The Power of Branding
How do you get people to want what you’re selling? Sure you have a quality product or service, but most of the time people buy things for other, more intangible reasons. If a certain company is all class and professionalism, then people might buy because they want to appear classy and professional themselves. This, in a nutshell, is branding. It is cultivating consistency in the message you put out to the world about who you are as a company. Done right, branding becomes a kind of shorthand. Your logo becomes instantly recognizable and communicates something about who you are and what you do without saying a word. Some of the biggest brands in the world (Nike, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola) have one thing in common: They have branded themselves effectively across the board. They use their logo in their branding and all their marketing, and so you intuitively know in a millisecond what the company is and what they stand for.
It is especially important for us to brand ourselves in our online businesses, because the Web is very visual and because we do business across many different platforms. We might have our blog, our forum, our products and services, our social media presence, and so on, and it’s important to brand ourselves across these. So your Twitter background may use the logo from your blog or a similar picture. Your products might refer to the same website. Focus on branding yourself artistically and philosophically in all of your products and services so that what you are placing before the public is more than just an individual product or service. It’s a united front via your brand that people can identify with.
