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The benefits of building a strong, recognised brand

Your brand is essentially the identity you choose to give your business or your products and reflects the key messages you want to communicate to your target market. It represents your promise to your customers; it sets you apart from your competitors, and creates loyalty.

Your brand is a combination of different elements and may include:

• A logo or symbol
• A name
• Your company colour(s) or combination of colours. 
• Standard fonts
• The 'position' you take in the market

It is how you put these elements together that makes you easily recognisable and memorable to your customers. It is also the combination of these things that tells your key customers what makes you stand out in the marketplace and why they should choose you.

Or from your customer's perspective, your brand is a promise of what they expect to be delivered or experienced by using your business, products or service. It is the essence of your business or product and something your customers learn to trust (or not trust!). They may even become emotionally attached to it.

More importantly,with other things being equal, your brand can be the deciding factor that sways a person to buy from you rather than your competitors.

Building a strong brand that is easily recognised by your target market has many advantages, and will enable you to achieve:

• More effective targeting of the market you want to attract
• More accurate and effective distribution networks
• Increased customer loyalty
• Reduced long term marketing costs

Once developed, a brand will provide an 'umbrella' under which other products can be offered, providing your business significant economic and strategic advantages.

All of these things help your business to be more profitable, more focused and sustainable in both the short term and the long term.

According to Kevin Roberts (of Saatchi and Saatchi fame), brands done well can become 'Lovemarks'.

"Lovemarks reach your heart as well as your mind, creating an intimate, emotional connection that you just can't live without. Ever.

Take a brand away and people will find a replacement. Take a Lovemark away and people will protest its absence. Lovemarks are a relationship, not a mere transaction. You don't just buy Lovemarks, you embrace them passionately."

How to build a successful brand and get people to know your brand

The big companies often go about building their brands with large scale brand awareness campaigns. For the likes of McDonalds, Coke etc they have the benefit of very large budgets and can afford to spend it on mass media campaigns just telling everyone how wonderful their brand is.