What’s in a brand? Everything you need!

 Branding is product or corporate identity. It can be so effective that the name or image of a brand literally goes into the language. Good branding is the marketing equivalent of search engine optimization, making a product or business highly visible. If you think a little about the brands you know best, you’ll also recognize how effective branding is as a memory trigger.

The instant information you have about brands is a “recognition” mechanism, and it’s extremely important to businesses. The “recognition effect” is the core value of branding, and it’s as valuable as real money in terms of market reach.

Typical “instant recognition” brand images include:

Coca Cola- The world’s most famous brand, instantly recognized all over the world.

McDonalds- The Golden Arches of the big M are now universal.

Kangaroos- The image of Australia

The Apple logo

Google

Kellogg

As you can see, these brands are so recognizable that they also attract instant attention. This is actually just part of the branding process.

The results of effective branding are:

Knowing the brand means that consumers are more likely to pay attention to it when a new product or service is released.

Brands usually attract repeat business.

Brands give distributors, retailers, and service providers customers. If the local shop advertises Coca Cola, it’s a selling point for the business.

Brand mechanisms

Brands are designed to be conspicuous. The mechanics of brand design are very straightforward, but they often produce some great design concepts. The consumer brands typically use contrast, shape and colours to be as visible as possible.

Brand designs are supposed to be as unique and individual as possible. If you have a look a the major brands in particular, you’ll notice that the brand images and logos are quite unmistakable, and couldn’t possibly be confused with any other brand.

The brand designs are market researched to get consumer responses. In most cases several alternate designs are compared and the preferred designs are chosen for the public image icon. This is very much part of brand creation, and is often the basis for total redesign of brand imagery and in some cases even the products themselves.

Branding is market identity

The brand, when it comes on the market, is the impact point of the product image. It’s important to recognize that market perception of the brand governs its performance. Brands are supported by promotions, but the brand identity is the functional image of the product, service or company. Many consumer brands, in fact, are entirely dependent on branding to differentiate themselves from their competitors. They’re often very similar products, and the only functional difference to the market is the branding.

So, branding really is everything to any product. It creates an identity, a name, and an image. This really is “SEO for consumers”, and brand names are among the most searched names online. The ad images are also the recognition points in online advertising.

The keys to a good brand are:

Individuality

Strong visual presence

Recognition factors

Design values and attractiveness

Brands are literally the imagery of modern society, in phones, computers and most forms of technology. There really is no “Brand X”, for those reasons.

Guest post by James Fielding, a branding and brand management expert.