A brand is state of mind, a mental image that consumers have based on experiences with a company and its products. Successful branding is a process to determine how you can create your own state of mind with customers, and how that can drive growth — the ultimate reason for a brand.

Branding as a topic today is filled with clichés and buzzwords that can sometimes trivialize the real advantage of having a good brand. A brand is more than just hype communicated with heavy spending on advertising and promotion. That just creates awareness, which helps but being well known isn’t enough.

Creating desire

First step in setting-up a brand strategy focused on business growth is to create a brand that has the ability to turn need into desire. With strong brands, customers don’t just want to buy from you, they want to have a relationship with you.

Value proposition

A brand involves a focused strategy requiring action. It encompasses what you do and how you behave as an entire organization to create value for your customers beyond product and price. The business world today is highly competitive and relatively transparent, with greater access to information making it easier for customers to make comparisons. The value-added experiences a company provides to its customers — from service to delivery, or from customization to relationships — all are brought to focus and unified through the brand.

Customer-driven

Strong brands help simplify customer choice and guide prospects to your products. They are a powerful way of differentiating your company or products and building strong relationships with ever more demanding customers. This is more critical today as the market has become increasingly customer-driven, and the demand economy is predicated more on customer needs than manufacturing capabilities.

In fact, the branding process should start by assessing your customers, not your products. By fully understanding your customers, you can make your brand more relevant and valuable to them.

Branding also gives you a better opportunity to segment customers into higher-value opportunities that might be more receptive to your brand message. The more successful you are at adding value for customers, the greater your ability will be to move decision making away from price, and to charge potentially higher prices.

Growth strategy

Above all else, branding should help a company gain more customers, make customers more loyal, and impel them to recommend you to others. It should increase sales over the long term.

Branding is a corporate strategy, not a marketing initiative. It has to be managed daily to be effective, and must be sustained to create long-term value. Creating, developing and maintaining a strong brand requires focus, commitment, and passion throughout the organization.

A strong brand requires:

• Understanding of customers needs, wants, behavior
• Commitment from the top to make the brand a corporate strategy
• Focus of the entire organization on building and sustaining the brand
• Consistency of the brand story across all customer touchpoints
• Passion of all employees to believe in the brand and support it daily