What is Branding?

Business Dictionary.com defines branding as:

“The process involved in creating a unique name and image for a product in the consumers’ mind, mainly through advertising campaigns with a consistent theme. Branding aims to establish a significant and differentiated presence in the market that attracts and retains loyal customers.

Read more: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/branding.html”
In simpler terms, it’s everything that might influence your buyer. That starts with visuals and in the case of masterminds like Kanye West, music and apparel.

How does it help you?

Picture this:
You’re at the store, and you pick up two cereal box, one has Tony the Tiger and the other one has the words “Cereal” all around and nothing else. Which one would you most likely pick? The one that you’ve seen thousands of commercials for and your friends eat, or the one that literally just says “Cereal”?
This is a question of branding, not pricing.
In most cases, Tony the Tiger will win, because it’s much more present in the customer’s brain than the competitor. That is good branding, everything revolves around the story that Tony the Tiger conveys. Ask yourself, does your business convey a story? If the answer is no. Then you have no branding, and you need some help because you are loosing a huge amount of revenue.
To give you a quick overview of this, let me take you back to the numbers we were pooling before we updated our branding.

Before Branding:
$856
After Branding:
$1549

As you can see there was roughly a 55% increase. Branding permitted us to improve our sales by giving a more focused look into what our business is all about; it gave us a name, a look, a voice. It helped focus our pricing, our client base and even cement our credibility. This move landed us our first big time client, which directly led to the increase of revenue. It’s not even the best branding, it was simply the beginning of what will become a wonderful, very profitable journey.

How do you start?

Branding will be with you for the rest of your business’ life. You can embrace it and mold it the way you want to or you can let it do what it wants and you will spend years wondering why you never made more money off your business.
Below are 3 things you can do today to improve your brand.
1- Make a business plan, there is no question. You need a direction, whether you are building a sofa or painting a painting, you need a plan. You need to know what you are going to be making in order to make it, and you can’t run a successful business if you don’t have a plan. There are plenty of sites that will help you build a business plan, but always keep in mind that if you have never done a business plan. This will be not be your magnum opus, this is the first of many plans but this one is the most important because it will help you understand what you are selling and why you are selling. Without this you cannot build a business, much less a brand.
2- Get a logo. Commission an artist or design it yourself, but without a face you can’t have a mouth to produce a voice. The logo is the face of your business. Treat it like such, do some proper research and come up with as many ideas as possible, then narrow it down by eliminating the good from the great.
3- Get a color palette. The GameGrumps have their orange and yellows. Burger King is red, yellow, orange, blue. Google Chrome is blue, green, yellow, red. The world is a colorful one, and a black and white logo can only do so much for you. Color is attractive and it can carry all sorts of emotions. Your business is much like a person, it will have opinions and ideas, that will go according to the plan you had set-out. If you stick to black and white, you will not be able to express everything that your brand should express.
Experiment with taking pictures and finding out their color schemes in Photoshop, or by driving around and noticing the distinct colors that business have. It doesn’t have to be perfect, your brand will evolve along with your business. Nothing is set in stop.

Hope you enjoyed this blogpost. Do you think we did a good job covering this topic? What could we have done to make it better?
Antonio (MabsArts)