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If you have recently launched your startup, you will understand the importance of your brand. You are exposed to tens of brands every day. 

They subliminally enter into our consciousness making us implicitly aware of their presence. Some brands are so integral within popular culture that we can recognise a company by a mere symbol, a jingle or a typeface.

Designing and honing your brand doesn’t simply mean creating a doodle and choosing some funky font and colours for your website. A brand goes beyond the logo, to something much deeper. Your branding needs to tell your customer base who you are, what you represent and how you work. Your image will set you apart from your business competitors and should bring something new to your niche market. It is difficult to compete with your already established industry rivals. However, with effective branding, you can prove how innovative, unique and forward thinking your startup is.

Instant Recognition

As a new company, you need to be instantly recognisable. This is why it’s vital that you place enough emphasis on your branding. If you are selling custom made baby tee shirts to wealthy parents, your brand needs to connect with this market. There’s no point designing a slick, corporate style logo for such a product. Instead, you will need a softer approach, and a logo that is a little more informal, fun and gentle, emulating the baby tee shirts that you are looking to sell. Forget the Times New Roman typeface, you need a font management system that will implement a more naive font across all of your content.

If you can create a brand, a logo, a slogan and a business name that resonates with the market you are looking to tap, you will develop a momentum to take beyond your business launch.

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Reputation

With an effective brand, you can develop trust within the consumer market. With your logo on a product, you could be implicitly giving a product your tick of approval, adding value to it. Coupled with exceptional customer service, an emphasis on over delivering and developing an online presence, your brand has every chance of becoming synonymous with quality and excellence. A professional look can create the ethos of expertise and authority giving confidence to your potential customer base.

Your Workforce

If your staff team cares about the brand that they are working for, their morale will be more positive, and they will be more productive. An excellent brand isn’t all about the font, the logo, and the slogan. It’s also about the ethos of a company. You want your brand to be synonymous with a fair, tolerant and forward thinking company. You want people to want to work for you, attracting the brightest candidates, the leading minds and the most talented experts in their fields. While you might consider your branding to be the most important customer facing asset for your startup, you shouldn’t neglect the power that it can have in-house. With an excellent business vision that your employees buy into, you can create a powerful, dynamic and positive brand.

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Advertising

Whether you are keen on marketing your startup online via social media channels, through more traditional forms of media such as television and radio, or across billboards and newspaper adverts, your branding will play an important role. Being instantly recognisable, you need to ensure that there is a positive feeling evoked by your logo. You don’t want consumers to view your billboard advert only to recall your negative reviews online. Instead, you want them to think about speedy delivery times, courtesy calls, and fast communication. From your website to your blog and from your flyers to your radio jingle, your branding needs to remain consistent across all channels.

Take your branding and logo ideas to a small focus group and take on board their feedback. Market research can be the best tool and money well spent to ensure that your branding has the impact that you have envisioned. If they tell you that you need a less wordy slogan, act upon it. Don’t be too proud to take on board the advice of others, otherwise, there is no point in carrying out market research in the first place.

Designing your branding should be an exciting process. This is the logo, slogan, and typeface that you want to portray your brand for many years many generations to come. With any luck, you could be joining the likes of Vegemite, Coles, and Qantas with recognisable, long lasting and dynamic branding.