is a need for redirection or negative feedback it should always be done privately and one-on-one.

Integrating personal branding into your business strategy creates a win-win scenario: Employees feel valued and empowered, which enhances their loyalty and productivity. For the company, this alignment between individual and corporate brands leads to increased trust and better relationships.

As the lines between personal and corporate branding continue to blur, companies that recognize and leverage the symbiotic relationship between personal and corporate brands will likely see the most significant growth and success. Indeed, at a minimum, they’ll encourage the curation of better relationships and more defined sales leads.

BY CHRISTINE WETZLER,

ENTREPRENEUR LEADERSHIP NETWORK® CONTRIBUTOR

President and Founder of Pietryla PR & Marketing

Christine Wetzler is a PR and marketing strategist who knows how to generate consistent, widespread media coverage as well as offer strategic digital insights to business owners. She knows how to accurately integrate public relations, social media and digital marketing to achieve desired outcomes.

EDITED BY KARA MCINTYRE

Sourced from Entrepreneur

By Dan Haverty

When it’s allergy season you ask for a “Kleenex” instead of tissue paper; you might enjoy a “Popsicle” on a hot summer day instead of an ice pop; and you “Google” something when you need to search the internet for information.

This is expert branding in action. Some companies have so successfully pushed their brands that the brand name itself has overtaken the generic term, as in the above cases.

Good branding is indispensable to the success of your business, and there are numerous benefits that come with it. Having an easily recognizable brand drives new business through word-of-mouth referrals while making it easier to roll out new products. It also helps build coherence within your company and attract the best talent to your open roles.

Keep reading to learn more about branding and the five biggest benefits for small and large businesses alike.

What Is the Purpose of Branding in Marketing?

It’s easy to conflate branding with other forms of marketing, but they aren’t exactly the same thing. Marketing is what you do to drive your products and services to potential customers, whereas branding is basically the way your company presents itself to the world.

Branding includes the obvious components of name, logo, colors and fonts, but it also includes your mission, values and motivations, creating an all-encompassing brand identity that, if done right, customers will readily associate with your company. This is key: You want your customers to feel something when they think of your company.

The main purpose of your brand strategy should be to differentiate you from your competitors and create brand equity, or commercial value derived strictly from the perception of the brand. Doing so builds trust and loyalty among your target market and puts you at the forefront of your potential customers’ minds when it’s time to buy.

Developing an easily identifiable tone and logo, aligning your values with those of your customers and evoking a strong emotional response at the sight and thought of your brand are all signs of a great branding strategy.

5 Benefits of Branding for Companies

1. Brand awareness: One of the strongest and most impactful benefits of high-quality branding is brand awareness. Customers who already trust your company and recognize your distinct color, logo or font style are far more likely to buy your product or service. In this way, brand awareness does much of the heavy lifting for you when it comes to selling your products or services.

2. Drives new business: Word-of-mouth referrals are still the tried-and-true way of driving new business. This is especially true for small businesses, 85% of whom report that word-of-mouth referrals were the best way to drive local business. When customers can quickly and easily recall a brand they use and trust, they’re much likelier to refer your company to their friends and family members.

3. Shared values build company coherence: Strong brand equity doesn’t just help strengthen your relationships with your customers and clients — it also helps build a clearer sense of mission and direction within your company that boosts coherence and ensures your employees are all working toward the same set of goals.

4. Easier to rollout new products: If you have a strong brand in place, much of the work of marketing and selling your products and services is already done. Once you’ve built up a level of trust among your customers, it’s far easier to convince them that your latest product is worth buying. Think about it: Apple doesn’t need to do a whole lot of convincing to generate interest in and sell the latest iPhone, right? That’s good branding at work.

5. Better job applicants: Customers want to buy from brands they know and trust, but the same is true for job seekers. Good branding can actually help you attract a larger and more talented pool of applicants to your open positions, ensuring that you’re hiring the best of the best.

The Main Types of Branding, With Examples

Visual Branding

The visual components of your brand are some of the most important — and ultimately attention-grabbing — features of your brand. A good visual brand strategy conveys your company’s personality and style to your audience through visual cues (i.e., are you easy going and laid back or serious and resourceful?). This helps them learn about you without having to dig too deeply.

Think Apple: Apple’s visual branding style is silvery, sleek, sharp and new, and this is evident in their stores, logos and, of course, their devices. You don’t need to know much about Apple to understand that it develops and sells some sort of cutting edge technology, based on its branding alone. And that’s exactly what good visual branding should do.

Social Media Branding

A huge proportion of social engagement and consumer activity today happens on social media, so it’s important that your company has a clean, consistent online presence across all social networks. Social media is one of the few places where attention is measured in mere seconds, so it’s important that users can identify your company in this short space of time.

Amazon’s Twitter presence should serve as a model for other companies. It operates dozens of different accounts for many of its products and services. While each account has its own distinct edge to it, there is a clear sense of continuity involving similar colors, tones, fonts and messaging threaded between each of them, all of which marks them as Amazon’s. The bottom line is users shouldn’t have to work hard to recognize that your social media account belongs to your company.

Corporate Branding

Corporate branding covers all elements of your company’s branding strategy, from marketing its products/services to ensuring that all digital touchpoints are in sync. At the end of the day, a customer should feel like they’re getting the same message from the same company no matter which part of your business they’re interacting with.

Nike stands at the top of the corporate branding world. Its mission to enhance physical performance through top-tier athletic attire permeates every section of its branding and marketing, from its motto “Just Do It” to its marketing materials, featuring athletes in the zone.

Don’t overlook the importance of branding. The right branding strategy can make or break a company, and it’s important to ensure you have a clearly defined brand that permeates across all of your products, services and touchpoints to ensure you’re front of mind when your customers are ready to buy. Doing this drives your company forward.

By Dan Haverty

Dan Haverty is a content writer at Brafton. Currently based in Boston, he also spent time living in Ireland and Washington, DC. When he isn’t writing, Dan enjoys reading, cooking and hiking, and he recently became an avid yoga practitioner.

Corporate Branding

Want to Know the Secret to Closing More Sales? 65% of Consumers Say They Will Buy If Your Company Does This.

Key Takeaways

There is a synergy between personal and corporate branding

Encouraging personal brand development without losing control