Branding is a critical part of business. If you need a basic primer on how to brand your company or organization, read this ultimate guide to branding that addresses key questions such as:

• What is a brand strategy and why does a company need one?
• How should a company go about developing a brand strategy?
• How do you approach developing the visual elements of a brand?

What is a brand?

A brand is the way your company or organization is perceived by internal and external audiences. It starts with your visual identity, but it’s important to recognize that a brand is more than a name and a logo: it’s the overall experience and impression your customers, employees, partners, and other audiences have with your organization. A company or organization should have a cohesive brand, where all of the different touchpoints your audiences have with your brand are consistent. This is the promise of a great brand experience.

How is branding different from marketing?

Branding is a sub-set of marketing and it is how you shape or define who you are as a company whereas marketing is how you promote your company, product, or services to your audience. Advertising is a form of marketing and includes traditional TV, radio, print, and outdoor as well as digital advertising, including digital display, native advertising, streaming, OTT, and programmatic advertising.

Why is brand important?

To put it another way, what is the promise of a successful brand? We need to start with the end in mind – there are three keys to a great brand:

1. Differentiation – uniqueness helps differentiate your brand from the competition and delight customers, increasing brand loyalty.
2. Growth – your brand, including its name, should be flexible enough to adapt to your growth goals.
3. Increased loyalties – by delivering an exceptional product or service in a consistently branded way, you will increase loyalties among the people you serve.

Your digital footprint is critical in helping customers discovering your brand. Google ranks websites based on their expertise (professionally written content), authority (expertise on the subjects), and trustworthiness (links to and from trusted websites).

What is a brand strategy?

A brand strategy is a long-term plan that sets your goals, audiences, and approach for how, what, where, when, and who your brand interacts with as well as how to measure success. It’s important to identify any areas for improvement. Think through each of your departments and how they are representing your brand. Where do they excel? Where do they fall short? And how can you address these operationally? A brand strategy needs to start within and it’s critical that you go through internal brand workshops and ensure your employees are representing your brand at every turn.

When should you revisit your branding strategy?

Your brand strategy must be revisited when your organizational strategy shifts or pivots. For example, revisit your strategy when experiencing or planning:

• Acquisitions or mergers
• New products or services
• New target audience(s)
• Competition – either new competitors entering the market, or existing competitors taking an aggressive action to attract your customers
• Strategic mindshift, such as a shift in the way you sell your products
• Low awareness, perceptions, or customer satisfaction

As you revisit your brand strategy, it’s important to determine what’s relevant and what’s not – and whether your current visual identity aligns supports the brand strategy.

What is branding architecture?

Brand architecture is a framework from which a company engages its customers and builds awareness. It helps set the foundation for your brand positioning, value propositions, brand story. It can also dictate how a company presents itself visually. Brand architecture is a way to show how everything relates to each other.

There are several brand architecture models. Here are the two most popular models;  however, often companies find themselves in need of a hybrid approach.

Branded house

With a branded house model or “one brand” strategy, there is a tight connection with products or services – often carrying forward the company name with a descriptive sub-brand name or extension.

How companies execute on a branded house architectural model can be different. FedEx is perhaps one of the purest examples of a Branded House with its sub-brands sharing the FedEx name with a lock-up of a descriptive product/service name below in smaller text. In contrast, Microsoft moved to a Branded House model several years ago for its main brands such as Windows and Office, but also owns stand-alone brands such as Xbox, yet it still carries the Microsoft logo on communications and packaging.

Pros: With a branded house, you can increase brand awareness because consumers come to recognize the parent brand while the sub-brands feed off the reputation of the parent brand. It is also the most cost-effective and resource-efficient approach.

Cons: Any negative event associated with the company or an individual product can be attributed to the umbrella brand.

House of brands

A house of brands (sometimes referred to as an endorsed brand model) in many respects is the opposite of the branded house model in that the parent company owns and markets its products and services under separate, standalone brand names.

Two of the most common examples are Procter & Gamble (P&F) and Unilever, whose portfolios of products span across home and personal care brands as well as food and beverage. Think Pampers, Charmin, Gillette, Old Spice, Crest, and Pepto-Bismal (P&G) or Ben & Jerry’s, Lipton, Hellman’s, Dove, and Q-Tips (Unilever). While these companies have more recently promoted their connection with the parent brand, each product retains its own branding and familiarity.

Pros: With a house of brands model, the main benefit is the ability to reach a broader demographic through brands that are targeted to specific target audiences.

Cons: A house of brands model is inherently more difficult and expensive to manage, and it dilutes the parent brand.

Reasons you should update your visual identity

Your visual identity or brand look and feel encompasses your name, logo, colors, fonts, imagery, and graphics. It is expressed in your website and other marketing communications from collateral and business papers to presentations as well as advertising. You should consider updating your visual identity if:

• Your brand strategy indicates a need based on the examples above
• It’s out of date – your brand look and feel is dated
• It’s difficult to execute

Often, companies seek to do a brand refresh versus a brand overhaul to retain some equity in their brand look and feel. This can also be a more cost-effective option.

Naming as part of branding: to rename or not to rename?

It’s a big commitment to rename a business or product – because changing the name can be quite costly and you may have equity in your current name. Some of the most common reasons businesses change their name are that the name:

• no longer reflects their business or product
• is difficult to say so people turn it into an acronym
• is not unique and causes confusion
• has trademark issues

If you do choose to rename, be sure to identify naming criteria such as trademark and domain availability, cultural relevance, as well as creative likes and dislikes.

How to tackle a rebrand

Your brand strategy should be rooted in research. From this research and agreement on the brand architecture, you should identify naming criteria (if naming is required) and creative likes/dislikes. Once all parties are in agreement on that criteria, you can explore naming and tagline options. It’s in this phase that you should evaluate the names and tagline options against the criteria outlined as well as test the options with your customers. Once you have approval on the name and tagline, you can explore and finalize logo options. Then, it’s a matter of determining what’s involved in terms of implementation and launch.

Companies often find it helpful to work with an external branding partner to tackle a rebrand, name a product, service, or business, and create a logo and identity.

Need a branding partner?

Organizations often know where they want to go, but don’t know how – or don’t have the bandwidth– to get there. GA Creative takes our clients’ businesses to the next level by building brand awareness and generating leads—all to meet and exceed growth goals.  GA helps clients cultivate strategic brand solutions that resonate, drive awareness, and inspire action. Our branding work has helped clients in healthcare, technology, professional services, and nonprofit sectors to foster greater brand awareness, enhance perceptions, drive sales leads, and enable successful fundraising efforts.

We also help drive brand campaigns that help clients grow by outsmarting, not outspending, the competition. GA tells brand stories in ways that work harder by understanding the audience, unifying the message and amplifying the brand in a digital-first world.

Clients value working with GA because of our ability to bring new ideas forward, creativity that shines through in concepts and capacity to drive initiatives forward.

If you need help with branding your company or organization, reach out today!