Why is corporate branding important?
Products are worth far more than unbranded products. In addition, history has shown for almost 100 years that people prefer brands if they have a choice.
Brands have an almost surreal power over people by being able to create perceptions of services, products and companies. They can create language and, in some cases, change the rules of the game and completely seamlessly link messages, products and service provision together in such a way as to supply additional value. On many occasions, enough additional value that many people are envious of those capable of selling products with far greater profitability than the rest of the market.
Great profitability
Brands are a visual encapsulation of the unique emotional properties that people ascribe to a specific product or service. They give you a distinctive character and an individual focus. Where you often need a long presentation to get your message across, brands are able to do this just by their presence. In a fraction of a second, they have communicated their relationship to quality, price, innovation and other important qualities. When you are exposed to a strong brand, you associate it with some positive qualities that you are willing to pay more for. And this is what makes the biggest difference between the best brands and the rest.
Creating affiliation, identifying yourself
Corporate brands have an identity and, with this, a personality that links employees, products, services and customers to the organisation. They start a process of socialisation with a view to getting people to identify with the brand - both inside and outside the organisation. A brand is, therefore, so much more than a logo. It represents the corporate culture, it represents expectations of both the established, but also the future. For this reason, the brands that are managed in an active and conscious manner will create more additional value and profitability for their owners. Some of these values are achieved after just a very short time.
Focus and a deeper meaning
Strong, focused brands with a deeper meaning are genuine, reliable and, perhaps most importantly, are permeated with a meaningful objective - a Purpose - designed to provide a direction for the most important commercial property a company can own and protect. If you remove the identity from a brand, you will no longer have a brand. And without a Purpose, you will lack both the direction and the actual basis for the brand becoming established. The reason we are here is often what motivates the employee to go to work every day and stretch himself a bit further.
Customers don't want to be disappointed
Customers are often the obvious reason for developing strong brands for a company. Having a powerful "sales tool" that means that the brand almost sells itself has always been a great advantage. A good corporate brand - or good brand for the company - helps to make the company relevant to the target group , but can equally contribute to making products and product portfolios easier to sell. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance to know whether the brand is doing the job it is supposed to be doing.
Employees desire a sense of belonging
The fact that employees choose to work for attractive employers is something you don't think about when you have more good applicants than positions vacant. But if you are experiencing difficulty getting the best candidates in the industry, you will quickly notice that you have a problem and would have liked to act as a magnet for the best candidates.
Investors have feelings
It is wrong to say that owners and investors have no feelings. How can you otherwise say that you are pricing goodwill into a share, have high or low expectations of a share or give a share a P/E in relation to what the investment market "believes". Being an attractive corporate brand in the investment market is, therefore, of vital importance to ensure a supply of capital so that you can continue to invest and develop the company. The trust and the good links the brand creates with its owners and investors are the same ties of trust that you generally see the brand create with both employees and customers.
Now that we know that customers prefer brands and know that brands enjoy far greater profitability, it is not difficult to do the sums.
That is why we at Mission design successful brands by gathering investors, suppliers, employees and customers around a meaningful purpose.
5 questions you should ask yourself
How do our customers view our brand?
Have we become more attractive to our owners, employees and customers over the past while?
Would you recommend to friends or family to start work at the company?
If you were an investor and had 1 million to invest, would the company be an obvious choice?
What could possibly be missing?
