When you are going out of your way to brand your business, there are a number of possible routes you can take. Whichever you happen to go for, ultimately the desired outcome is going to be unchanged: to promote a certain way of understanding or looking at your company which you would like external parties to adopt. When branding is done right, it changes forever the way that people feel about a business, and this in turn can have a number of markedly positive effects on the way the business operates. Fortunately, there are many ways to approach branding, and this means that you can turn your own creative impulses towards making it work as well for your business as possible.
Bold
Something that we can all agree on is that bold branding tends to have a strong effect. When it is bold, it means first and foremost that people are much more likely to pay attention in the first place. This is arguably the most important step of all, so you can see why this might be necessary to achieve. Being bold is not always what you need to do, and branding is possible without boldness, but it is one particularly strong way to approach the difficult task of branding your business as positively and as effectively as possible, and for that reason alone it is worth considering.
Unique
If you can think of a branding method which is not done by many other businesses, or - even better - has never been achieved before, then you will probably find that this is a method which has a strong ongoing effect for your business. The more unique branding is, the better, as it is more likely to have an effect and stand out in the viewer’s mind. If you decide to advertise your business using custom Christmas sweaters in June, it just might be funny and unique enough to have a strongly positive effect. When you are branding, it pays to think big and to be as creative as you can.
Memorable
Memorability ensures that your branding actually has an ongoing effect, long past the time that it is actually witnessed first hand. The more memorable you make your brand image, the more likely it is that it will have some kind of an effect. However, memorability alone is not enough; you also need to make sure that you are doing everything you can to make the effect positive, otherwise all you are doing is promoting a negativity associated with your business and making it stick in people’s minds. Clearly, this is far from ideal, so avoid this situation at all costs if you can help it.
Daring
Finally, there are those few branding efforts which might be labelled as genuinely daring. These are those brands which shock the viewer in some way, and although this can be highly effective, it is always a gamble. It is worth testing out these types of brand image with focus groups first, just to be sure you don’t offend people.
Troy Lambert