The Importance of Branding in 21st Century
The world we live in today demands brands to be unique.
There is no secret to the fact that we live in the age of over-consumption. People are surrounded by so much noise — literally and figuratively. Needing to buy something as simple as a toothpaste, people often get lost in myriads of offers: surrounded by ads everywhere they go.
In such a world where over proposition creates over confusion, customers need brands more than ever. Not any brand will do, only the ones that speak to people’s hearts have the privilege of leading their buying behavior.
From the statistics we can see that today there are 2000 brands for every category, and the customer can only retain 3–7 brands in it. What defines if your brand is the one people will instantly remember if the need occurs?
What makes a brand appeal to people in 2021?
Empathy.
The hard lesson learned in 2020 from the pandemics is that brands need to be more empathetic, both to their customers and employees. Every company can find and realize hundreds of ideas to express their empathy.
One example is to engage in charity, just like a craft beer brand called BrewDog did. Seeing that people were short on sanitizer, the team made large batches of their own Punk Sanitiser and sent them out to the frontline services in the UK for free.
Speaking on its charitable initiative, BrewDog’s founder James Wyatt, said:
“We are determined to do everything we can to try and help as many people as possible to stay safe.”
Lying won’t help either. If you try to show off as a concerned brand, while treating employees poorly, it will come up, and you will end up in a crisis.
Example:
While Amazon is trying to do the right thing by its customers, it looks like some of their employees have a different point of view. As of March 31st Whole Foods workers have walked out and demonstrated over lack of personal protection in the workplace. To make the PR mess a bit worse, the organizer of an Amazon warehouse walkout was fired. To some this validates Amazon as a great place to shop…but a horrible place to work. These incidents are not going to help them shake that reputation.
Note: Empathy is not only recognizing the global struggle, it also entails a deeper understanding of individual struggles of your target audience. Defining the issue, and offering a helping hand, is the only way to be perceived by the customers. Who needs a new, shiny thing, that never helps with anything? Who needs a brand that never enters a customer’s world, and never helps make living in this world better?
Self-discovery and portrayment.
A large portion of the ability to position the brand correctly and emphasize the focal points is the art of self-discovery. If you as a brand, do not know your raison d’etre, you will never be able to express it properly.
A good brand has to ponder over, more or less, 4 components and the way they are entwined with one another.
- Brand philosophy — what you’re talking about, and how you’re doing it.
Brand philosophy is an internal factor that determines the way your brand communicates with the world. You won’t find brand philosophy statements in brand guidelines, like you would typically find the mission and vision ones.
In order to determine your brand’s philosophy try to answer the following question: What is our way of doing things, and why it’s important to us?
Why do you need to determine your brand philosophy?
Simply put, it will help you choose the right direction with your development, branding and marketing. Every decision you make will abide by the philosophy you will pick for your brand.
For example, Apple’s brand philosophy dictates to make great, innovative products, and simplify them, while adding more functionality. Now, this is the rule they hang on to with their every communication.
Channeling their brand philosophy, Apple tells people exactly what to think about their brand. If people look for the most innovative products, they will likely think about an iPhone first, even though Samsung may have the same functions, or even more. This is the power of clearly defining the brand philosophy, and sticking to it.
2. The brand core personality — what your messaging is.
As we probably all know already, one of the definitions of the term ‘brand’ states that it is a collective set of experiences a customer has had with your company. Your goal as a brand owner, or a branding manager, is to make those experiences positive. Every little thing matters: even if a customer trips entering your store, they will remember that.
And what is the best way to help people enjoy communicating with your brand? Evoking emotions. This is where your brand’s personality kicks in.
Brand personality is a set of human characteristics, traits that are attributed to the brand’s name. Your brand, if it was a person. Something your customers can relate to: they cannot relate to an inanimate object, can they?
Why do you need to determine your brand personality?
Imagine a teenager named Kyle. He wears jeans, sneakers, and a printed T-shirt. Kyle lives in the moment — just like everybody from this generation. His closet is not too tidy, yet he is a vibrant and adventurous person. Who needs order anyway? On weekends, he parties: he loves meeting new people and has an endless list of friends. Kyle never lies — he likes being honest with the people around him. In his calendar, Kyle has all the festivals and concerts listed, he would never miss any of them. His go-to socialization dish is pizza.
Did you understand what brand we have described here? It was Pepsi. This brand screams youthfulness, fun, friends, and huge festivals. When you’re meeting new people at a party, most of the time you get a bottle of Pepsi to share it and socialize over it.
The personality of your brand doesn’t have to 100% correlate to the person’s own personality. The whole point is to make something within a person respond, make their heart throb a little bit.
Make people relate to your brand and evoke positive emotions within them. This will shape the customers’ perception of your company and products, to the point they will only go to you in case the need occurs. Or even more often.
3. People — who you’re talking to.
We cannot stress enough the importance of knowing exactly who your target audience is. Knowing the person you’re addressing helps you with the two points we’ve mentioned earlier — empathy and evoking emotions.
Empathy: by studying your target audience, you can point out specific issues and problems of the people you’re talking to and offer them a solution.
Emotions: defining the demographic and the living situation of your audience, you can push the right emotional buttons.
Here’s an example of the smartly used target audience analysis:
Brand: Starbucks.
Target audience: The target age of Starbucks’ market is 22 to 60, with the teen audience growing steadily.
A point of pressure: Even the 50- and 60-year-olds rely on their smartphones to make their lives easier.
An offer: Starbucks obliged in 2015 with its app for mobile orders and payments, and it was a huge success.
4. Design principles — how you’re visualizing.
Design is sometimes overlooked as a marketing tool, and a branding one. Knowing, first of all, the messaging you’d like to channel, then the personality of your target audience, you need to use design to link everything together.
The design decisions that Starbucks makes directly reflects the Trendy, and Cheerful brand personality traits. One of the primary design decisions that helped the brand manifest their messaging was their color palette.
The greens are widely associated with the youth, health, and freshness. The browns mean security, safety and reliability. This is the image they want to portray: a safe space for the youth to hang out. Exciting isn’t it?
After pointing up what your brand should be, what associations to build, you can use design tools to help build those associations in people’s minds — on the subconscious level. Apart from color, you can also use the shapes and fonts to help you accomplish that.
…And how it all works together in the outcome.
The bottom line
Let’s draw some conclusions. In order to catch people’s attention in 2021 — a year of over-proposition, you will need to become best friends with branding. Here are some of the things we advise you to rethink.
Brands are visible among dozens of similar offers.
Analyze your competitors: their design and marketing strategy. Your goal will be to stand out among them, and never create a complete copy.
Brands go beyond the functional advantages.
Yes, building products with awesome functionality is important. But brands have more to them: functionality is accompanied with care for their customers. They offer both the service, and the emotions.
Brands create associations, build stories and leave memories.
Company and brand are not synonymous notions. While a company may be selling a product or service, the brands are loved for leaving pleasant memories with their customers.
Brands are systems driven by consistency and commitment.
Branding is in no way chaotic. In order to build the needed associations within people’s minds, you need to be consistent with your messaging.
Brands become our means of social and emotional self-expressions.
Brands are a way for people to communicate their personality and privileges. They wear recyclable clothes to announce that they are sustainable. They buy certain cars to showcase their status.
Brands are companies with bigger broaden aims.
Brands are not here for the money; they always have a bigger goal: to change, to improve, to make something better.
Being a brand adds a few 0s to the price tag.
Big brands sell not only the product, but the privilege to use them. People are willing to pay more for the vibe they’ll get, using your product.
People love brands.
