What makes your business unique? Is it a specially-designed logo? An unusual core value? Strong relationships between employees and clientele? These factors, alongside many more, are applicable to the brand of your business. If you have not yet established a specific brand, it’s important to do so. Read on to learn more about brands and how they can boost your business.
What is a Brand?
A business brand is an amalgamation of all elements contributing to your business’s voice and personality. This includes elements as simple as the color scheme for your logo, or as broad as your methods of customer interaction. All of these factors combine and influence how customers, stakeholders, and the larger community view your business. But what exactly makes branding so essential, and how do these factors influence your business strategy?
Branding Makes Businesses Unique and Recognizable
Consider the logos for FedEx, Volkswagon, and Subway. Their combinations of fonts, colors, and iconography are easy to recognize and can trigger immediate responses, even in those who have not used the companies’ services or products. A brand can be a means of helping your business stand out from the rest, not in the least because it promotes recognition, which can help customers and clients feel more comfortable approaching you. By gaining recognition, and in turn customer loyalty, businesses may see increases in revenues, market share, and profitability. This takes some marketing stress away from your business strategy, allowing you to focus on expanding your efforts instead of simply developing them.
Branding Offers Internal Benefits
Entrepreneurs, leaders, and founders are the visionaries of a business, responsible for translating a single concept to multiple people in multiple ways. A brand adds to this vision and helps continue translating it through every internal and external interaction, every meeting, and every email and phone call. In this regard, brands provide motivation and direction for employees, as it sets common goals and values for success, as well as a common voice for interactions. Since business strategies consider internal benefits for employees, and business strategies are developed in part to communicate goals and big-picture concepts with said employees, it’s important to brand your internal facets in a way that is accessible and exciting.
Branding Influences Current and Prospective Employees
Part of a business’ brand is its employment brand, or the external notion of what it’s like to work for your company. Company culture, for instance, is one part of the brand, along with employee values and workplace standards. All of these elements mix together and can influence those looking for jobs as well as those who currently work for your company. A strong brand not only attracts people to an organization, but also helps to retain employees by offering unique perks and an interesting work environment. This way, you can continue to communicate your ever-evolving strategies clearly and concisely.