How Your Brand Image Serves As The 51st Shade Of A Successful Business

If someone told you they love your brand, it means that they love your brand for the way it appears to them. That’s how people know a brand by the image it projects.

You may put strenuous effort in building your brand and pour hefty cash in the marketing to make your brand sing like a canary, but if it lacks the ‘face’, no one’s going to know the brand that made news till midnight struck.

About 77% of businesses these days desire a brand that is strong and bolsters their overall growth. While a brand is a level-up for a business, the latter gets the chance to display its products, services, and prominence in the industry. Here, the contours a brand creates determine its path of growth and how it creates its universal façade.

If you’re a brand that has pulled all of its priorities together, 91% of the customers you made might be ready to swear by your authenticity and exceptional service. But how do you make a brand authentic?

Depending on the characters you choose for your brand, your business appears in a different light or maybe even in 50 shades of mistakes, failures, or success to the customers.

In this article, we’ll show you how adding a great brand image as the 51st shade of your business can be the herald you’ve been waiting for. We’ll boil it down to the following:

Significance of brand image
How is your image different from your brand?
How you can rock this super shade
Without wasting a moment, here’s your way to discovering the 51st shade of business success.

Significance Of A Brand Image

None except Kotler can paint a better picture of an image:

An image is the set of beliefs, ideas, and impression that a person holds regarding an object.

While your part of the brand is concealed, your brand image is the object, an accumulation of your efforts perceived by the customer. Your image will spark expectations unique to each consumer, which is where precise targeting and consistency become nothing less than a necessity.

You can be an Apple fan and love the smooth performance. On the other hand, you can still be an Apple fan and yet dislike the struggling battery life!

However, a sleekly crafted brand image has yielding effects. Customers can see your true self through it. This isn’t just about having a fancy logo, website, packaging, or the number of social media followers; it’s the aesthetic representation of your brand’s core messages.

While all the benefits remain, brand image is sometimes tucked in the brand identity category dimension – where both terms are used interchangeably, and yet incorrectly. Let’s talk about it.

BRAND IDENTITY AND BRAND IMAGE: FINE LINE, BIG DIFFERENCE

Though there’s a thin line between image and identity, anyone can get easily lost in the fogs of confusion. But let’s take a shortcut to understanding both in simple terms.

Brand identity and image are like two ends of a traditional phone receiver. One is transmitter and the other is a receiver. Brand identity talks and the image responds.

So, What Does Brand Identity Do?

Through brand identity, you express your message, vision, products, services and other areas with your customers. You speak in a language the other responding party understands. Your tone, your ideas, language and intent you want to share with the other determines the identity.

Your brand identity will tell about who you are, what kind of aspects you are showcasing, how you represent yourself and how your company is doing.

More often than not, your brand identity comprises of the internal brand elements, such as your brand’s special features, attributes, qualities, performance, services, support and so on.

For that reason, brand identity comes along as a result of brand strategies and techniques that aid in communicating the company ideas to the customers. Brand identity is the culmination of the process that highlights the company’s vision, its mission, position, relationship, and etc.

And The Brand Image?

On the other side, what the customers hear is the brand image. They unify the brand’s idea of a product as per their understanding. The passive image projected to the consumer end widely varies in what they are perceiving.

It’s the connector of brand identity or a mediator that connects the brand to a customer. Or say, your targets get introduced to your business, looking at the image you have. When they interact with you, the resulting ideas, thoughts, expressions, and actions become the key features of brand image.

On the basis of their interaction and engagement with a brand persona, customers can link themselves with the brand. That brings us to another area that the communion of brand image and consumer creates: user-experience.

While a brand identity is a business-focused area, the persona provides a visual and practical experience. For instance, if your brand specializes in mobile app development, the ease of access and usability it provides your customers creates your image respectively. The consumer experience becomes real-time and can be both positive and negative.

FEW IDEAS ON HOW TO OUTSHINE YOUR BRAND IMAGE FOR A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS

Now that you know that identity and image had been a close call, you can jump right into learning about what you can do to make your brand persona stand out.

And finally, when your business is all good with its 50 shades of rise, here is some word on how to grab the 51st.

Make Brand Identity Your Priority

Every effort that you make might seem to fall short to deliver exactly what you mean. At times, you need to focus on creating a brand identity.

Make sure you’ve touched on your customer pain-points like reaching out to them via their favored media. The best thing to do is to experiment with strategies – digital or traditional – to evaluate what your audience appreciates. Create the identity that appeals than repels.

Get A Great Logo

Your brand’s logo design doesn’t make you your brand’s image, but still represents an eminent point of it. Search what kind of logos your competitors are using. See what differentiates them.

Similarly, look at what differentiates you from the others. Use the colors that represent business values, symbols and shapes associated with your company behaviors.

Remain Consistent

Whatever case follows, consistency is the thing that makes the difference. Businesses striving to nail their image must have a consistent pattern in their brand identity, colors, logo and so on.

Because of consistency in your approach, your brand should be able to build awareness and develop the trust of your customers. If you leave your brand image prone to multiple interpretations, your brand image loses the reason of its importance.

Choose Your Medium

Your audience is the true perceiver of your brand, which is it’s important to choose the medium where your audience is most active at.

If you’re thinking social media, you could build brand awareness through several means. If your target audience is broad, sorting the best advertising means can help you out.

Be Clear On What To Do

You can’t possibly expect your brand strategies to equal the expectations of your clients. Setting realistic goals and organizing your business according to an effective marketing plan.

Audit your brand performance on the media it is running and find out the consensus. Wherever you find the latter, it means your brand is gradually gaining the repute.

Even if there are contradictions, you can get the edge on how to communicate better with your audience.

Use Your Creativity

Your brand image is a product of many concepts, where creativity is one. Leaving it out will hinder your growth. Customers are drawn more to brands answering their concerns with creative solutions than brands using the generic approach. It shows that you have the creative potential and can expand your brand’s image in many dimensions.

Opt For A Brand Refresh

Brand refresh or rebranding seems like the right thing to do when you feel like you’ve made a mistake in your branding experience and want to fix it with the right strategy.

Rebranding your business or an aspect of it redefines the way your brand acts and interacts with the customers. You can fix internal issues, correct malpractices, and hence, strengthen your brand identity and its public image.

While building you brand image, you could come across a variety of shortcuts to boost your process. These gimmicks could be a way to ear you temporarily boost, but can hurt your long-term goals.

The only thing that pays off in the end is your hard work, where cheap tricks and black-hat practices shouldn’t substitute it.

IS YOUR BRAND READY FOR THE 51ST SHADE?

Phew.

We made it! Understanding a brand image can be a tough job where building it can be even harder. When you know that your brand is authentic, has the potential, and can live up to its mission, it’s now the time to focus on your consumer service, your brand image and your creativity.

In this article, we’ve discussed how your brand image becomes the most significant element for your brand when it’s understood and projected well for the customer.

Any business, either small or big, can make a great difference when it pays attention. It’s time you pay attention too.