Do you know brands that maintain a consistent presentation across platforms experience an average revenue increase of 23%? Creating a brand is easier, but clearly understanding what values it will bring to your business is challenging.
Branding is a secret weapon of businesses to achieve their revenue goals and maintain a steady product flow. It serves a far greater purpose than just being the visual face of an organization.
You might ask why branding is key to success. Effective branding helps build a loyal relationship with consumers and connect with your target audience at an emotional level.
Top 8 Core Functions of Branding
The following 8 key functions of branding play a pivotal role in reshaping your brand’s image and identity.
1. Helps Audience Recognize Your Products
Do you know it takes only 0.05 seconds (50 million seconds) for people to form an opinion about your website? Branding is not only about a logo design or snazzy strapline. It encapsulates everything an organization needs to set itself apart from the competition. For example, you can build a strong brand identity by:
- Improving the visual identity of your brand (logo design, website design, and colors)
- Establishing competitive prices
- Improving product packaging
All these branding factors help people identify and recognize your products. You can get inspiration from Minute Maid, a popular brand that managed to create a powerful brand identity through its packaging design. The brand created a unified and easy-to-recognize packaging design for its premium products, which helped them to leave a remarkable impact on their target audience.
2. Allows to be Clear with Your Organizations Goals
According to Deluxe, a strong brand involves turning your company logo into a flag that the rest of the company can rally around, and this is exactly what branding does. To be successful in your business strategies, everyone needs to believe in the same vision and purpose.
Helping businesses to be clear with their strategies is one of the core functions of branding. For example, if you have employees who understand your company’s goals, they will stay focused and work harder to drive more leads.
3. Helps in Building Trust with Stakeholders
The role of branding is not only to attract top-quality talent or increase the number of customers. It is also responsible for reshaping the company’s reputation. With effective branding, you can attract many different stakeholders, such as business partners, licensors, opinion leaders, government, and purchasers.
According to Salsify, 46% of the providers like to work with companies that are known for their quality products and professionalism. You can get inspiration from Coca-Cola’s stakeholder engagement strategy to learn more about the role of branding in building trust with investors.
4. Responsible for Retaining Existing Employees/Customers
Did you know acquiring new customers can cost five times more than retaining the existing ones? With effective branding strategies, you will not only be able to attract top talent but also retain your existing employees/customers.
Branding helps customers understand why they should work with you. It improves your company’s reputation and showcases it as an ideal workplace. Google is the greatest example of a brand good at retaining and attracting new employees. Only the tagline of the brand, “Do cool things that matter,” can convenience employees to work with them.
5. Differentiating from the Competition
One of the core functions of branding is to differentiate your company/brand from the competition. People build a loyal relationship with the brand that tends to be meaningful in its offerings.
For example, if no branding is applied to the bottled products, consumers will just buy water and any water, as they all look the same. But branding makes your products stand out from the competition. It is why consumers walk into a supermarket and prefer choosing your products over the competitors.
According to Stackla, 88% of consumers believe authenticity is the key factor when deciding what brand, they like and support. Effective branding helps resonate your promises with the customers’ demands so that they can become loyal to your brand.
6. Formalizes the Company’s Core Values
Setting and centering your company’s values is an essential role of branding. The storytelling step is undoubtedly important for bringing an organization’s missions to the forefront, but you have to formalize your values.
It is a common misconception that branding is only about witty slogans and visual identity. An effective branding process unveils the core values that a company truly believes in. It helps businesses center themselves on their core values as an operating procedure.
7. Helps Connect with Customers Emotionally
Have you ever wondered why people prefer buying Nike products? The brand uses powerful branding strategies to connect with its customers at an emotional level. People believe that Nike products will make them feel trendy and capable of doing anything.
In this digital era, the end-user is far better at sniffing out fake brands. Consumers demand brands share their core values and understand their demands. Branding is essential to effectively represent specific values and communicate them with your target audience. It creates trust with your customers so that they keep coming back.
8. Responsible for Continuous Business Growth
The importance of branding has drastically grown over the past few years, and for some companies, it is even included in the balance sheets.
Developing a profitable business directly depends upon having a valuable brand. Though customers’ demands and needs continue to change over time, a brand with a strong identity can survive any test of time.
You can get inspiration from the world’s renowned brands, such as McDonald’s and Apple. These brands are able to adapt and grow continuously. Effective branding is the most important investment you can make in your business. It can take your business to a higher level, allowing you to convert more leads into high-paying sales.
Read also: What Is Mixed Branding And How It Helps?
Wrapping Up
Branding is not only a fancy marketing term; it can make or break your brand’s identity. With effective branding strategies, you can grow your business steadily, formalize the company’s values, and retain more customers.
