Branding 101: Branding is the True Sales Funnel
Author’s Note: Branding 101 will be a series of posts helping you to understand what branding is and how to create powerful branding within your company.
Branding for most is known as a really well designed logo. Whenever I’m speaking to a group of business owners and the question of branding is brought up most think of it as a logo, some colors placed together in an orderly fashion, or tagline. What most people are missing is that this is only the result of good or bad branding.
Over here at Veloce Media we educate our clients on what we feel is the true definition of branding. Helping businesses understand branding is very important and when they understand it their businesses begin to grow by leaps and bounds. The definition is quite simple.
Branding is the expressed personality and culture of an entity, business, or organization expressed throughout a business. You can think of branding as we would think of social clicks from high school. On one side of the school hallway you would have the “Jocks” on the other end the “Nerds”. Based on a popular movie, “Revenge of the Nerds”, there was always a conflict between the Jocks and the Nerds. Each social group has a way it acts, thinks, talks, behaves, responds, dresses, interacts with it’s surroundings, and views the world around it.
Nerds have their own view of life as do Jocks. Nerds like to wear clothes that clash, pants that are too tight or too short, tshirts that are outdated, wants to play with anything involving a computer, and spend their days reading in their books.
Contrast that same age demographics with those that would align themselves with the “Jocks”. They are all about sports, like to pick on those around them, they wear clothes from sporting activities, and some how always end up at prom with the cute girls.
You would never see a Jock spending time with a Nerd. These two social cultures don’t mix too well. They really have nothing to relate on. Where am I going on this? Just on hang there with me.
Going back to branding as the expressed personality of a company, you will see that the personality influences the way that “person/company” will relate to the world around it. The personality will establish how the logo looks, how the company communicates, and what social demographics it goes after.
The problem is that most businesses who are starting up and even those that are established never take the time to define what is the “brand personality” of their business. Like it or not society has clicks not because we are stupid or closed minded, but because human nature wants to categorize and organize the world around us so we can best relate to it in how it matches our internal view of ourselves.
When a customer comes into contact with your business personality and it resonates within them there begins the process of a buying decision. For example, no matter how great McDonalds is I will not eat there because it is not the social culture of our family to eat fast food. I want to eat fresh and somewhat healthy. Take me to an asian restaurant any day of the week and I’m happy or a good homemade burger joint.
Like a good friend of mine always says, “Branding starts with the phone call.” Branding is all about the experience. If the customer doesn’t have a good experience or doesn’t relate to the social culture of the business then no matter how good your sales pitch is they won’t buy!
The above statement is something you should take to heart. Branding is all about the experience and that is what people buy more than anything else. It’s not the price point, it’s not the features, it may not even be the benefit, it’s the experience of them coming into contact with your company.
I would consider myself a business geek. I love my gadgets, computers, video games, martial arts, and marketing books. My idea of an ideal weekend would involve those pieces. Sell me that and I’m excited. Sell me anything in the opposite direction and you’re going to get a big no.
Here’s a quick tip to get you started with branding. Define the personality of your business. Ask these important questions.
- How are you currently being perceived in the market place? Do you even know how you are being perceived?
- How would you like to be perceived in the market place?
- What solutions do you offer to problems?
- What is the average person’s personality like who need your solution for their problems?
- Have you ever defined what the business culture of your company is like. For example look at Google, one of their slogans is “Don’t be evil.”
Tags: Branding, branding 101, jocks, nerds, sales, sales funnel
This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Branding, Business Growth, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
