It is, however, one of the most important elements to get right when starting your business. A whopping 81% of consumers will only buy from a brand they trust. And when done right, this consistent brand presentation can bring in an average of 33% revenue increase.
So if you want your brand to become a household name, let’s turn to the greats and see what branding tips we can pick up from their own strategies:
1. Create a Brand Narrative
Human beings are naturally drawn to stories. An anthropological experiment, in fact, revealed how much impact a story can bring to a brand’s bottom line. Researchers wrote fictional stories about each item bought for $1.25 a piece. The result? All items were sold on eBay for almost $8,000.
Case Study: Warby Parker
The Warby Parker catalog only includes eyeglasses and sunglasses. What makes them one of the more memorable brands today is the story around their company. The entire team took more than a year to decide who they are and how they will present themselves to the public.
In the end, they became the rebels of the eyewear industry with a cause—offering products that are fashionable yet fulfilling a social mission.
2. Elicit an Emotional Response
Successful companies do not overlook brand intangibles. These refer to your positioning, promise, personality, and the emotion that you want to be attached to your brand.
Case Study: Apple
Today, we associate Apple with innovation and novelty. There was a time, however, that this wasn’t the case.
With Apple’s ‘Get a Mac’ Campaign, the tech giant personified their brand and made it more relatable to its consumers. With more than 60 TV ads running from 2006 to 2009, Apple was able to address some of the negative perceptions about their products and show how they differ from PCs. This resulted in a 39% sales increase in 2006, with the ads’ staying power continuing until today.
3. Use Innovative Technology
Businesses have now started incorporating virtual reality, augmented reality (AR), and artificial intelligence into their brands—innovations that were once confined to the realm of video games. And for good reason.
Case Study: Home Depot
Decorating without first seeing how furniture pieces or paint colors will look inside their homes often stops people from pursuing this project. To solve this consumer problem, Home Depot launched The Project Color app in 2015. With AR technology, users can ‘preview’ how paint colors will look considering the light and shadows in the room. In 2017, they improved the app and added furniture pieces.
4. Take on a People-First Approach
Your brand identity dictates who you present to the public. How do you want to be perceived? What kind of values do you want to attach to your company’s name? Although your tagline may be a good place to start, one of our biggest branding tips is to also add a more human element to your brand identity to make it more relatable.
Case Study: Typeform
Typeform is a software company that allows users to create and customize forms for surveys and data collection. For the longest time, they carried the tagline “Make things a little more human.” In 2018, however, they did a big rebrand so the company can fully incorporate a true people-oriented brand.
After almost a year of rebranding and several iterations of this people-oriented concept, the company created a new logo and overhauled its website to represent vulnerability, empathy, and a stronger emotional connection that they help create between their users and their users’ people.
5. Create a Memorable Logo
One of our previous branding tips is to look at the intangibles of your brand. Your logo, meanwhile, is part of the tangible elements of a brand, alongside graphics, colors, sound, etc. And since your logo will be present everywhere, you need to know how to design it.
Case Study: LG
LG’s logo shows a happy winking face which exemplifies its “Life’s Good” slogan. The capital letters L and G are placed inside a red circle, representing the company’s core philosophy of humanity as they create a lasting relationship with their customers. LG also uses the 3D version for their storefronts to give it a more futuristic appeal—a fitting look for an electronics brand.
There’s both art and science involved in creating a logo. You can check out our guide on logo design tips for startups if you’re looking for ideas.
Learning From The Best
These global companies have given us valuable branding tips, including connecting with your target market on a more emotional level, creating a compelling story around your brand, and putting your target market at the core of your philosophy.
If you want your brand to have a lasting impression on your customers, like how our on-demand brand strategists helped our own clients in the past, feel free to get in touch with us today and we’ll walk you through our brand design services.
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