The Importance of Building a Brand Around Your Small Business
Branding Your Business Can Change Everything
Building a brand around your small business can be a game-changer. Businesses sell goods and services, but a brand represents so much more. By identifying the values important to your brand, you can find customers that align with your business. Think about why you started your business in the first place.
What are the values that you want your company to uphold? What images do you want people to see in their minds when they think of your business? These are some of the elements that make up an organization’s brand. It is essentially a collection of thoughts, ideas, and images that people think of when your company is mentioned.
It is up to you as the owner to identify what that should look like and convey it to others that are attracted to those ideals.
Visual Branding: Logos, Fonts, and Colors
An important element of branding is how your company comes across visually. Use aesthetic elements to convey the style and feel your brand has. A good example is the website and blog The Minimalists.
The ideas behind their blog and movement are all about cutting back on excessive consumption and living with less. If you look at their website design, it is completely in line with those ideas and is quite ‘minimalistic’ itself. By removing excessive text, links, and images on their blog, they are immediately conveying the ideas behind their ideology through visual cues.
What kind of design should your company have?
Modern?
Earthy?
There are so many to choose from, but in the end there is only one that aligns best with your business. To get started, try to think of several options and see what people think of them. You can sketch out some rough ideas or even have a designer help with initial drafts.
Generating Emotions
Coca Coca is one of the best in the world at branding. They focus their campaigns on the feeling of happiness and try to generate that emotion from us every time we see their logo and marketing campaigns.
So think about what you want your customers to feel when they think of your company. How do you want them to see you? Brainstorming a list of ideas is a great way to get started on defining your brand.