With a few clicks or keystrokes, consumers find and select products with names they know and promises they trust. In this boundless marketplace, brands rule and no-name products barely survive.
✔ Brands build name awareness. For good reason, new businesses and products increasingly go by invented names instead of by known words. For one thing, more than three million U.S. trademarks are already registered, so any marketer who wants to protect a new name practically needs to create a never-before seen word in order to succeed. For another, 99 percent of all words in the English dictionary are already reserved as Internet addresses and are therefore unavailable to new marketers. As a result, most new offerings are launched under invented names, and invented names require strong and diligent brand development in order to achieve consumer awareness, recall, and meaning. (Chapter 7 is full of advice for naming your brand.)
✔ Brands increase the odds of business survival. New businesses and new products are being launched at an unprecedented pace. Only those that ride into the market on the strength of an established brand or those that are capable of building a brand name in a hurry can seize consumer awareness, understanding, and preference fast enough to survive.
Brands have been around for centuries, as the sidebar “The red-hot history of branding” explains. But they’ve never been more important – or more essential to business success – than they are today.
People confuse branding with designing a logo. Or they think branding is a matter of creating a great website, great ads, and consistently great marketing messages. But branding is way more than any of that.
Deciphering branding lingo
Following are some need-to-know terms:
✔ Brand: The essence and idea of what you stand for. Your brand starts with a vision and grows into a promise about who you are and what you stand for that gets reinforced every time people come in contact with any facet of your business or organization.
✔ Brand identity: The name and visual marks that present your brand, usually in the form of a logo, symbol, or unique typestyle, as well as all other identifying elements including colors, package shape, even sounds and smells associated with your brand.
✔ Brand image: The beliefs about what your brand is and what it stands for that exist in the customer’s mind as a result of all encounters, associations, and experiences with any aspect of your business or organization.
✔ Branding: The process of building positive perceptions in your customer’s mind by consistently presenting the vision and idea of your brand so others understand and believe what you stand for and the promise you invariably make and keep.
✔ Brand position: How your brand fits in with and relates to various other brands within your competitive market.
✔ Brand management: Controlling the presentation of your brand identity, message, and promise across your entire organization and through all communication channels, and protecting your brand identity against infringement or misuse.
✔ Brand equity: The value of your brand as an asset based on its qualities, reputation, recognition, and the demand, loyalty, and premium pricing it generates.
Armed with an understanding of the above terms, you can navigate branding conversations just fine. Plus, throughout this book we introduce other terms – brand message, brand promise, brand strategy, brand extension, brand revitalization, rebranding, and many others – that will be useful as you take specific branding steps. Use the index to beeline to other definitions.
Branding’s essential ingredient
Originally we titled this section “Branding’s essential ingredients.” Lucky for you, we changed the plural to a singular. Brands are built around four fundamentals: differentiation, relevance, esteem, and knowledge. But the magic ingredient that converts those fundamentals into a branding success story is consistency.
✔ If you bring consistency to your branding program, you build a brand that stands head and shoulders (no branding pun intended) above the others.
✔ If you have a clear and passionate vision about what you stand for and project messages to your target market that constantly reinforce how your offering is different and relevant, you build knowledge and, eventually, esteem.
✔ As a result of your consistency, you win out over businesses that shift with the wind, regardless of how beautifully they’ve polished their identities or their marketing materials.
Too many companies develop award-winning logos and marketing materials only to have their brand images go sideways when the customer has an actual brand experience. In Chapter 2 we make the analogy that treating branding like a skin-deep solution is like putting lipstick on a pig: False promises don’t work. Your brand must be an honest, accurate reflection of who you are.
Turn to Chapter 6 for assistance as you define your brand and put your desired brand image into words you can live up to. Then turn to Chapter 14 for help developing a brand experience that ensures consistent presentation of your brand through every single customer encounter.
Branding’s altered environment
What a difference a decade makes. Since 2006, when the first edition of Branding For Dummies hit bookshelves, the world in which brand-builders operate has undergone seismic shifts. Although the definition of what brands are and do remains unchanged, the expectations of today’s always-screen-connected consumers have vastly affected branding tactics. Here are the new realities:
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✔ Online search results make or break brand images. In the now-famous words of former WIRED Magazine editor Chris Anderson, your brand is what Google says it is. Before they meet you in person or consider a purchase of your products or services, people in ever-greater numbers check you out online. Their search results often form the first impressions of your brand. And even after making initial contact, they tune into and trust word-of mouth-comments and online rants, raves, and mentions more than they trust (or tune into) your marketer-generated communications. Your brand has to be visible, engaged, and interactive online to stay part of the dialog. Chapter 11 makes the job easier.
✔ You have only seconds to pull people to your brand, no matter the communication channel. Only good branding can turn your name and logo into a familiar face that wins a second glance, and only messages that reach out and grab interest can convert that interest to action. Make Chapter 12 your guide as you plan ads, promotions, and publicity efforts.
✔ Customers expect a consistent experience whether they’re encountering your brand online or in-person. They expect your brand to look, act, and deliver on the same promises whether they’re dealing with your website, social-media pages, brick-and-mortar location, products, promotions, or staff – before, during, or after the purchase. And they expect your online and offline locations to interact seamlessly, with web pages offering one-click phone contact and arrival directions