With social media, consumers get exposed to new brands every day. This can be great for consumers who have plenty of options and are able to do research to find the best one, but it makes it harder for businesses. The barrier to entry for new businesses has been made much less severe thanks to the invention of the internet where anyone can create a website and start selling their products or services online. Working on the assumption that you and your competitors first have a solid and useful product, businesses have to go the extra mile in order to stand out from their competitors. The best way to do this now is through their branding.
Typically when people hear the term “brand” or “branding” their minds go straight to logos, slogans, advertisements, etc. Now, while elements such as these are commonly used for this purpose and do play a large role in portraying a certain brand, the act of branding encompasses so much more than just words and colours. In reality, your brand is expressed through your entire customer experience. This includes everything from whatever product or service you are providing being fit for purpose and being delivered on time, a brand's social media experience and any interactions your customers have with your business be it in person with employees or trying to navigate your website. For this reason you can try to position your brand a certain way through marketing campaigns all you like, but if customers don’t feel the message is consistent with their actual dealings with your business, then all this extra effort in branding will be doing more harm than good. Ultimately, your brand will be how your customers perceive you in reality, not what you wish for them to think of you.
When your customers do in fact perceive you in the way you wish for them to, this is where you can begin to reap the many rewards that come with effectively building a strong brand. One such benefit that comes with this is that you can build trust with people. Customers who are new to doing business in your industry or who are looking to change things up will always first notice the business who have successfully built up a strong and credible reputation and will express to people exactly what they can expect with little doubts. Additionally, the trust built from having a strong brand will also result in strong customer loyalty and can help build lasting relationships which everyone has something to gain from. These principles are true for all kinds of businesses, not just large B2C corporations with their products in stores worldwide. It is especially true when dealing with subscription based businesses where trust is vital to the process in order to keep customers on board and this is done by consistently sticking to a strong and credible brand identity and improving upon it year after year.
Here at Kooba we have built up an impressive portfolio of clients over the years from leading by example and always having a clear and strong identity as a leading brand in our space, with our brand new stunning website design, active online presence and carefully fostering great relationships with our clients being some of the ways we have gone about developing our presence as a brand. This is also beneficial not only for our clients, but also for our employees as it allows us to feel part of a team and that we are building something together instead of aimlessly going about our day. This results in an award winning agency working with some major brands both in Ireland and Berlin and lends itself to increasing success year on year.
The decision to purchase from a brand is much more an emotional one than it is logical. While it is obviously important to get value for your money, most people would rather pay extra for a more positive and convenient experience when spending their hard earned money. Now consider doing business online. There are many bad web experience pitfalls your customers can face which can quickly turn them away from your website, and as mentioned earlier competition is as plentiful as ever so your time to impress potential customers is sparse. While it is important to have nice imagery and informative content on your website, this will not make up for any shortcomings related to your customers journey. We have been fortunate enough to design and even years later redesign client websites with their brand principles at the heart of any decisions made, while simultaneously looking at it through the eyes of the customer and ensuring they can navigate through the website quickly and efficiently and achieve what they set out to. Being able to seamlessly do business without any frustrations will do wonders to position your brand as a trustworthy and reliable place to do business.
