Elements of effective branding

What makes your brand or organisation stand out? What will make customers pick you out from a crowded market place, locally and globally?  

There may be no magic wand that you can wave to stand out. However, effective branding will work just like magic.  

What is branding? 

Branding is the process of distinguishing your brand and its offering from that of the competition. Branding ensures consumers can identify and differentiate your products from other comparable products. 

Exterior customization is a great place to start. Brand elements such as a unique logo, brand colors and brand fonts make it possible for consumers to identify your campaigns and your products with ease. A combination of these elements and a great product or service is what ensures that your brand is at the top of your customers’ mind.  

Brand elements act as your silent marketers when it’s just the consumer and the product. Nevertheless, it takes more than a beautiful logo to get a customer to make a purchase. A logo may make you stand out, but ultimately it is the perceptions that the buyer has towards your brand that will drive the sale. 

The way you truly become distinguishable is by ensuring that consumers have a strong positive perception of your brand. Whatever opinions they have about your brand will influence their buying choice.

Brand is the sum total of how someone perceives a particular organization. Branding is about shaping that perception.

– Ashley Friedlein

Effective branding goes beyond the exterior. 

Elements of effective branding 

• Unique brand elements 
• Strategic Communication 
• Brand storytelling 
• Consistency 

Unique brand elements 

Unique brand elements make you intriguing. They pique the customers  interest,which leads them to discover more about your brand.

Avoid generic brand elements that have nothing special or different about them. Your elements should only be recognized as your own.

5 key brand elements you should invest in to stand out.

Strategic Communication 

Strategic communication is intentional, with well-crafted messages that are conveyed through the most suitable channels to the ideal audiences, and with the aim of achieving a desired long term effect.

It is how you control and stay ahead of all narratives and perceptions. Most importantly, you get to unfold what your brand is about on your own terms.

Strategic communication not only allows your audience to know what makes your brand unique but it also demonstrates an understanding of who your audience is.

How to develop strategic communications for your brand to influence perceptions and behaviour.

Brand storytelling 

Brand storytelling is the use of narratives to communicate what your brand is all about in an interesting and engaging way.

Storytelling goes beyond what you do. It is aimed at fostering deep and meaningful connections with your audience based on shared values, trust and assurance of value. 

The good thing about stories is that no one can copy them. Your brand has real and unique stories that you can use to connect deeply with your audience.

Stories have the power to provoke emotions, which greatly influences behaviour.

Here are three brands that have successfully used the power of storytelling to differentiate themselves from the competition.

Consistency 

For your desired identity to be registered in your customers mind, you must be consistent. 

Start by ensuring you consistently apply your brand elements, have a brand book or a visual identity system to guide the use of your elements. 

Secondly be consistent in your communication, ensure all your touch points are sending out harmonized messages to your audience. Finally let all your actions be in harmony with who you say you are as a brand. 

Consistency over time positions you as a reliable and trustworthy brand in the minds’ of your customers.

Products are made in a factory but brands are created in the mind.

– Walter Landor