Branding products or services is important with all businesses

Editor’s note: Michelle Stockman works with Little Rock-based Arkansas Capital Corp. to promote entrepreneurship development around the state. Stockman earned a bachelor’s degree from Loyola University-Chicago in communications and fine arts, and earned a master’s in entrepreneurship from Western Carolina University. Her thoughts on business success appear each week on The City Wire.

A brand is a name, sign, symbol or any other means that identifies and distinguishes a business, product or service. While creating a brand may seem like a simple concept, branding a business, product or service or creating a brand experience can be challenging.

Branding your business, product or service may take time, but the payoff is great. Nike, UPS and Coke are famous brands, and their branding efforts are seen in our lives daily. One trip to a Nike store and the customer can see the countless ways the “swoosh” symbol is used to enhance the shopping experience while engraining the branding in one’s mind.

Through the use of branding, the company is working toward creating a consumer experience with the brand that brings about a subconscious emotional response and memory to interaction with the brand. Additionally, the company seeks to create meaning to the brand to its target audience.

Branding creates value for the product, and it is the basis for all marketing and advertising strategies or materials. The brand needs to foster consumer’s memory of the company, product or service. Once a brand becomes widely accepted by the target audience, the brand is often able to promote the quality of the product on its own.

While understanding the concept of branding, how does a company begin its journey into branding? Typically, the first step to branding is deciding on what it is that you would like to brand. Do you want to brand the business, product or service? What do you want to attract customers to buy?

Once the business identifies what to brand, the next step is to focus on creating a visual representation of the business, product or service being branded. From logo design and packaging to in store appearance and more, thinking through the consumer experience with your company will reveal the ways the consumer will see the company. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and look at what they may see. Then visually address what you want the consumer to see through your brand. Museums have become experts in creating consumer visual experiences through consistent branding of the museum.

Once you have an understanding of what your customer will see visually, then think through the customer experience? What kind of experience do you want the customer to have? How will they be treated and what do you want them to remember? How do you want your employees to represent your business to your customers?

Once you’ve worked through the questions of what needs to be branded, to whom, how and what the consumer experience should be, the business owner needs to implement the branding strategy consistently. Branding your business one day and forgetting the brand the rest of the week because of distractions does not build the brand effectively. The greatest gift McDonald’s gave to the business world is the model on how to bring consistency into any business. They branded fast food as much as Dell branded the concept of “just in time inventory.”

To measure how your current business brand is doing, ask a few customers and friends how they view their company. When you compare their answers, you will quickly learn if you are sending a consistent message to the world about your business. If the answers reveal different answers, then consider the message you are sending to the target audience.

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Stockman can be reached at [email protected]