The 7 Reasons People Invest in Branding.
Welcome back!
Let's cut to it, when it comes to branding, marketing, and content, most people struggle with three things:
One) Confusion
There are a lot of platforms out there, buzzwords, concepts, and frameworks - many being sold and reshared by ‘experts’. The irony of this post having plenty of buzzwords isn't lost on us at the Studio.
Nonetheless, it's confusing and frustrating to try to invest time and money to formulate an understanding of 'SEO' and ‘social media marketing’ only to have the goal posts moved and to have to invest your time and money all over again.
Two) Consistency
Once you've figured out which platforms you're meant to be on, the style, tone, and branded service offerings, you realise that consistency is a real problem. In a few ways:
Having the correct branding used consistently.
Posting consistently - every day, week, or month.
Developing a consistent message that communicates the correct message across each placement because each platform has its own tone, language and norms.
Three) Content
The third main issue people encounter is content—the difficulty of producing content, which is more expensive and takes longer than most people estimate. However there are also issues revolving around the content itself, i.e. what you should be making. What you should be doing is arguably the most important question to ask regarding content, marketing, and branding. What to do and what to leave on the shelf for later.
A typical example of the content problem in action is the ‘tail wagging the dog’ phenomenon. This phenomenon generally follows the following story arc:
A new platform comes along. Everyone is talking about it. The platform has become popular. A client sees the platform and wants to be part of the popularity contest. Creates a video to be there—the end.
There are three issues with this phenomenon:
There is no consideration of strategy. Does the platform suit your objectives? If yes, great, go for it. If not, why invest your time and money on that platform?
2. Fitting your story to the medium can be harmful. Just because 12-second videos are popular, and a platform's algorithm organically promotes this post type, does not mean you should cut your story into a 12-second square.
The rule of thumb you can apply here is that long-form content is about building relationships. Short-form content is about attention. Use the two accordingly.
3. Just because you go ‘viral’ on a given platform does not mean you have a virtual level of business coming through the door. For example, having a video with 1 million views and 200K likes on Tik Tok can feel great, but it doesn't mean you now have a million new customers.
The seven main reasons people invest in branding and brand building.
1. Presentation.
Your visual language is an undeniably important part of your brand and branding. How you present yourself is how people come to recognise you. Your visual identity revolves around the symbols you will associate with your messaging and the way you deliver services. Investing in branding is an investment in your visual identity.
2. Findability.
These days you cannot build a website and expect everyone to find it. Your message is not findable if that's how you limit your efforts. Branding, specifically brand strategy, is largely about understanding how your customer looks for your services and presenting your brand along that path. Note: Content Marketing goes beyond presenting along the route and centers on your brand becoming a content destination.
Brand strategy determines where you will invest your resources and how you will present yourself in strategically mindful ways for your brand and clients.
3. Control.
Your messaging is fundamental to brand building. However, as systems grow complicated, organisations change, and you increase the number of platforms your brand is presented on, your original message can be changed beyond recognition. Sometimes this is part of the natural progression of growing your business and documenting the transformation to reflect your updated characteristics and points of emphasis. In other scenarios, you must control your narrative because nefarious agents have hijacked it.
In either case, having control of your branding, platforms, and systems is a key reason people invest energy into developing their brand.
4. Scale.
As your business grows, there is more opportunity on the table. Still, there are also more points of failure and limitations to the portable hard drive holding all your original logo files. Branding and, specifically, brand systems are there to support the growth of your business and ensure it scales while maintaining the essence of your brand. Investing in a brand is an investment in the successful development of your business.
5. Consistency.
Talking about scale without mentioning consistency was difficult, but we did it. And consistency is the fifth most important reason people invest in their brand and the infrastructure that enables their brand to grow—having a brand system, a brand book, a readily available portal on Cavna, or a bespoke content management system. Each aims to give people all the relevant information and resources they need to work autonomously while maintaining your brand image and message.
6. Perception.
You could argue that building perception is the only point of marketing and branding. Still, in this pragmatic list of reasons people invest in their brand, we'll categorise perception as especially important for existing businesses.
Meaning, when a business is looking to serve a new customer, develop a new product or service, or change how they are positioning themselves in the marketplace. Branding often serves as the guide to changing the trajectory of the business and how people perceive its services.
7. Clarity.
Branding and clarity are critically interconnected. If your brand proposition is confusing, it cannot be shared and will not scale. Nike did not become known as the world's largest athletics brand because it also promotes its sales of gas pipelines.
What may be implied but something which has not yet been overtly stated yet is that 1) a lot of the listed concepts are ‘soft skills’ related - meaning that managers, brand builders and entrepreneurs need to assess the ethos of a concept before implementing a practical application of the idea. 2) Building these elements takes a long time, and brand building requires patience and experimentation. 3) When building or rebuilding a brand, you need to find the right partner because your marketer needs to be the right fit for your project.
That's all! See you next time!