Having an identity and a persona of sorts is extremely critical for every brand in the market. It is something that defines their stature, values, and key principles. Often confused with branding, Brand Identity essentially means what a brand actually stands for and while it also encompasses the visual branding or marketing of a brand, it also accounts for the business management process in the larger picture.
Branding primarily includes marketing the brand, its ideology, its vision and values, products, and services in both the online and offline markets to bring forth a positive focus on the brand. It serves a number of purposes from increasing sales to promoting the right brand image and also, creating a good brand perception while engaging the specific target audience for whom the brand is apt.
While all this is highly beneficial to the outer image of a brand, it is not only restricted to the promotion and marketing as the internal business management process involving the different functionalities of a business have an equal role in impacting the brand image.
In order to create a strong brand for a business, it’s imperative for the leaders to stand together in harmony and maintain asynchrony that is evident in their decisions, actions, and all operational business executions and with which, their employees, investors, clients, and all other associates can get a glimpse of what the brand is intrinsical.
Managing a business is about taking into consideration all facets of the brand, right from smaller segments of scheduling daily basic operations to strategize the next product launch or financial handlings. Thus, it results in creating an unshakable brand identity that people can relate to for years altogether, giving the brand the much-needed stature to be a success.
Let’s have a look at some of the steps that a business enterprise needs to take both within its structure and surrounding its brand to create a perfect brand identity as a whole:
How to Build the Right Brand Identity?
The first and foremost requirement in the path to building an amiable, steady, and powerful brand is to analyze your business model and the brand made on it thoroughly from the inside-out. You should start by understanding the core of your brand, what is it made of, what are its chief offerings, what are its values, and most importantly, what exactly is its target audience.
All these are elementary and vital aspects to take into consideration in order to lay a firm base for the business to thrive onto the fame of a reliable brand in the market. While analyzing the brand ethos, a smart entrepreneur ought to take the opportunity to bank upon the strengths of the brand and highlight them as well as reinstating it in the mind of his team to drive them ahead correctly. And this clearly is dependent on an excellent business management process in place by the authorities for others to follow suit.
Next comes establishing the outcomes of your understanding loud and crystal clear and as specifically as possible to avoid a confusing brand identity coming to being for your customers. Do not undermine the power of online channels such as the social media platforms that possess the power to make or mar a brand almost overnight.
What you display is what you sell, making it engaging and relatable for your customers. While some brands believe in making an uproar in the digital media everywhere to announce their launches and offerings, there are others who prefer to create a niche and limit it to particular podiums to attain exclusivity for the brand.
This another call to be taken wisely in correspondence to the nature of your product/service as well as the level of outreach you wish to aim at. Utilizing social media like Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook is best done professionally with the right content and graphics being the key to success. And the underlying point remains to give us a clear, well-defined, and well-thought-out representation of what the brand stands for and for whom so as to derive a favorable perception and market standing.
And as imperative as it is to manage the outside factors, it all begins from the inside structuring and functioning of the business that ultimately reflects in the unification of the brand as a whole on the outside. The management needs to categorize the different roles formally as each one has its own significance and from thereon, once everything is in place, to concentrate on management on a more macro level.
Often the top leaders are unable to reach their full potential when it comes to building the brand identity while enhancing the core business strategy for their growth and development due to small and unimportant matters taking precedence. And that’s where an intelligently designed management system comes to aid for every leader to concentrate their energies on.
Good management is incomplete without planning and implementation of sound business strategies to regulate the business operations from time to time. And as it is aptly said, ‘Rome was not built in a day’ and so, brand identity is made over the years with several sound strategies put in place successfully to strengthen the brand standing.
A wise strategy must have a balanced approach, swiftly handling all business functionalities in a systematic manner. Particularly, it is important to invest time in building robust social media strategies including popular platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube or Instagram. As well as detailing the strategy to promote or market the brand on a physical or online PR mechanism, carefully selected and employed to mold to the brand’s favor, highlighting its USP. Again, the role of having the right management personnel in place for the purpose becomes supreme, which can make a big difference.
Last but in no way the least in the chain of events is to take a step back and carefully analyze the strategies implemented and the operations executed during a certain period of time so as to get a clear idea of success or failure of the strategies. While a strategy may be good at a given point in time, its impact and relevance can always vary at another time, depending on the altering inside and outside factors.
To be in the game, to be able to compete with the new and the old, and to find one’s niche, a brand needs to reflect and redefine itself with the changing circumstances in the industry. Brand Identity is way more than a statement or slogan or logo, it’s an amalgamation of the business values, its character, people, leaders, and its core at large. Thus, a unique perspective with a pinch of innovation and the latest trend-encompassing ideas can do wonders to uplift your brand’s stature.
Different Ways & Means to Build Brand Image/ Identity?
While creating awareness around your brand’s offerings and intrinsic features equals having an exclusive and fairly decent brand identity, it involves much more than that. Building a buzz around your brand, attracting the right audience, and engaging with them from time to time while making continuous efforts incorporating dynamic ideas to cater to their needs in the best possible fashion.
Regular engagements, brand promotions, and product marketing is the key to achieving this goal, and some of the ways and means that a brand can adopt in this advanced digital age to build their unique and powerful brand image/ identity are as follows:
· Online & Physical Advertising on Apt Platforms
· Social Media Marketing encompassing all major Social Media Platforms
· Relevant, Regular & Prominent Media Coverage
· Brand Promotional & Marketing Partnerships
· Dynamically Appealing & Engaging Visual Branding
· Concise & Precise Email Marketing through Swift Medium
· Factual, Closer to Reality yet Alluring Website Design and Content that says it all
· Appropriate & Central Retail or Office locations
· Regular Client Review Analysis & Conducting Customer Service Interactions Smartly
· Displaying Exclusivity & Stature of a Niche Brand via Purchases and Packing Materials
· Prestigious Industry Events Socialising and Networking
· Getting Connected & Published with the Right Publications
These are some of the prominent, equally easy, and equally complex ways and means to handle your brand identity strategically to not just be noticed around but be there at the right place and time in the perfect way that’s there to stay and dominate the market in the long-term.
How Right Management Adds to Improving Brand Identity?
While all the formulas and processes to getting that utopic brand identity in your segment have been more or less defined, it all boils down to how and in what way a brand embraces it and showcases it to represent itself to its associates and customers out there. Only the right transport business management that is clear-cut and precisely relevant and defined from the very beginning with comfortably categorized functionalities to accompany its brand, will put things into place for a brand to succeed.