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Branding is the heart of every successful business. Take a look at any successful company, and you will see they are all highly branded. Above all, knowing what these terms mean will help you build your brand effectively.
It’s crucial to understand what your target audience wants, what they’re looking for in a brand, and why they would want to buy your products. If your marketing is not effective, then you will have increased costs to overcome customer indifference with your brand.
This article will provide some basic marketing terms that can be used as a reference for building, promoting, and defining your brand.
The Most Basic Branding Industry Terms you should Know
Brand Ambassador
An ambassador is anyone employed and tasked with being the face of your company. It can be an employee of your company, an executive, a social media influencer, or a salesperson.
Brand
A brand is the sum of people’s perception of a company’s culture, customer service, reputation, advertising, and identity. This perception is to customers, the experience they have interacting with your brand. It is what differentiates your organization from another.
Branding
Branding is the process of researching, developing, and implementing unique features to your brand for customers to associate your brand with your products or services.
- Check this ultimate guide to branding
Brand Architecture
Brand Architecture is the organizational structure of your company’s portfolio of brands, products, and/ or services. It can be a house of brands, branded house, an endorsed house, and a hybrid house.
Alphabet, the owner of Google, is an example of this with Google focusing on what they know best, search and advertising, while brands like sidewalk and calico operate as individual companies in their own market verticals.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is simply defined as the extent to which consumers or your target audience are familiar with the image of your brand. When people know about your brand and what you do, it leads to your brand being popular. This results in sales because consumers buy from brands they are aware of.
Brand Equity
Brand Equity is the commercial value that comes from customers’ perception of your brand rather than your product. Think about Nike, consumers are willing to pay more for Nike products than they are for other products. Look at this marketing discussion from marketing students on how Nike was able to drive up sales by increasing prices.
- Check out this blog about what brand equity is.
Brand Extension
A brand extension is sometimes a category extension. This is when people know a brand for one type of product and starts selling different products. One big example of this is apple moving from personal computers into MP3 players. Companies use brand extensions to give their new products an audience immediately. This is because brand extensions leverage an already existing customer base.
Band Identity
Brand identity is the visible elements of a brand, such as color, design, and logo. These elements identify and distinguish a brand in consumers’ minds. In today’s competitive business environment, a bad perception of a brand can be harmful. This bad perception could result from a bad-looking logo or even a bad choice of color. It could lead to the termination of relationships with current or potential customers.
Brand Image
A set of beliefs held by a specific brand are its brand image. When customers have a perception about a company or brand, it is usually from what the company or brand stands for.
Brand Management
Brand management is the use of marketing techniques to build and maintain a brand over time. This includes managing the tangible elements of your brand, like your visual style guides, and intangible – how your customers perceive your brand – especially done through a verbal style guide. Your brand has a personality, and it should stay the same all the time, the only thing that can change is your tone.
- Here is a blog about brand management.
Brand Message
A brand message is the specific value proposition for a company’s product or service. It is what companies use to tell their customers, or potential customers what makes them different from their competitors. Brand use messaging to inform their audience what they stand for.
Brand Strategy
A brand strategy is a long-term plan to achieve a series of goals that result in identifying and understanding the preference of your customer. It is the plan to create, grow and support your brand to sustain it in the market.
Co-branding
Co-branding can be a very effective way to grow your online store’s customer base, increase sales revenues, and gain instant credibility. It allows you to leverage the power of your brand combined with the brand of an established store or vendor.
The key is finding brands that have synergy with your product or service offerings. You might also consider co-branding with products that complement yours, augment them or easily fit into the same category.
Co-branding can be a great marketing strategy to expand your product line, but it’s also great for strategic partnerships. You can open up possibilities for partnership with brands that don’t offer the same products, but do offer complementary ones.
Collateral
These are all the materials a company uses for marketing, and they may comprise of email templates, data sheets, brochures, business cards, case studies, email signatures and so much more. These days, in one way or another, companies are reaching out to customers in digital format.
The ubiquitous nature of the internet has made it easier for customers to search for goods and services online. What’s more, social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have helped brands connect with their target audience easier than ever. Just about any visual representation of a company can be used in email templates, data sheets, brochures etc. for marketing purposes.
Culture
A brand’s culture is an evolving entity and must be always communicated in the right manner so that outsiders know what you stand for and how you wish to be perceived. The culture of a brand is also important to it’s longevity and will directly help the company navigate through difficult times and still maintain it’s footing in the market.
The brand culture must be combined with well-planned and tried marketing strategies for that particular brand to be known and sold well. The main aim of any company that is looking to be successful should be well-recognized by its stakeholders and well-communicated externally as well as internally by having tangible translations of their values.
Customer Service
Good customer service will reap rewards for any company. Whether it is a bonus from a happy customer or a business’s reputation being salvaged thanks to an extremely helpful approach, companies should not overlook this vital channel of communication. It is the responsibility of every stakeholder in a company to ensure that good customer service is at the forefront of everything that they do. This includes the way in which they interact with customers through all touchpoints available.
Logo
A logo is the identity of your company; it is the face of your company. A logo ranks in the top five for things that come into contact with prospective customers. It’s important to have a stamp of approval for your brand that matches up with the value you are trying to represent to the market.
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