Strong brands drive sales. It’s a proven fact, and if you’re one of our existing clients you’re probably sick to the back teeth of hearing us go on about it. However, the examples are all around us.
Look at Nike, Kellogg’s, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Apple. They are all textbook examples of strong brands with a massive worldwide customer base, who have made billions of pounds and whose logos are recognised from Ecclefechan to Egypt.
The important point to note here is that branding, in its true sense, is not primarily about the name or the logo, or even about marketing. It’s what an organisation or product stands for, through everything it does. It needs to be delivered through the logo, website, advertising, literature, customer service and PR; all of them should be inspired by the unique and distinctive proposition that your business stands for. By proposition, we mean your unique selling point, or USP as it’s also referred to.
What is a strong brand, and how do I know if I have one, I hear you ask?
Well, in a nutshell, it’s the images, values and characteristics that come into your head when you think of it or see it.
Take Apple, for example. Whenever I see their logo or hear their name, I don’t immediately think of a Pink Lady or a Golden Delicious (funnily enough). I think of a high quality, intuitive, efficient range of products and services. Albeit you know they’re going to charge through the roof for a replacement screen on your new iPhone, you also know it’ll be done the same day and you feel 100% confident leaving your prized possession in the hands of a “Genius”, a feeling you may not get if you were to go with a cheaper high street alternative.
That’s a strong brand: you know what you’re going to get before you’ve got it, and you’ll pay for the certainty.
You may well have a pretty good idea whether or not your own business’s brand is strong. If not, you’ll get a good feel for its status using careful, informal questioning of your customers, suppliers, friends and even family. For an objective, professional view, an experienced marketing company will guide you through the market research maze.
So when you hear us, and other marketers, refer to “strong brands”, that is precisely what we mean: the emotions and feelings that are provoked when you hear the company name.
What a strong brand actually does for your business
It’s easy to treat brand as the soft stuff. The research says otherwise.
It gets you thought of in the first place. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the marketing science body behind Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow, calls this mental availability: the likelihood that your brand comes to mind when someone is in a buying situation. Most people don’t shortlist every option; they go with the one or two names that surface. A strong brand is the name that surfaces.
It gets you recognised quickly. The same research puts a lot of weight on distinctive assets, the colours, shapes, characters, sounds and taglines that let people spot you in a split second without reading your name. Think of the red of Coca-Cola or the swoosh on a pair of trainers. Those assets only work if you use them consistently, everywhere, for years.
It makes your marketing cheaper over time. Les Binet and Peter Field’s analysis of the IPA’s effectiveness databank, The Long and the Short of It, found that the most effective campaigns split spend roughly 60:40 between long-term brand building and short-term sales activation. Their 2018 follow-up put it at 62:38. Brand building is the slower lever, but it’s the one that lifts the baseline, so every promotion and every ad works harder than it would for an unknown name.
It protects the business when things go wrong. Kantar, which has valued the world’s biggest brands every year since 2006, says the most valuable brands have consistently outperformed the S&P 500 and the MSCI World index over 20 years, and that strong brands are more resilient in downturns and recover from them faster.
None of this requires a Nike-sized budget. It requires knowing what you stand for and sticking to it.
Signs your brand is strong (and signs it isn’t)
A quick, honest audit. You have a strong brand if most of these are true:
- Customers describe you in the same words you’d use to describe yourself.
- People recognise your materials before they’ve seen your name on them.
- You win work on reputation and referral, not only on price.
- You can charge a little more than the competition and nobody blinks.
- Your website, your van, your invoices and your social posts all look and sound like the same company.
- Your staff can say what the business stands for in a sentence, and they’d all say roughly the same thing.
And the warning signs:
- You compete mainly on price, and you lose when someone goes cheaper.
- Your logo has been redrawn three times in five years, each time by a different designer.
- Marketing is whatever the last salesperson or agency felt like doing.
- Ask ten customers what makes you different and you get ten different answers, or a shrug.
How to build a stronger brand
Start with the proposition. Before colours, before a logo, decide what you stand for and why someone should choose you. Write it down in plain language. Everything else follows from it, and if it isn’t clear, no amount of design will hide that.
Get the basics right once, then leave them alone. Name, logo, colours, typeface, tone of voice. Write them up as simple guidelines so everyone, in-house and agency, uses the same ones. The temptation to freshen things up every couple of years is the enemy of recognition.
Be consistent everywhere. The shop front, the website, the proposal template, the email signature, the way the phone is answered. Each one either reinforces the brand or quietly undermines it.
Keep showing up. Brand building is cumulative. Advertising, PR, sponsorship, content, a presence at the right events: the point is to be seen, consistently, by the people who might one day need you, long before they need you.
Deliver on the promise. The brand is only as strong as the last experience someone had with you. Apple’s premium only works because the Genius actually fixes the phone.
Measure it. Ask customers how they found you and why they chose you. Track unprompted awareness if you can afford the research. Watch whether you’re winning on price or on preference. A strong brand shows up in the numbers eventually.
Where we come in
If you’d like to talk about your brand, whether that’s a full identity, a refresh, or an honest outside view of where you stand, we’d love to chat. Have a look at our design and branding work, or get in touch.