Well, having a great product or service is no longer enough, considering the level of engagement of the competition.
If you want to do better, consider the power of building a meaningful relationship, a unique positioning, and an enduring reputation.
And that’s where branding comes in handy the most.
But do not think it’s a cookie-cutter approach. Just as every business is unique, so too are the branding strategies that will propel it to success.
We would like to help you connect the dots of branding by exploring 7 major types of branding that you can leverage to meet each of your specific objectives.
Be it a new product initiative, an effort to create a strong corporate brand, or simply an attempt to hire the best available talent, grasping various branding techniques will help you base your decisions on facts, hence maximizing your brand’s capability.
Table Of Contents
Product Branding: Creating Iconic Products
How do you set apart your category-defining product when consumers are overwhelmed with similar products?
Well, product branding is the answer here. It is the process of establishing a brand for a specific product to be sold on the market and making it stand out from its competition.
Let’s take Apple’s iPhone or Nike’s sneakers Air Jordan as an example of their iconic products.
Such products have moved beyond being just functional items and have been appropriated as cultural phenomena with unique characteristics associated with them. That’s the magic of successful marketing of product branding and effective branding strategy implementation.
The key elements of creating any successful product branding must be as follows:
- Identifying Unique Selling Propositions (USPs): What makes your product stand out against your competitors? What solutions does it offer that similar products do not? Declaring the USPs and benefits of your product must be done clearly to cut across the overpopulated market.
- Designing Attention-grabbing Fresh Packaging: Packaging is the first tangible contact customers have with your product brand. It should be attractive, provide essential substance, and be in line with the brand.
- Coming Up with an Effective Product Name: The right product name, coupled with a catchy hook, can actually change the game when it comes to targeting people and making them remember.
- Telling a Captivating Story: The interaction you intend your customers to have with your product should be well outlined so that they comprehend and develop feelings towards it.
By strategically incorporating these elements, a product brand that meets the customer’s desires, advances patronage, and increases sales can easily be achieved.
Corporate Branding: Advertising The Company’s Image
Corporate or organizational branding is not limited to particular products or services.
It includes the overall impression of your business forging a powerful and unified brand that defines your goals, beliefs, and company culture.
Take a company like Google or Microsoft, for example. These businesses have developed strong corporate branding experience with emotions attached to it. Where Google stands for advanced technology and ease of use, Microsoft stands for dependability and efficiency.
Recommendation of corporate strategies involves:
- Determining Your Purpose and Values: What is the purpose of your company? And what values or aspects determine the activities and decisions of the undertaking? It is crucial to provide a mission and a set of values to your corporate brand from the start.
- Building an Encouraging Work Environment: Company employees must act as part of the brand. Create a pleasant, non-discriminatory workplace so that the employees will project the company’s values.
- Achieving Unified Visual Perception: The aspects of your visual identity, including the logo, color matter, typeface, and images, need to complement one another to reinforce the corporate image.
- Consistency in the Content and Communication Channels: Communication is essential in any brand’s advocacy, using tools such as the branded content, website and social networks, which in turn create the brand’s face and personality.
Concentrating on these aspects, you can create an effective organizational brand based on which customers, investors, and employees can be attracted.
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Employer Branding: Enlisting And Retaining The Best Employees
Does employer branding really matter?
Well, it does. It means branding your business in such a way that it attracts top-class employees showcasing your unique culture, values, and opportunities.
Google and Salesforce are leaders in terms of employer branding. They attract top talent by emphasizing employee well-being, career development, and a positive work environment.
Some of the elements related to employer branding are:
- Creating an Employee Value Proposition (EVP): Why do employees want to work for your company? What benefits, activities, or opportunities do you provide to your workers? For you to be able to hire the best people, you must be ready and able to explain your EVP.
- Communicating Company Culture and Values: Inform the favorable components of your company culture that will influence individuals to join. Highlight videos, photos, and written stories illustrating how employee values are lived out.
- Creating Opportunities for Growth: To look for achiever employees, training and mentor programs and other career advancement prospects will be appropriate.
- Positive Candidate Experience: Make sure every step a candidate goes through from the course of the application to the interview stage meets the tenets of the company on the satisfaction of its employees.
One of the most effective strategies for boosting employee morale and performance within an organization is investing in branding as an employer, which assists in attracting and retaining employees.
Personal Branding: Create a brand for yourself
The demand for personal branding has been rising, especially as social media and online presence have taken root.
This applies to not only business persons, freelancers, or corporate managers; building a personal brand is requisite; it improves reputation, helps in networking, and leads to new avenues.
Imagine a person like Gary Vaynerchuk or Oprah who has built a powerful brand that goes beyond their day jobs.
The following are some key features that embarking on personal branding includes:
- Defining your Niche and Expertise: What excites you the most? What do you have that is special? It is important to come up with a well-articulated niche and specialization as it will help create a brand for oneself.
- Building a Strong Online Presence: Develop a business website and social accounts that go beyond your core services or skills and include your personality. Provide quality content that relates to your audience and positions them as influencers in the respective industry.
- Networking and Engagement: Meet professional colleagues from your field, go to conferences, and, relatedly, effectively use the Internet to form a community.
If you pay attention to these factors, you can develop a great personal brand that will be helpful in looking for jobs and new endeavors.
Service Branding: Designing Experiences to Remember
For businesses that provide intangible services, service branding is necessary to obtain a competitive edge and build customer loyalty. It is not just what you provide but the whole positive experience people will associate with the service.
Think of companies like Airbnb or Uber. They have efficiently taken over your accommodation and transportation problem brand by focusing on customer experience, convenience, and reliability.
Some of the important features of service branding include:
- Delivering Quality Customer Care: Customer engagement is essential to brand experience. Your staff has to be active, solve potential issues, and go out of their way to delight customers.
- Establishing Trust and Fidelity: If you exceed customer expectations and fulfill all your customers’ promises, your customers will trust you, which in turn will make them loyal to you.
- Attracting the Customer’s Attention toward Your Brand: When customer-brand interactions occur, adding humor or ‘fun’ to service delivery enhances customer retention.
- Providing Supplementary Benefits: What aids in cutting the market for these firms is additional service superiority enhancement.
Focusing on these elements will help you create a service brand that captures attention and generates customer loyalty.
Nonprofit Branding: Uniting with the Funders and the Helpers
Branding presents its own challenges for non-profit organizations.
Such organizations have to earn the trust and goodwill of both the contributors and the volunteers and explain and demonstrate their roles and achievements.
Institutions like the Red Cross and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) have successfully handled this challenge, establishing strong non-profit brands in the desired areas vital to their audience.
Key elements of nonprofit branding include:
- Clearly Communicating your Mission and Values: Which specific social change do you seek to achieve and for which social demographic? What principles guide all your endeavors? It is essential to outline this not only for your audience but also towards potential donors and volunteers.
- Using Stories and Data to Share Success and Success itself: It is not enough to say the organization works; rather, explain how it works.
- Evoking Feeling and Affection: It is often said that pictures portray what words cannot. Therefore, using pictures to show the project’s impact will create the impact that is trying to be achieved.
- Maintaining Transparency and Accountability: It is important to say how much is accounted for and how the donors’ contributions are utilized.
It is critical to emphasize these elements to develop a nonprofit brand that will draw attention and support the organization’s objectives.
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Let’s Wrap Up
Branding is quite a complicated concept that comes with several different approaches that can be employed for different purposes.
It does not matter if a person wants to introduce a new product, create a well-respected image of an organization, or even recruit the best employees; mastering the characteristics of each branding strategy is key.
Making a decision on the favorable branding strategy for the given goals and market segment results in a strong brand identity that satisfies customers and increases sales revenue.
Are you ready to take your brand to the next level with the best branding professionals?