It takes years to build a solid brand (and only five minutes to ruin it). An excellent business brand is one that aims to be informative and provides the client an excellent experience upon using the product or service. Companies even help good causes or create these helpful initiatives themselves to improve their branding.
If you wish to reinforce your brand from the logos on your wares to every future project you can have, then take note of these five areas.
Seven Ways to Ensure Your Brand’s Consistent Presence
Assert Who You Are
Everything your business makes must assert your brand’s consistent presence. Having a logo plastered anywhere on the product or service is the first step. Then exert efforts to provide solutions to long and short-term problems that you find. A good brand identifies other potential problems after its resolution. It also offers additional solutions based on their identification of new issues.
It is important to assert your purpose as an efficient problem-solver helps brand recognition for any initiative you have.
Subliminal Brand Signals
Aesthetically, your product exudes the personality and effort of your business. It does this by using the company’s branding colors. If the product functions similar to your competitor’s wares, then you can expect your audience to expect similar controls in some way. Using familiarity allows you to introduce the new element or control that can become the focal point of the product’s uniqueness and efficacy in resolving an issue.
Aside from aesthetics, you can add other subliminal signals that make your brand consistently recognizable.
If you can include effort in design and function, then you can add great after-sales support and supplementary information on maximizing the usage of the product and service. It is true that the identification and creation of “add-ons” helps your product or service provide solutions to case-specific issues.
One great example is a photo of Pepsi wearing a Coca-Cola cape. In this case, it can be interpreted in many ways. Pepsi used it with a Halloween theme with the caption “Have a Happy Halloween,” making the cape relevant to Dracula.
In contrast, Coke made the image look like the Pepsi can is trying to be a “Superman” with the caption “Everyone wants to be a hero.” This example, along with other examples, can be found in Hubspot’s compilation of ads that used clever subliminal messaging.
The Presence of Personality
For hotels, personality is exuded by their waiting staff. This also means the consistency of their property design, room and amenity experience. Their branding is extended to the overall positive experience they brought to clients.
For small businesses, the personality can come from their social networks. The voice in their written copy also exudes branding. Small and medium businesses are often more personal with their clients.
Some businesses inject their personality by providing special custom work or services for their loyal customers.
The brand’s personality must be consistent. If your business aims to help, then always remain informative and supportive. Businesses focused on charities can indicate their supported beneficiaries underneath each advertisement.
Positive Experiences Always
An excellent product or service will always receive attention. However, poor after-sales services can affect the experience of your customers. Negative experiences will always affect your brand’s consistency.
To undo this, you can introduce immediate and efficient resolutions to consumer issues.
If you want to meet customer expectations, then add value by being informative and helpful through supplementary content. Helpfulness can create loyal customers and advocates.
Business responsibility legitimately stops after a product is sold or a service is rendered. However, brand building virtually never ends.
Customer service is always a great avenue for introducing positive experiences. Because your consumer had a faulty experience, doubling up on effort is a sure-fire way to succeed.
For example, Zappos learned that a woman could not buy conventional shoes because an accident left her feet sensitive to adequately-fitted shoes. This made ordering the right item difficult.
Zappos sent the woman a bouquet of flowers with a VIP membership. A Zappos VIP gets free shipping on all orders and returns. More splendid ways on how customer service can introduce positive experiences in LiveChat’s compilation.
Anything is a Small Part of Everything
Every blog, advertisement, product, or initiatives from your business are small parts of a whole: your brand. If you want to improve its quality, then keep your efforts consistent in every area exposed to the public.
You must note that your brand is not static. It will face recessions and failures over time. However, it is in your brand’s resilience and identification of opportunities to introduce positive experiences to loyal and new clients that allows it to grow and develop.
In conclusion the same effort given to product or service development you must also give towards the new responsibilities and expectations brought by wider brand recognition.
Always remember it is important to learn to measure your successes or failures through analytic channels. Invest in your brand development efforts, and you can see your ROI within the shortest time possible for any business endeavor.
After-Sales Supportive Content
After-sales content focused on maximizing the product or service’s usefulness was once underrated. Nowadays, it is an efficient tool to retain customer loyalty and even create advocates.
Loyalty and advocacy occurs when customers continuously experience positives in all situations including those involving product failure or service malfunction or shortcomings.
You won’t have to wait for an incident to happen. You can just write about the business’ speculated customer troubles. The business’ dedicated patrons love businesses that take initiative and maximize the consumer’s experience with their products or service.
Creating after-sales content requires some creativity, but in general, it only uses already-existing business knowledge. However, case studies and comparison tests give business better after-sales content to leverage.
Real-Life Events
The traditional exposition or convention participation or even sponsorship helps develop you brand’s identity in a positive light. The entire event shouts your presence. Brand recall and retention increases in levels when you sponsor real-life events. It can be a small charity activity. Your business can choose to sponsor a local school’s small equipment.
Bringing positive human experiences aside from your products and services is a sure-fire way to create and reinforce your brand.