As a branding agency, we believe there are far more than three benefits to branding. But at the core, most of those explanations can be categorized under one of these three reasons:
Branding differentiates you from your competitors.
Branding builds familiarity and trusts with your customers, clients, and future employees.
Branding provides a guide to you AND your team when it comes to creating content and strategies.
1. Branding differentiates you from your competitors
Branding is all about telling the world who you are as a business. And in order to do this, you need for people to know that you are in fact a different business than your competitors. We’ve all been on websites or social media and suddenly getting déjà vu, unsure if we’ve seen this business before or if it was just one of their competitors. Not ideal.
Strong branding should distinguish you clearly from your competitors and it will be done in two main ways.
Your visual identity literally separates you from your competitors when it comes to how you look.
Your logos, colors, fonts, brand assets, photo direction; all of this will help potential customers and clients see that you are different. Your visual identity should also speak to the customers for whom you are solving a problem. This means that if you are business that is helping retirees learn GenZ slang to better communicate with their grandkids, your visual identity should speak to those retirees.
Your brand is also how you communicate the problem you are solving and why.
This means that you are explaining why your solution to the problem is different than how your competitors are solving the problem (we call this your core differentiators). This could be your technology, your processes, your target audience, your pricing model, etc.
2. Consistency builds trust and familiarity
Consistency builds familiarity and familiarity builds trust. Think of when you order a product from a business you’ve never heard of online. You’re likely to spend a bit of extra due diligence to understand whether or not what you’re being advertised is actually what you are going to get.
This might mean you might read deeper into reviews, you might go to their social media to see the comments or see if anyone you know already follows them. You may even seek out additional forums or websites such as Wirecutter or Reddit to see what others have to say. The point is, you are unfamiliar with the brand so you don’t have any reason to trust them. The brand has to work extra hard to build that trust. Now imagine if every platform you visit they have a slightly different logo, different colors, different photography styles, your likelihood of trusting them drops to almost 0%.
In contrast, a brand that you’ve heard of time and time again, you are far less likely to do this due diligence. Maybe you personally have never purchased something from Patagonia or Chewy, but you’ve heard of them enough to have a built-in trust that what you’re going to get is what you ordered.
Strong (read consistent) branding does that on a more localized scale. Every customer touchpoint is an opportunity to build familiarity which in turn builds trust.
3. Provides guides and guidance for your team
As your business grows, the number of people who touches your brand will also grow. This may be a social media manager creating new content for your different social media channels, or a HR person writing up your employee manual. In order for these individuals to be able to create the content required to run your business, they will need to know how to talk about what you do, how you do it, why you exist, and format it in a way that actually looks like the rest of your content.
Finally, establishing a clear brand for your business provides a guide for your team to begin to make decisions, build strategies, and offer recommendations in ways that move your business forward. A strong brand lets team members know what is and isn’t within the boundaries of your organization. This could be a new internal initiative, marketing campaign, sales strategy, or even distribution channel that hasn’t been tapped. Your brand offers guardrails to you and your team to ensure you're distinguishing yourself from your competitors, staying consistent, and ultimately growing.
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Interested in building your business's brand foundation? Schedule a discovery meeting or contact us at hello@twolipscreative.com
About The Author
Olivia Wisden is the Founder + CEO of TwoLips Creative. She has worked with dozens of brands over the years ranging from city initiatives to product launches and beyond. When she’s not fan-girling over the design team’s illustrations she can probably be found reading a novel or attending a boxing class.