Whether you are trying to market a company or product online or you simply want to understand how the marketplace around you works, the importance of understanding brand marketing cannot be overstated.
As a small business owner this is one aspect that can help you dominate your marketplace online.
Below you will find some branding guidelines to help you get started.
In a highly competitive world that’s growing even more competitive with every year that e-commerce becomes more and more trusted by consumers, not knowing how to brand and not knowing how another brand may be influencing you and your website can be a very detrimental thing to your online business.
Understanding Branding The Relationship
The various approaches to branding are more or less all related.
The scientific and psychological concepts behind the idea remains consistent throughout the varying approaches, it’s merely the strategy related to each approach that differs.
Companies choose what approach they want to take based on a number of factors, but in many cases it’s the marketplace itself that dictates what the chosen approach should be.
Brand Marketing For Business
So what is a business brand?
This is a way in which the name of the company and its overall principles become branded in a consumers mind through marketing. Google is a fantastic example of how this works.
They have many products up for grabs, having greatly expanded from their original yet still popular mission of universal search, but its their company name that’s used to sell consumers on almost all of their products.
By having a well established brand for the Google name, they don’t have to work quite as hard when offering any of their services. That is why they continue to maintain over 68% of all search traffic from around the world. The only other company that comes close to Google is Facebook who on some days actually has more site visitors than Google, again this is all down to branding of their products and services.
Other companies, generally larger scale manufacturers, approach their brand strategy on an individual product by-product basis. Proctor & Gamble is a great example of this. The company’s name is known widely, but the bulk of their branding efforts goes into each of their product lines one by one to the point that many people don’t know those products even come from P&G. Tide, Duracell and Pampers are great examples of their products that have strong identities of their own.
Another result of having a good brand marketing strategy and especially for those businesses online is trust, giving you and your website instant credibility. The site visitors will tend to have more confidence in your information, products or services making it that much easier for you to make a sale.
The kind of brand marketing that many consumers are most accustomed to hearing about is what’s known as attitude branding. This can apply to either of the above mentioned approaches, but has a more specific purpose. This kind of branding is what you see with companies like Nike who try quite successfully to get people to associate a certain attitude with their product.
Nike has established itself as being cool and powerful, and people want to be a part of that. You won’t see Nike promoting their quality or even individual shoes all that often, because they sell enough shoes by just reminding people about attitude.
Other Strategies To Help Build A Business Brand
There is also a great movement as of late to extend the power of a long-established brand to other areas. This includes a branding strategy that’s often known as non-branding and another strategy which would be best described as brand extension.
The first includes things like grocery stores who have their own product lines in store and sell them as their own brand. The latter refers to companies who use their existing brand to launch a different product line such as Nike selling sports clothing to go along with their shoes.
None of these strategies are better than the other, just more appropriate for different situations. The more you look into each method the more you’ll understand just how influential an established brand can be, and you’ll probably start to realize that they influence you greatly in your day-to-day life.
Having an understanding about business branding will also ensure you are giving the search engines what they want to see with all online business, that is moving away from keywords to a more branded approach for your online business.
