Branding Alaska

For the most effective branding, a memorable name and a ubiquitous slogan should be combined with an instantly recognizable and unique logo. A logo is the graphic or design by which your firm or product will come to be imagined by the customer. As in other elements of branding, simplicity can often be the best strategy. Your logo can be as straightforward as a simple geometric shape or, potentially, an elaborate design of a simple idea — such as a silhouette of a person or an object. In contrast to other elements of branding, your logo needn’t in itself be a clear representation of what your firm does, or what your product is. Its most important factor is being recognizable and unique.

To use another of the most famous examples from popular branding, Kentucky Fried Chicken’s logo is the ‘Colonel Sanders’ design — a smiling image of the face of the firm’s founder. In itself, this iconic branding doesn’t represent ‘chicken’, or even food of any kind. But it is remembered in association with the name of the firm, meaning that as a whole package, its branding successfully keeps the firm lodged in its customers’ memories.

Once the logo has been chosen, it should be used regularly and consistently throughout your branding strategy, in order to represent your firm or product wherever possible. You should combine the elements of your branding — firm name, slogan and logo — on each piece of correspondence you make or advertising space you buy related to your product. This means that emails, letterheads, business cards and invoices, and promotion and advertising, should bear the main elements of your branding. In doing this, your branding will be extended to the reaches of everything you and your products do, and will continue to spread the word of your growing success.

With the basic elements of your branding strategy in place, you should begin to extend your branding across the marketplace. This is important because much of your strategy’s effectiveness lies in its consistency. To ensure this is achieved, it must be remembered that each time a potential customer or regular customer has any kind of contact with your firm, whether through visiting your company’s website online or simply in seeing a printed advertisement, he or she has what should be understood as a branding experience.

Bearing this in mind, it becomes clear why regularly fine-tuning your branding strategy to better suit the desires of your customers is absolutely crucial. This is especially true if your firm is in a particularly competitive market, up against several rival products or services which claim to do what yours does, and possibly even better, through their own branding. It is specifically your branding that will separate your product from the competitors.

To ensure your branding maintains a strong statement and to continue differentiating it from your rivals’, you will need to regularly assess the competition in your particular market. To perform what could be called a competitive analysis, you should keep track of your competitors’ branding by taking clippings of their advertisements, reviewing any PR coverage they have achieved, researching their online presence by analyzing their website, and even by trying their products or services — especially if they have introduced new products or branding strategies. Then you should decide what especially continues to make your product different — what sets it apart from the rest. It will always be this differentiation that allows you to create an image that remains in customers' imaginations. Therefore, you should continue to be willing to realign your branding strategy to fulfill this fact.

Once you have selected an appropriate name, logically the next stage in the branding process is to accompany this with a slogan, or statement summing up your intentions and strengths. For the most effective branding results, the slogan you select should be a short sentence which is memorable or ‘catchy’ and, again, easily remembered by customers. This will then combine with your name to strengthen the branding structures working for your product.

Slogans can be just as difficult as names to create. Saying something powerful and original in a small number of words is a tough part of the branding process. In order to generate ideas for slogans to lead your branding, you should always stay focused on the potential customer. What are they looking for in a product such as yours? What values and aspirations do they expect from a firm producing it? Why should they buy your product in particular? What do the products and slogans of your rivals represent? The slogan you choose should attempt to take into account strong answers to each of these questions.

To help understand why this stage of the branding process is so important; think about slogans prevalent in popular culture today. The phrase ‘Just do it’, representing a proactive, energetic and no-fuss attitude to life, instantly recalls the branding of Nike. When seen, either on billboards or on Nike clothing itself, the customer takes in both these represented values and the Nike name, and comes more and more to associate them as a permanent combination. This is branding at its most effective, and is what anyone or firm choosing a slogan should seek to emulate.