Branding Campaigns
BRANDING CAMPAIGNS
What is the first thing that comes to mind when your customers think of your company? Great service? Low prices? Clever advertising or a catchy logo? Each of these elements is an important factor in building awareness for your company and for your site. In marketing circles, this awareness is called branding. It's crucial because when people need a product or service, they'll reach for what they are familiar with.
A brand is more than a logo or company colors; it encompasses the experience a customer has with a company. Simply defined, the brand is the immediate image, emotion or message people experience when they think of a company or a product.
Brand association: This is what people think of when they hear or see a brand name. For example, most people think of safety when they think of Volvo. Safety is Volvo's brand association.
Brand name: The word or words by which a company or a product is known. An effective brand name gives a good first impression and evokes positive associations. This can be done subtly, as with Southwest Airlines or HP, or not so subtly, as with Happy Meal or Yahoo!.
Brand personality: Here we focus on emotional experience of a brand. Companies often use a representative, such as Cindy Crawford for L'Oreal; an animal, such as the Taco Bell Chihuahua, or an inanimate object, such as the Rock of Gibraltar as used by Prudential Insurance Co., to give their products the desired personality in these examples, glamour, cute quirkiness or reliability/longevity, respectively.
Logo: A textual and/or a graphic image that identifies a company or a product while communicating the brand. Sometimes the logo becomes more than just letters or shapes and is inseparable from the brand association. McDonald's Golden Arches are more than a big yellow "M"; they impart a sense of place, arches representing an entry to something grand, and product, golden evoking images of fries and other fast food.
Positioning: Where a company or a product fits in the marketplace. Position is determined by a company's core business or product, the benefits it provides to consumers and society, and the advantages it has over the competition. For example, Honda's position might be summarized as, "We manufacture motor vehicles in a wide range of models that provide comfort, reliability and fuel efficiency at competitive prices."
Tag line: A catchy, memorable phrase or a sentence that expands on the logo concept to further describe the company or product brand. Successful tag lines are so catchy that people can recognize the company by the tag line alone. Think of "Just do it" or "Don't leave home without it."
In summary, the objective of a branding campaign is to impress your firm's identity upon potential customers, not necessarily to entice users to visit your site or to capture an immediate sale, although both of these could result from a branding-oriented banner. Because of this specific objective, branding campaigns are more appropriate for certain phases of your business's growth than for others.