Everybody has already heard that Branding is essential to any company, right? But, what is Branding, actually?

Branding is the marketing practice of creating a name, symbol or design that identifies and differentiates a product/label/company from others. Your brand is your promise to your customer. It tells them what they can expect from your products and services and gives you a margin over your competitors. Your brand comes from who you are, who you want to be and who people perceive you to be.

Your brand influences how customers interact with your company and how you interact with them, so without a clear brand, your company may struggle to communicate your mission or purpose. 

There are 3 reasons to care about Branding:

1. Builds your reputation
2. Helps you connect with your customers
3. Simplify your products and services

Now let me give you a visual example for you to understand Branding and put it in practice in your company.

There is a brand we made up called Naturalle which sells clothes made with the purest cotton. They care a lot about the environment, all their production releases the least polution level and they don’t use slave labor. The clothing style is really basic, fresh and with light colors. Now, based on this short briefing, we have here 2 options of logos for you to relate with this company’s Branding:

Aspect 1: The clothing basic style is reflected on the sans serif typography logo (image 2), not in the serif one, which gives the traditional look to the brand.

Aspect 2: Even though we used almost the same colors, the tons vary. As you see, the most pastel green (image 2) fits better with basic and natural descriptions. On the the other hand, on first image the green is stronger and calls attention, exactly the opposite of the brand briefing.

Aspect 3: The irregular edges on the circle on image 2 takes us to something manual, rustic and less sophisticated. Which combines perfectly with our briefing. The image 1, on the other hand, has a perfect round shape that reveals the opposite.

So if you want to build an unbreakable brand culture you should get deeper in this matter. Take a look at this awesome article from Nearfinderus, for example. The more the better! Branding is a very important and complex theme. One of the ways of getting your business branded is by creating a Design Style Guide. You should define do’s and don’ts for your company’s visual appearance. This grows consistency across your products and promotional materials. Because by getting a concise look, customers can feel comfortable. And if you haven’t noticed yet how branding is all around us, there is a ranking of the 25 most valuable brands of 2016 by Webhostinggeeks.com which proves it.