by Andi Miles

Investopedia defines a brand as “a name, symbol, or other market that businesses use to distinguish their products from competitors’ and foster a public identity.” A brand is a crucial part of any business. It’s what sets your product or service apart from the competition and helps customers remember who you are. At its core, a brand is a name, symbol, or other market that businesses use to distinguish their products from competitors and foster a public identity.

However, a brand is more than just a name or logo. It’s the intangible process that connects the product with the consumer. While there may be documents and artifacts to define a brand and how it is displayed to a customer, ultimately, the brand’s final shape is created in the consumer’s mind.

The complexity of a brand increases with the variety of products and customers it serves. As you try to cater to more markets, your brand and its marketing strategy will become more complicated. Adding a new consumer product line to a business-geared brand, for example, may require a totally new direction with different marketing creative and distribution strategies to get the best results.

A good brand should be both distinguishing and identifying for the product(s), but also reminiscent of familiar brands, concepts, etc. It should be recognizable and memorable to the consumer, both at the time of purchase and when they need to re-purchase. This is critical to continued loyalty and success.

Branding is not just limited to the packaging of a product. It can include the tone of materials distributed, both customer and consumer-facing, and can possibly include guiding internal communications and emails. Branding can also be a position or approach to an issue encountered in the world and how the products or company behind the brand navigate the issue.

When defining your brand, a great place to start is to visualize your product on a shelf from the consumer’s point of view. Can you imagine what the logo on the packaging looks like? What emotions or thoughts do you experience towards the product? What colors do you associate with the packaging? A logo is the visual representation of a brand, and it should reflect the tone and personality of the product or business it represents.

All of these elements can be defined in a document called a Style Guide. A Style Guide can be used as a standardization for marketing, PR, photography and videography, graphics work, and more, to maintain a consistent public vision across teams or iterations of projects/initiatives.

Defining and maintaining a document such as a Style Guide will lead to years of adjustment/improvement on your initial brand as it grows, and a turnkey start to any marketing campaign, regardless of agency, in-house, or other production. Example of a style guide for a multinational streaming service.

Ready to define your brand? Andi can help. Reach out today.