If your marketing isn’t memorable, then you’ve got a problem. A key aspect of making a marketing campaign memorable, among many other things, is your brand.
Brand development is going to require you to think carefully about four of its most important aspects. There’s personality of your company which needs to be communicated through the branding. There’s the design itself. There’s the methods of use and deployment which will get the branding out there so people can actually start seeing it and recognizing it. There’s also the need to get elements of your brand protected from a legal standpoint to ensure that elements of it aren’t impinged upon by other companies or individuals.
Let’s take a quick look at these essential aspects of brand development.
Personality
When people think of personality, they tend to think of a set of human characteristics. After all, the root morpheme is “person”! So even business owners sometimes fail to see their business as something that should have a personality. You have to start seeing your brand personality as a semi-formal framework which will help you determine how the public are going to feel about your business. You need to start thinking about the emotional response you want to elicit if you want to get this right.
A more in-depth look at the ways in which you can discover and define the personality of your brand can be found at codemyviews.com. Will your business display a stern but simple character? Will it be more laid-back, fun, humorous? The product or service you’re selling, as well as your own personality, should be taken into account.
Design
Once you’ve got an idea of the business character you want to get across to potential customers, you then need to develop a visual aesthetic. This area of brand development is often all many business owners think about because it’s the one that has the biggest effect on a consumer. But one of the main reasons you need to think seriously about brand personality is because you need to know precisely what you need to get across through the design of your logo.
Of course, it’s not just the logo you need to think about. There’s the color scheme and dominating design shapes, which will help determine the design of your website or even your office. You can read more about expert web design at gravitatedesign.com. The design is a big part of what will make your branding stick in the minds of potential customers.
Getting it out there
So you have the brand personality and the visual aesthetic developed. Now you need to think about how you’re going to get it all out there. For many people, the immediate answer to this would be digital marketing. This is essential, of course, but just leaving it up to a digital marketing agency may not get you everything you can get from your branding. A lot of digital marketing uses plain text, which won’t get the visuals across in the manner in which you need it, unless you also make sure to have a focus on video adverts.
Branding is aided, in large part, by physical marketing and media. Creating tangible products that feature your branding is essential. Billboards and posters are probably obvious good examples. But even the design of the outside of your office or store can be a good opportunity for brand communication. Putting branding elements on your physical correspondence to customers and clients, either printed or via a stamp (you can read more about that at rubberstampsgsa.com) shouldn’t be underestimated. You should also consider mugs, USB sticks, lanyards, shirts… anything on which your branding elements can be printed!
Legalities
Going through all of this trouble and then neglecting to get your branding legally protected is a fool’s error, and a dire one at that! You shouldn’t just assume that evidence of you having first used branding elements you designed is going to be enough to legally protect you from others stealing those elements for their own use. Courts expect you to ensure that you’ve properly trademarked parts of your branding if you don’t want other people to use those elements for their own business advantage.
It’s essential that you read up on the process you need to go through in order to properly protect your brand. There’s a detailed article regarding this over at entrepreneur.com. Of course, there are certain situations in which the courts will probably side with you regardless. If an individual is using your branding in order to pretend to be a representative of your business, then this is fraud.