Before you can market your brand with promotional gifts, you need to know what it is, how it works, and what it can offer you. Here, you’ll learn more about small business branding and its categories, as well as its benefits.
Small Business Branding | What Exactly is in a Name?
If you’re wondering what a brand is and how it operates, you can use Levi’s as an example. When you think of Levi Strauss, the first thing you think of is blue jeans; the product and the name are irrevocably linked. The brand name serves to establish trust and a favorable image, a concept called brand awareness.
Small Business Branding | Branding Categories
The term “branding” is rather broad, but there are different categories, which are:
- Starting from scratch. This category can be applied to new websites as well; for instance, if you think of Amazon, you likely think of books.
- Branding a product, such as Wonder Bread, or Nike. Many products are known by their symbol.
- Adding a new product to a line, which is when a company adds a slightly higher- or lower-class brand to its name. For instance, P&G (Proctor and Gamble) has Tide at the higher end, and Cheer at the lower end.
- Extending a brand, or adding new dimension to an existing name (think to when Pepsi came out with Pepsi One). The idea is, that if a customer trusts a brand, that trust will transfer over to the new product.
- Personal branding, such as when a movie star or other celebrity trademarks their name and adds it to something like printed carrier bags.
- Service branding, which is when a service is branded. For example, when most people hear “triple A”, they think of the automobile service company.
Small Business Branding | How it Works
Branding is heavily customer-driven, so understanding how it works should begin with an attempt to understand the customer. When creating a brand, it needs to fulfill a need, establish itself, and elicit a favorable response.
Small Business Branding Benefits
Now that you know a bit about how branding works, you need to learn how it can benefit your business. The biggest benefits are the abovementioned trust, favorable image and credibility, which can establish your product as better than that of the competition. Consumer loyalty, positioning, and profit are other advantages. All of the above factors are related; trust leads to loyalty, which can increase leverage and therefore profits.
Learning more about the basics of branding, and about how it works can be a benefit to any small business owner. Building a brand takes money and time- the most famous brands weren’t built overnight. As social media grows, so does your chance to reach a wider audience with a product or service they’ve never seen before.
Wayne Barker writes for UKPrintPrice – the experts in promotional gifts like printed mugs and carrier bags.
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