“A product can be quickly outdated, but a successful brand is timeless.”
What makes a successful business? The fastest answer would be – the product or service you offer!
Well, not quite right…
While the product or service is a crucial key for a business to run, but there is something more to it. You can be the best consultant or service provider the world ever saw and no one would come knocking at your door. The answer to that problem is branding! The way people perceive your business can often be more important than the things you offer! Despite that, not a lot of people see that. In this article, I will tell you the most common misconceptions about branding you need to know.
- We don’t need to be special, Let’s fit everyone:
Every business needs a USP to stand out. If your business doesn’t have any USP, how you going to decide the tone and things while marketing your business. Let me make it more simple for you, When we see a logo of Mcdonald’s the very first thing comes in our mind is “Burgers”. You know why? Because that’s their USP, that makes them stand out from other fast-food chains. So, before marketing your business, you need to figure out what’s your or your business’s USP.
- Branding is just a name and logo:
Logo, the name of your business is a part of your branding, but branding is much more than a name or a logo. Branding is all about the feelings, features, and emotions associated with your company. Let’s take the example of the “Liverpool Football Club”. We all are very well aware of LFC, the fans of LFC have an emotional attachment with it, that’s made the Liverpool Football club so popular among all the football fan across the world.
- Customers only care about product / service:
Actually, customers care a lot about choosing a brand that appeals to them and are able to connect with. A stuntman or a fan of extreme sports are more likely to pick a Red Bull energy drink over, for example, a Monster. That’s because Red Bull promotes themselves among these groups of people. Or, imagine walking into a drugstore looking for toothpaste. Which one are you more likely to pick? The one you saw an advertisement of (it showed footage of smiling people with perfectly white teeth) or some other random paste you’ve never heard about.
Well, obviously the first one! According to Malcolm Gladwell: “Buyers make most decisions by relying on their two-second first impressions based on stored memories, images and feelings” (Gladwell, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking) – that means, an advertisement you saw some time ago is now embedded in your brain and will impact your choices! No matter how good the other toothpaste is, or how bad the first one might be, you will most likely choose the one you are familiar with.
- Branding will not make you any money:
That’s true, it won’t. The sales of your product or service will make you money. Consistent branding across all channels increases revenue by 23%. Branding is what will make the customers choose what you offer instead of what somebody else is offering. So like, in the long run, it will make you money!
- Branding is only about product or service:
The CEO example, I wrote about above already cracks this premise. However, think of customer service – the experience you get when getting your problem solved by a company representative can largely impact the way you perceive the entire structure. True – the products or services are what drives your company forward, but it’s all about the aftertaste that a transaction leaves. Brand equity can be largely impacted by the quality of customer service.
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