What Branding Does for Your Business

You cannot own a business and say you’ve not heard the term “branding” used in at least one or ten sentences. Branding gives your business a clear identity and helps you communicate who you serve, what you want to be known for, and how you present your value to the world.

A brand is simply a name, design, symbol or other feature that distinguishes one seller’s offer from another. Branding is the deliberate work you do to shape those distinctive elements for your business and the associations people form around them.

READ MORE: How Hiring A Marketing Agency Works With Your Internal Team.

Your logo is one part of your brand

As important as a logo is, it’s not the beginning and end of branding. A logo makes your business recognisable, but branding also includes your positioning, message, voice, visual identity, customer experience and the expectations and emotions attached to your name.

This is an important thing to note because a new logo cannot resolve an unclear offer. You can have polished colours and a beautiful font, but customers still struggle to understand what your product is, who it is for or why they should choose it.

A logo can help people identify you, but the rest of your branding gives that identity meaning. Does your website explain what you offer as clearly as your logo identifies your business?. Use Cold Open Lab’s Independent Marketing Breakdown to find the gaps between how your business looks and what it communicates.

Branding guides business decisions

A useful brand strategy should help you answer practical questions.

Who’s your target audience?

What are their primary pain points?

What promise can you consistently keep?

What should your marketing emphasise?

Which opportunities fit the reputation you are building?

Answering these questions lets you know how your business is positioned in the market. Brand positioning is simply how your business is placed in the market and how your value and benefits are communicated to your target audience.

Clear brand positioning helps your team choose what deserves attention and what falls outside the brand’s direction. Not sure how to determine how your brand should be positioned? Complete this sentence in specific language: “We help [this customer] solve [this problem] through [this approach].” Follow Cold Open Lab for more practical brand and marketing guidance.

Branding and promotion do different jobs

Branding and Promotion might be used in the same contexts, but they’re different concepts.

Branding decides the identity, position and message behind your business. 

Promotion is the vehicle that carries that message into the market through advertising, social media, public relations, email, events and other channels.

Promotions make campaigns work while branding ensures each campaign sounds and is connected to the same business. Branding is more than just a logo and a tagline. It includes values, personality, communication and audience perception.

An illustrative example

Let’s use a growing furniture company that says it sells “beautiful furniture for everyone” as an example. That sounds vague, right?

Now imagine the same company saying it sells “durable, space-conscious furniture for young professionals furnishing their first homes”.

Doesn’t that sound better? That’s what branding does; it takes a vague claim and gives it identity. 

Proper branding is the bedrock that shapes the product range, photography, website copy, showroom experience, social content and sales conversations of your business.

Branding becomes useful only when it guides real choices across your business. Go over your offer, audience, message and customer experience. Look out for any conflicting signals and rework them. Book a discovery call with Cold Open Lab to build a brand direction your marketing team can use.