Branding

What is Branding?
Branding is more than just ensuring that customers recognize a logo or product name. Branding means creating an emotional association such as the feeling of success, happiness, or relief that customers associate with the product, service, or company. There are two basic techniques for branding: direct experience and indirect messaging.

With direct-experience branding, users attribute emotions directly to the product or service. For example, when customers test drive a car or eat a restaurant meal, their direct experience influences their feelings toward that vehicle or establishment.

Marketers can't give users a direct experience for most products and services, so they need to use indirect messaging for their branding. For example, Nike sponsors sporting events to encourage the attendees to associate Nike products with the fun and excitement of the sport. Companies create slogans such as Avis's "We Try Harder" or Ford's "Built Ford Tough" and use them everywhere. TV commercials, magazine ads, and billboards are all indirect messaging. The problem here is that this form of branding needs repeated exposure. Conventional advertising wisdom says that a message isn't effective until the customer has received it at least 10 times.

What Are the Benefits of Branding?
Branding is essential for small businesses because branding helps you sell more products and services more effectively. Good branding makes sales easier because the customer feels he or she knows the company. Most people like to deal with a company they "know".

With a good brand recognition, you can charge more than your competitor. Don't believe me? Did you notice that Coke is selling 1.75 liters of soda for the same price that everyone else charges for 2 liters. As a result, they may have lost a few customers in protest, but most people are loyal to the brand.

Branding causes people to remember your name and associate it with your products and services which eventually will lead to them referring your company to their friends and associates.

Website Branding
The key to understanding branding on web sites is to remember that web sites are interactive, not passive. There is always a direct experience. Because direct experience is so powerful, it can override indirect messaging. Since indirect message branding is passive, the user may not even be paying attention to the message.

Normally users visit web sites for a specific purpose. The better the site fulfills that purpose, the better the direct experience. You must design your site so that it answers any questions your visitors are likely to have to ensure they have a powerful direct experience.

Research shows that users consider a site "good" if it lets them find what they're looking for. The researchers asked users to find specific information on web sites. They measured many objective variables about each site, such as the number of graphics, the colors used, and the length of links. They also measured subjective variables, including the user's scaled ranking of how "good" the site was.

When the data was analyzed , the strongest correlation how good the site was ended up being both the quality of and how easily they found the information they were looking for. In other words, the more successful they were at finding information, the more likely users would call the site "good." The users direct experience with the site shaped their impressions of the quality of the site. That impression is one aspect of branding.

How Do You Go About Creating a Brand?
I've found two sources of excellent information on branding.

I recommend reading the book Branding the Net by Dan Janal. It provides an excellent insight to what this process is and why it's important.

Another source of information that I found useful is call BrandU run by Why Communications which are a group of professionals in the field of company branding. They offer self-paced courses, tele-classes (some free), recorded workshops, live workshops, on on-line community for their customers and one-on-one mentoring. You can find everything you need to create a successful brand at BrandU. Click Here for more information on BrandU.