Sarah McCartney - 100 Great Branding Ideas

Copyright 2012 Sarah McCartney Cover art: Opal Works Co. Ltd.

First published in 2012 by Marshall Cavendish Business
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Whether you run a multinational or a social enterprise, a charity or a one-man-band, you have a brand.

Branding is all about deciding where you stand, and what makes you different from the others, then showing and telling the difference as clearly as you can to make you brand stand out.

Everything that a brand is and does forms part of its identity.

Building a brands identity makes it more recognisable, familiar and reassuringas long as you get it right. If its all going well, then people are more likely to chose your brand, use it and tell their friends about it.

Your branding is working when youve got people saying, Yes, I know them. Theyre the people who ...

... have the big blue building in the centre of town.

... make those delicious biscuits.

... sponsor our football team.

... designed my favourite jacket.

Whats important is that people remember the good things about your brand, come back to it or recommend it to people they know, and dont get you mixed up with someone else.

In this book, there are 100 branding ideas; some are about brand strategy and some about specific actions you could take. Use them to give you direction, or to help evaluate the branding youre already doing. You can read it from start to finish, or you can also pick a page at random.

All the stories are here to make a point, not just as anecdotes. I use them to shed light on a situation that might arise again, and which you might approach differently for your own brand.

They wont all be relevant to you right now but some of them will, and I do hope they give you something new to think about, debate and adapt for your own use.

Brands are peoples and organisations intellectual property, so youll have to adapt some of the examples Ive written about before you can apply a similar idea to your own organisation. But thats where innovation and creativity come in; define what you can and cant do, and this will help you to invent a your own solution to a particular problem.

PS

Point 101: Tell the truth. In these days of social media and the speed that news can travel around the Internet, if you try to put a glossy face on a grubby reality, youll get found out. The best branding comes from building a great organisation, then letting people know all about it.

KNOW WHAT A BRAND IS

People think they know what brands are, but often they dont. Ive heard business people say, Oh no, we dont really have a brand, we just run a business. Clothes shoppers will tell me, I dont buy brands, theyre too expensive. I go to the Gap, Next or Uniqlo.

A brand isnt something thats too expensive for most of us to buythats a luxury brand. A brand is any product or service (and occasionally an individual) that stands out from the others around it because of its positioning or its personality. All organisations are brand owners whether they like it or not, and theyve a responsibility for how other people regard that brand.

The most important thing is to stand out.

A brand is much more than a logo or a name. As well as its easily defined features, like its colour and its location, its made up of the feelings it evokes in people. Each individual will feel something different about the brand according to personal experience, and this is something a brand owner cant control.

However you should still give it your best shot. As the brand owner, its your responsibility to influence the way people think about your brand, and you do that by taking care of each experience your customers have when they come into contact with the organisation. Dividing a brand into positioning and personality comes from an excellent academic book, Branding In Action, by Graham Hankinson and Philippa Cowking.

When they talk about positioning, they mean where your brands fit compared with all the others you compete with. Where do you fit in the price versus quality scale? And what do people use your brand for?

With personality, Hankinson & Cowkings book includes things that you definitely control, like the typeface you use your corporate colours your logo, where youre based, where people come into contact with you.

Personality is also made up of perceptions which are much more difficult to pin down. How do people see you? Are you traditional or modern? Are you safe or risky? Do people think youre really good value or cheap? Do people think your excellent quality or way too expensive, or both?