Creating a brand is a great thing. However, a good brand is certainly more than just a good name, logo design, or packaging. Branding is everything that encompasses your business and helps set it apart from the rest.
In practice, a brand doesn't even need to be an expensive logo or design. In a brand, there must be a value that is reflected in a tangible way. Although not visible, a good brand can be felt by someone through the products or services provided.
Understanding Branding in Business
The American Marketing Association defines a brand as "a name, term, design, symbol, or other feature that distinguishes the goods or services of one seller from another. The legal term for a brand is a trademark. A brand can identify a single item, a group of items, or all of the items from a seller. If used by companies, the preferred term is brand name.
According to Margie Clayman, branding is an encapsulation of a company's mission statement, purpose, and spirit expressed through the voice and aesthetics of the company. Meanwhile, defining a brand symbol as anything that leaves a mental picture of a brand's identity.
Reasons Why Brand is Important in Your Business
Branding has always been an important part of business, even more so with the presence of social media. New brands may appear every day so the strength of the brand becomes more important for a business to survive. Launching from a Forbes article, Kristopher Jones explained the importance of branding for a business.
1. Make your business more recognizable
One of the strong reasons for the importance of branding is to help the products you offer become more recognizable. If your business has a strong branding, people will naturally pay more attention to it. Branding can be a characteristic that customers recognize so that it lasts a long time in someone's mind.
When you create branding with elements like logos, colors, and visual elements, your business branding will be much more memorable. At first, one might only catch a glimpse. However, with the quality standing out positively, there is a high chance that consumers will not forget it and recommend it to others.
2. Branding can build trust
Trust from consumers is one of the most important things you can have as a business. However, this is not always easy to obtain. The image of a brand is something that is expected to emerge as an identical view of a business in any industry.
The image that emerges from a brand can help show potential customers that your business is well established and credible. Branding can be an investment made by a business to be able to continue to grow. Consumers will also recognize that you have worked hard to create a good brand.
3. Differentiate your business from competitors
If there is no branding applied to bottled drinking water products, consumers will buy any kind of drinking water. In plain view, drinking water also looks the same in the bottle packaging.
However, you must have entered the supermarket and looked for a brand of drinking water with the same brand. Whatever the reason you take the drinking water, that is the strength of a brand.
The steps a person takes when buying drinking water may not be because of the different taste. Yes, this arises from the 'promise' conveyed to consumers so that they will immediately choose the same product packaging upon arrival at the supermarket.
4. Attractive to employees
Branding also provides value within your company. When employees feel happy working for the company, they feel they will feel emotionally involved with something more than just work.
The emerging image of a company is also used to attract quality talent to your company. Employees who have worked for a long time will also stay and contribute well.
5. Branding brings loyal customers
Not only are you known, you want to keep customers coming back. With good branding, you can form a more human image. This can tell customers that you are more than just a company that does business entirely.
You can appeal to your customers' emotions through branding and make them feel more connected to your business. Branding allows you to build relationships with customers so that they will become loyal customers.
Like humans, each individual is unique and has something different to offer. This difference is also what distinguishes the brand according to the value described and marketed so that the company can excel in its industry.
The importance of a brand is reflected in the magnitude of the equity value of a brand. This is one of the most important assets in business. For this reason, prasmul eli strives to design a Strategic Brand Management Short Program so that you can form a strong brand.