Your Brand: Identity, Image and Importance

Picture this: your business is doing well but your client base is plateauing. You are entering the precarious stage which dictates whether your business excels into a major leading brand, or sinks as another failed hopeful trying to squeeze into a saturated market. How do you ensure your business progresses into the former category?

You need to take a look at your brand. 

Have you ever stopped to consider how important brands are? How many are instantly recognisable? 

You don’t have to think when you enter the supermarket: you instantly reach for the item you need without looking because you recognise the colour instantly. It’s not until you’re home that you realise you have accidentally picked up a cheap imitation brand trying to absorb some of the success of the market leader.

Your goal should be brand awareness. Having a brand which is instantly recognisable and trusted in the public consciousness is invaluable to the longevity of a brand, keeps them at the top of the market whilst weakly marketed imitative competitors come and go. 

With effective brand awareness, browsing consumers can instantly identify that key aspect which makes your business unique.

We’re all aware of brand names which have become shorthand for the products themselves: we commonly refer to vacuum cleaners as “hoovers” after the brand, Hoover, founded in 1908. The most successful brands find themselves in the common vernacular, enduring in the public consciousness. They are familiar to all of us – they are trusted, long-lived brands which our parents, even grandparents bought from and trusted too. The longevity of a brand suggests quality.  

For some extremely effective brands, a single image or even a colour can evoke their name. A certain rich shade of purple instantly conjures the taste of milky British chocolate. You know the one I’m talking about.

You may think: it’s almost impossible to compete with these brands, established for over a century, firmly ingrained in our culture in an immeasurable way. But each major brand starts with a small business and lots of ambition. If you are willing to respond to your customers through your brand marketing, engage with their interests, you can build the foundations of a new leading brand in your respective market. 

As people, we gravitate towards the familiar. When torn between your brand and a competitor, you want customers to recall your recognisable brand and instantly reach for it. Having a brand name which rolls off the tongue or captures attention, which can easily be passed between friends and family, is vital for building brand awareness. And with that comes brand loyalty.

Brand awareness isn’t conjured out of thin air. It’s part of a sophisticated strategy developed by a business to differentiate them, to carve out a share in the market with room to grow. Once you’ve identified your target audience, have built a string of effective content (I’ve discussed the importance of this in a previous post, linked here), the success of your brand campaign dictates the success of your business. 

Investing time and effort into cultivating a concise and effective brand awareness campaign is like insuring your business for the future. Whatever happens to the market, or the economy at large, your brand will always be embedded in the mind of the public. 

Ready to produce that brand identity which secures your business in the market? Let’s get to work.

Emily
Founder @ Evolve Chelsea