Branding For Dummies
Overview
Discover how brands are created, managed, differentiated, leveraged, and licensed
Whether your business is large or small, global or local, this new edition of Branding For Dummies gives you the nuts and bolts to create, improve, and maintain a successful brand. It'll help you define your company's mission, the benefits and features of your products or services, what your customers and prospects already think of your brand, what qualities you want them to associate with your company, and so much more.
Packed with plain-English advice and step-by-step instructions, Branding For Dummies covers assembling a top-notch branding team, positioning your brand, handling advertising and promotions, avoiding blunders, and keeping your brand viable, visible, and healthy. Whether you're looking to develop a logo and tagline, manage and protect your brand, launch a brand marketing plan, fix a broken brand, make customers loyal brand champions—or anything in between—Branding For Dummies makes it fast and easy.
- Includes tips and cautionary advice on social media and its impact on personal and business branding programs
- Covers balancing personal and business brand development
- References some of the major brand crises—and how to avoid making the same mistakes
- Shows brand marketers how to create brands that match their employers' objectives while launching their own careers
If you're a business leader looking to set your brand up for the ultimate success, Branding For Dummies has you covered.
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About The Author
Bill Chiaravalle served as Creative Director with world-renowned brand strategy and design firm Landor Associates before founding Brand Navigation, which has been honored with numerous branding, design, and industry awards. Barbara Findlay Schenck is a nationally recognized marketing specialist and the author of several books, including Small Business Marketing Kit For Dummies.
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branding for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
A brand is so much more than a pretty logo. To win loyal customers, you need to develop a story that represents the quality and character of your organization or product. By then telling that story consistently across all channels and backing it up with exceptional customer service, you gain all the benefits (and profits) that come from being a trusted name in the marketplace.
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Some brands get off to great starts. Some are wobbly from the get-go. Others start well and then lose their way through lack of focus, discipline, and follow-through on brand strategies, brand promises, and reliably consistent brand experiences.
Thinking of branding as a quick fix
The mistake: When business is down, when customer interest ebbs, or when competition surges, otherwise cool-headed professionals begin to believe that a cosmetic fix will remedy all that ails the bottom line.
The best name, logo, ads, and efforts can’t compensate for a weak brand. But what’s a brand? And how do you build a strong one? These ten truths summarize the key points you have to know.
Branding starts with positioning
Positioning is the process of finding an unfulfilled want or need in the consumer’s mind and addressing it with a distinctively different offering.
Marketing
There’s a reason personal branding is a priority of the most successful people you know. Those who achieve their goals and ascend to the top of their fields benefit from highly regarded reputations — personal brands — that pave the way for their success.
You’re not making your personal goals
Personal branding is how you manage your reputation and interactions to develop positive images in the minds of those you want to influence.
Each year, Interbrand, a global branding consultancy, produces a ranking of the best global brands by value. The 2013 report concluded that the following brands were the most valuable in the world:
#1 Apple
#11 Mercedes-Benz
#2 Google
#12 BMW
#3 Coca-Cola
#13 Cisco
#4 IBM
#14 Disney
#5 Microsoft
#15 HP
#6 GE
#16 Gillette
#7 McDonald’s
#17 Louis Vuitton
#8 Samsung
#18 Oracle
#9 Intel
#19 Amazon
#10 Toyota
#20 Honda
To build even a fraction of the awareness, credibility, and reputation that these global brands share, instill your brand with the following ten traits.
By following a few simple rules, you can successfully brand your small business. As you plan, launch, and manage your branding program, remember and train others to remember these three branding rules:
Your brand is a promise that must be reinforced every time people come in contact with any facet of your organization.
The anonymous line “It’s never crowded on the extra mile” could have been written as a brand-building adage. The extra mile remains open territory for brand owners who are willing to double their service, triple their customer attention, quadruple their commitment to customized solutions, and build customer passion and brand value as a result.
Whether you communicate your brand message primarily in person, via social media, through publicity, or using online or traditional media ads, the following points are key to your success:
Develop an integrated marketing communication program by projecting one look, voice, core message, and brand promise across all communication channels.
Times change, businesses change, consumer interests change, culture changes, and sometimes brands need to change, too. If your brand faces one or more of the events in the following list your brand strength may be at risk and a brand update may be in order:
Major business changes
Major market changes
Ch
Naming your brand is by far the most challenging, momentous, and necessary phase in the process of branding. However, coming up with a good brand name can be tricky. The following list presents qualities of a strong brand name.
Reflects the character of the brand
Describes the brand’s offering
Creates a
The obvious benefit of a strong personal brand is the power of a positive, highly regarded reputation that precedes and paves the way for you whether you’re submitting a resume, asking for a date, making a sales call, leading a negotiation, offering a book for sale, contending for a plum keynote speech role, or prevailing in any other encounter.
A brand is so much more than a pretty logo. To win loyal customers, you need to develop a story that represents the quality and character of your organization or product. By then telling that story consistently across all channels and backing it up with exceptional customer service, you gain all the benefits (and profits) that come from being a trusted name in the marketplace.
Branding your business takes a significant amount of thought and effort. In order to get you started in the right direction, you will need to know some lingo. Following are some need-to-know terms:
Brand: The essence and idea of what you stand for. Your brand starts with a vision and grows into a promise about who you are and what you stand for that gets reinforced every time people come in contact with any facet of your business or organization.
You may be considering cobranding as a next move. Cobrands capitalize on the benefits of two compatible brands that present similarly desirable attributes to consumers with similar profiles. Cobranding advantages include:
Both brands benefit from the opportunity to appeal to a greater customer base than either may be able to reach on its own.
Great brands create consumer trust and emotional attachments. As a result, they foster relationships between consumers and products that lead to the following valuable benefits:
Premium pricing: Consumers pay more for branded items that they believe have higher value and lower risk than lesser-known alternatives.
Marketing
To get through the noise and clutter of today’s marketplace, you have to win a competitive position with your brand in consumer minds by presenting your offering as unique and different in a way that truly matters to those in your target market.
As you seek your position, consider the following points:
Define your target market.
Branding budgets run the gamut depending on whether you’re building a brand that will face only moderate competition in a small geographic region or a brand that aims to elbow out major competitors in the global marketplace. What’s more, budgets vary depending on whether you can reach your market through digital communications and social media or whether you need to invest in traditional media and marketing channels.
Marketing
Branding involves positioning and positioning involves focusing on not just what you do best but also on the market segment you serve best. Instead of trying to please all people in all ways, great brands position themselves to please some people — a defined market segment or market niche — in an extraordinary way because of the unique and meaningful attributes and experiences the brands offer.
Unless you’re building a personal brand, to paraphrase an old coaching adage, there’s no “I” in the branding team. Everyone in your organization plays an important role because your brand is reinforced or weakened every single time people come in contact with any facet of your organization.
The following tips help you when putting together a cohesive branding team:
Start by gaining buy-in from owners and leaders.
When your organization undergoes major change, most often your brand identity needs to undergo change as well. Otherwise, the core of your brand is out of alignment with the promise you make to your market, and a brand credibility crisis is likely to follow.
Likewise, when your market (the reason for your brand’s being) undergoes major change, your brand probably needs to change, too.
You need to build a brand for yourself and, if you own a business — even a one-person, part-time business located in a corner of your living room — you need to build a brand for your business as well. On top of that, you have to keep the strength of each brand in check with the other.
Keeping your personal and business brands in balance
Obviously, you want to enhance the image, visibility, credibility, and trust of brands, so this next sentence may surprise you: You have to be careful not to overdevelop your personal or your business brand.
Marketing
If you’re a solopreneur — a freelancer, a consultant, or a one-person business dynamo — building a personal brand, essential as it is, may not be enough to fuel your success. You might also want to turn your talents into a branded business that others know and trust.
This stands true especially if you want to compete with established businesses or if you have plans to grow your one-person business into a larger enterprise you can someday sell to a new owner.
The best brand owners make sure that salespeople are steeped in brand culture and armed with tools and scripts that help them share and inspire belief in the brand promise.
For example, Victoria’s Secret sells underwear, but salespeople know that what people are really buying is the idea of sexy romance. Harley Davidson sells motorcycles, but people are really buying association with an independent and rebellious spirit.
Brands are worth money. As proof, John Stuart, one of the 20th century’s great business leaders and a former CEO of the Quaker Oats Company, is quoted as saying, “If this business were split up, I would give you the land and bricks and mortar, and I would take the brands and trademarks, and I would fare better than you.
When it comes time to name your brand, get ready to invest some time and even some money, especially if your brand’s going to span a large market area, compete against major brand names, or support a major vision that will take decades to achieve and therefore will live long into the future.
Follow these steps:
List the attributes you want to reflect in your brand name.
Marketing
One of the best ways to arm yourself with the information you need to build your brand is to do some research on your customers. You may need to delve into the realm of interviews, surveys, and focus groups to get the information you need.
Just ask! Interviews and surveys
Before you take up your customer’s time with an interview or survey, be clear about what you want the research to accomplish.
A tagline, also called a slogan or motto, is a phrase that accompanies your brand name to quickly translate your positioning and brand statements into a few memorable words that provide an indication of your brand offerings, promise, and market position.
Discovering what makes a great tagline
Great taglines have a number of common attributes.
Marketing
Your brand statement, also called your brand definition, shrinks all your thoughts about your business mission, values, promise, and character into a concise statement that defines what you do, how you differ from all other similar solutions, and what you pledge to consistently deliver.
The brand statement you develop serves as the steering wheel for your branding strategy.
Your brand character is like the personality of your brand. Some brands are serious or even somber, and some are whimsical, fun, or playful. Some brands are youthful, and some are like silver-haired sages.
As a first step toward defining your brand character, ask yourself these questions:
What adjectives do those near and dear to your brand use to describe it?
Be the brand isn’t just talk; it’s the key to branding success. Brand strategy doesn’t move markets, but brand experience does. To build the brand you want, create an experience that reaffirms your promise during every encounter with your brand.
Test your brand experience
The first step in managing your brand experience is to experience your brand firsthand.
Marketing
Great brands generate sky-high customer enthusiasm that results in nothing short of brand passion. For good examples of the power of customer enthusiasm, consider the brands whose logos you see displayed on car windshields or whose labels are worn on the outside of clothes as badges of association and pride of ownership.
Your brand promise is the pledge upon which you build and stake your reputation. It’s what those who come into contact with you or your business can count on you to consistently deliver. It’s the expectation that you live up to every time people experience your brand, whether online or in person, or through advertising, promotions, buying experiences, service encounters, or any other form of contact.
Whether you do it on your own or call upon professional expertise, start developing your brand’s logo design by completing this worksheet so that you or your logo-design team members understand the brand your logo must reflect before the creative process begins.
Also, provide the following information to help guide creation of a logo that fits your brand and its market:
A description of your clientele.
In the same way that your brand name is the key that unlocks your brand image in the mind of consumers, your domain name (the string of characters web users type into a browser to reach your site, such as www.yourbrandname.com), and your social-media handles or monikers are the keys that unlock your brand online.
Most brands break not because markets change but because businesses change. Sometimes, names or logos need updating in order to keep pace with market realities, tastes, and cultural trends, but that kind of market-responsive change involves only a cosmetic update or name adjustment, not a brand overhaul.
Brand overhauls become necessary when business overhauls literally change a company’s heart and soul.
Marketing
When you’re creating a long-lasting marketing piece or launching a major branding campaign on which you’re pinning high expectations, think seriously about hiring pros to help you do the job right. Consider the following resources:
Free or almost-free resources: Media outlets and marketing suppliers such as printers, sign makers, and publishers often offer free or close-to-free design tools.
Marketing
The extent to which you protect your brand name legally depends on the size of your business, the size of your market area, and the vision you hold for your business. If you think that someday your brand will span state or national borders, you should put every form of legal protection in place, the sooner the better.
Your brand launch needs to happen in two phases: first an internal phase and then an external phase. Only after your internal team is on board and every customer touch point is in alignment and ready to deliver on your brand promise are you ready to take your brand outside your organization and to your target market.
As a brand builder, you will need to define the qualities, character, promise, core message, and essence of your brand. Every step is essential to your personal branding success as well. But personal brands benefit from the following additional considerations.
Map your starting point
Creating a personal brand begins with productive navel-gazing: What do you want people to believe and trust about you?
Brand licensing is one of the most widely used ways to extend a brand, largely because it allows a brand to achieve new product introductions without gearing up operationally for the task. Instead, the brand licenses its name to a manufacturer that takes on all the production and marketing efforts of the new product.
To ensure that your brand logo is presented consistently, create a set of usage guidelines to be followed by everyone who produces marketing materials for your business. Here is a logo-management outline to follow.
Creating standards and usage rules
As a first step toward controlling the presentation of your logo, create high-quality artwork and stipulate that your logo must be reproduced only from approved files.
Marketing
Most brand owners care about customer reviews and ratings, because what people say can make or break brand reputations. Take the following three steps to manage your presence on review sites and improve the odds that people say good things often enough to overshadow the occasional and likely inevitable one-star rating someone lobs your way.
When consumers repeatedly go out of their way, when they willingly pay a premium for the set of benefits they attribute to a branded product, and when they encourage others to do the same, they deliver an economic advantage — brand equity — to the brand owner.
To measure brand equity, most brand evaluators assess a brand’s ability to achieve premium pricing, lower costs, and business strength and growth.
If you want to build a successful brand, you need to consistently return to your business. Online or in-person, customers really don’t ask for that much. Here’s what they want:
They want to be served quickly, whether on the phone, at a physical location, or online.
They want their requests or problems addressed efficiently and effectively.
After you’ve decided on and approved your brand name, logo, and tagline, hold that information close to your vest while you put your brand through final tests and prepare it for unveiling.
You need to announce a complete brand story. If your new brand identity leaks out in bits and pieces, people within your organization are likely to think one of two things:
So what?
To build a brand or fine-tune the brand you have, you first need to know where you want to arrive. Which of the following brand functions best describe what you aim to achieve through branding?
Build awareness
Create an emotional connection
Convey distinguishing attributes
Gain credibility and trust
Achieve buyer preference
Some brand builders, especially those representing big, hugely funded companies or top-tier celebrities, aim above all else to establish and entrench top-of-mind awareness to ensure that the spotlight in their category shines brightly and fully in their brand’s direction.
Marketing
If you’re working on a brand for an already established offering, conduct research by meeting with customers face-to-face — at the reception desk, at the customer service window, in the complaints or returns line, and on the sales floor. Or place yourself in a position to watch customers in action. What attracts them?
It will be difficult to build your brand without the help of ads. People love to hate ads — especially ads that interrupt them with loud-volume, fast-talking messages that have nothing to do with them or their interests. On the flip side, people also love to watch, read, and talk about ads, evidenced by viewership of World Cup, Super Bowl, and award-ceremony ads and viral sharing of ads on social media.
In great print ads, the headline, copy, and design work together to grab attention, inspire interest, promote a brand promise, prompt the desired action, and advance the brand image. That’s a lot, but it’s not too much to ask. In fact, it’s what you need to demand out of every print ad you place.
To achieve success, each print ad must include three powerful components:
Headline
Copy
Design
Punching up headline power
Four out of every five print ad readers read only the headline, so write one that’s capable of targeting your prospects, grabbing attention, and making people want to read the rest of your story.
The quickest way to humanize your brand, short of meeting people face-to-face, is to share interesting, entertaining video featuring your brand leaders, staff, customers, experts, products, and behind-the-scene views that let others get to know your brand and the value it provides in your marketplace.
Videos also help improve your brand’s online visibility, because they provide content to post on YouTube, which is the second-largest search engine.
Marketing
Your brand is a reflection of what you stand for, so it has to align perfectly with the values and purpose of your business or organization. The following tips are helpful if you’re unclear about what you want your brand to stand for, the customers it serves, and what it promises.
This information is also great if you have a good sense of your vision and mission but haven’t yet committed anything to writing.
Marketing
You will need a positioning statement to build your brand. As soon as you’re clear about your customer profile, your place in your competitive environment, and the point of difference that sets you apart and provides customers a reason to buy from you and you alone, you’re ready to write your positioning statement.
To fortify your brand from attack by competitors and to protect it from damage resulting from misuse or mismanagement, be prepared to take these essential steps:
Register your brand name. The minute you decide on a name, reserve it as a domain name and as a username across social networks, becauase online real estate moves quickly.
In some ways, branding is like a construction project. Before you can build, you have to select and prepare the site. That’s the role positioning plays in the branding process. Following are the most common positioning approaches.
Fulfill an unaddressed interest or need
This is the find-an-itch-and-scratch-it approach.
Branding is the process that aligns the opinions people hold about your brand with the set of thoughts you want them believe and trust. As you develop your brand, follow these steps, in this order:
Determine what you’re branding and whether your brand will be your one and only or one of several brands in your organization.
There are several steps involved in building a brand from the essence of an idea to the esteem of a known and trusted offering. Take a look at what’s involved.
Credit: Barbara Findlay Schenck
Branding is a circular process that involves these actions:
Product definition:
You can brand products, services, businesses, people, or personalities.
Brands create consumer trust and emotional attachments. As a result, they foster relationships between consumers and products that withstand pricing wars, transcend offers from new competitors, and even overcome rare lapses in product or service excellence.
Great brands aren’t just known and trusted. They’re loved.
To brand or not to brand, that is the question. Or at least that’s the question that hangs in the air until people who aren’t quite sure about whether they really need a brand hear this truth: More than any other quality — even more than strong financial statements, great management, or terrific product or service ideas — brands are the key to winning long-term growth and success.
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