Website Branding | Four Killer Tips
What Makes A Brand Successful? Website Branding | Five Killer TIPS
The brain is introduced to thousands of things a day. We see scary things, funny things, annoying things but only about 10% of what we see everyday, we remember. We remember things that stand out to us and make us feel something, whether that be shock, betrayal, awe, humorous, sad, happy, angry or annoyed. What we remember typically has an emotion tied to it, just how you can remember your high school’s mascot or your first car’s logo. A successful brand sticks into a person’s memory when they feel an emotional connection to it. How do we make our brands emotionally appealing? There are a few steps to making a brand successful through emotional appeal.
1) Understand your product and business
What does your business specifically offer? What are the benefits of what your business offers? Why should someone choose your business through the dozens of others that offer something similar to what your business offers? These are all questions that you need to know the complete answers to. Understanding your business from every angle is an absolute necessity to ensure that your clientele can clearly understand the answers to those questions as well.
2) Target your audience
Who does your business or product appeal to? If you sell a sophisticated women’s perfume you would be looking at an audience of adult women perhaps between the ages of mid thirties to early fifties. Figure out who exactly will be interested in what you are selling, and what things would appeal to them. This includes colors, fonts, slogans, ideals, beliefs and anything that makes them fit into their genre. Create an experience that your target audience would truly enjoy. This is key into making your business branded into the people who would actually purchase what it offers. It would be truly unsuccessful to market adult women’s perfume to young teenage boys.
3) Keep it consistent
Changing your brand, slogan, or design every other year will make your business hard to remember and unstable. A consistent brand symbolizes stability, something that people will and continue to trust in. This stability in a brand creates brand loyalty. Keep the experience consistently great and pleasing to your customers as well. It creates a continuously returning clientele who continue to keep choosing that brand, because they know, like and trust that brand.
4) Get your brand out there
MARKET, MARKET, MARKET! Get your brand everywhere your target audience would see it. Whether that is on billboards, signs in malls, grocery stores, on t-shirts, on key chains or on whatever it takes to make your target audience see your brand! It is proven that repetition makes something memorable.
These are some of the most basic, fundamental and key tips to creating a successful brand. There are some that have done this extremely well, exceeding expectations. For example, let’s look at Coca-Cola.
Coca Cola- This soft drink has been proven to be one of the most successful brands in HISTORY. It has been around for over 100 years and known in almost every home. It has almost NEVER changed its logo, rarely changed its formula and has marketed its product continuously to keep up with the changing times. It is so successful that it has become a part of American culture. Coca-cola has their brand on commercials, in pictures, as pillows, stuffed animals, at Olympic games, at just about everywhere you could think of!
Apple- Apple has a brand loyalty like no other. There are die-hard apple fans who continuously purchase apple products, and only apple products. They understand who their target audience is and market to those people. They market their brand as the best in class as the brand with the most superior technology and user interface. They keep the same logo continuously. They keep their technology up to date by continuously creating new products of high quality. Their brand is on every piece of technology, like any other product, but apple has a way of making people feel superior by having their technology.
Chanel- Chanel is another brand that has been around for an extremely long time. Its logo has never changed and its target audience. It is known for being high class, luxurious and the epitome of class. It targets its female audience in commercials, modeling campaigns, magazines and everywhere that females would be interested in looking in. In commercials and ad campaigns various famous women such as Marilyn Monroe and even now Kiera Knightly were used as the face of Chanel. These were famous women idolized for their beauty, which appealed to Chanel’s target audience. They have stayed consistent, targeted their audience and marketed to them successfully.
Now, not every case of branding is all peaches and cream. Let’s see some examples of bad branding
Fluff Out- This is a toilet paper and tissue brand. Charmin’s marketing campaign for extra fluffy toilet paper that is just snuggly where it needs to be worked excellently. So, Fluff Out toilet paper didn’t really succeed because why on earth would you want to take the “Fluff Out” of toilet paper? They didn’t quite understand what their target audience was looking for in the product they offered.
AskJeeves.com– Ask Jeeves actually had a lot of success in previous years by differentiating themselves from other search engines. Their site wasn’t the typical enter in keywords and see a relative site search engine. Their site was a search engine that was designed to answer questions. Users would feed it questions and in return, the site would give them answers. Their logo was a butler who would fetch answers for you. They changed their focus, their product, by becoming a traditional search engine, an algorithm powered search engine. This became their downfall. This search engine lost its differentiation and uniqueness, losing its unique quality and audience. They are currently trying to return to the site’s initial service of answering questions.