Key Principles for Success in Branding

Branding is the most important marketing discipline as it underpins all other marketing activities. And although it isn’t a channel per say, we can treat it as such for the purposes of this article.

We must however highlight that there is often confusion between the perception of a brand and the creation of brand assets. This is because many aspects of branding are not in a marketer’s control. For this reason we focus on the principles that marketers can control, and specifically the creation of brand assets such as a logo, a name, a writing style and a colour scheme.

Marketing should always begin with an understanding of the market, although it rarely does, because ‘doing’ is prioritised ahead of ‘strategising’ in the majority of cases. It’s also very easy to get lost in the ‘fun’ of creating brand assets.

However, this can become a major drag on a brand’s appeal further down the line. If a brand is designed with the founding team’s or designer’s desires in mind and not those of the target market, then it may fail to take hold. This can lead to major additional expense if brand iteration or re-invention is required.

This concern is often difficult to diagnose when the brand assets developers, namely the logo, colour scheme, fonts and writing style, look excellent. Yet, they simply may not sit well with the expectations of potential customers.

Let’s consider a team at a fledgling startup. Typically, they will brainstorm a name, select a URL, and start to create a logo before establishing a clear picture of the target audience.

This contrasts with the approach typically taken by global brands, who invest in R&D and take months, if not years, to develop products with a clearly defined proposition. This upfront investment then pays dividends down the line.

When developing a market analysis, some aspects feature in most market assessments. These include a definition of the target market as well as its size and scale. Once a business has this information, the marketing team can then develop a brief for a creative team.

Every marketing activity generates an emotional reaction in the audience. For this reason, a design team will need to translate the market information into a set of marketing assets that evoke the required emotions.

This simple process of translating market information into emotions, provides a cause and effect relationship from which design assets can be evaluated. Marketing and design teams can work together objectively, while setting the parameters for creativity.

Moving beyond this, a more nuanced definition of the process takes into account the marketing environment at the point of perception. This requires adapting a set of brand assets according to the channels used. Channels vary significantly in engagement time and the motivation of a perceiver. For example, a commuter may see tube advertising when stressed, or social media advertising when relaxing at home.

Design teams can use these differences to adapt the brand's features for each channel, while considering brand consistencies at a macro level. The balance between these two viewpoints can be hotly contested when competing agencies responsible for different channels.

Being distinctive is one of the most important attributes that a brand can have. This is understandable, as a brand needs to stand out from the crowd in order to be memorable.

However, distinctiveness is usually developed through consistent exposure to a few attributes as opposed to infrequent exposure to many. This is a valuable lesson to learn for startups that regularly begin with rough edges before streamlining through time. This can be seen most clearly in the development of logos. In fact, as we’ve shown in our analysis of Apple’s and Nike’s brands, logos frequently become more, not less, distinctive once additional complexity is removed.

Mastering the discipline

These three principles underpin the development of all brand assets by providing a strategic framework. Beyond this, the experience and creativity of the design team will have a major bearing on whether this information can be capitalised upon.

We hope you enjoyed reading. You may like to discover more principles for marketing success. Alternatively, if you have any further questions, please do get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you.

Until next time.