What is branding?

In a nutshell, branding refers to the deliberate actions you take to influence people’s perception of your product or service. To quote author and entrepreneur Seth Godin, “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.” In other words, branding consists of every opportunity you have to influence those decisions—from the way you come up with a brand name, design your logo and advertisements to the way you build your website and layout your store.

Types of branding

Because every type of business involves different interactions with customers, they each involve different branding opportunities and challenges. Let’s define the different types of branding and discuss their particular nuances:

Product branding

Product branding refers to the design, quality, functionality, packaging and pricing that form a product’s identity. Product branding aims to make an item stand out in the marketplace, so consumers can easily identify and choose it among others.

Service branding

Service branding is less tangible than product branding and involves many more variables, making it a much more difficult endeavor. A service business has to ensure that its operating environment, the employees and company policies create a unified identity.

Online branding 

Online branding focuses on the way a company represents itself online. Social media marketing, email marketing, blogging and website design offer opportunities to strengthen your brand. 

Offline branding

Offline branding is the way a consumer interacts with a brand in the physical world. It’s your brick-and-mortar signage, interior decor and scent. It’s the lighting, the playlist and the affect of your employees. It’s the events you host and the outdoor advertisements you utilize. Basically, it’s the vibes your customer gets from an in-person experience with your business.

Offline branding is not as easily tested or monitored. You have to pay attention to your customers and their mood while in your store. Furthermore, you should ask for feedback whenever possible.

Although the branding strategies differ from those used online, your offline branding should complement your online branding rather than exist as something distinct.

Co-branding

Think of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dog: their personal brands are strong on their own, but together they've created an unstoppable joint brand. This clever marketing strategy is called co-branding, or a collaboration between distinct businesses. The strategy enables the involved businesses to share their target audience and broaden their reach.

Corporate branding

Corporate branding emanates through everything the organization sells and how it operates. By providing an umbrella identity, the corporation links all the brands that live underneath it.

Some corporations, such as Unilever—which owns hundreds of brands, from Dove to Hellman’s—enable the brands that live underneath it to develop unique identities. On the other hand, corporations like Alphabet—which owns Google, Android, Nest and others—prioritize continuity over distinction. 

The latter type of corporate branding follows the Vision-Culture-Image model, which calls for all brands to align across these three components. Whether a corporation’s distinct brands maintain a tangible through-line matters less than whether they all stay within the organizational ethos.

Personal branding

Personal branding encompasses your reputation and your personal and professional image. You emphasize your personal brand via tools like your CV, social media posts, website design and business cards. For inspiration, check out these business card ideas, or create a business card of your own.

Why is branding important?

People form their first impressions of someone before they even realize it—researchers at Princeton found that people can get a read on someone in fewer than 100 milliseconds. Thoughtful brand strategy makes the most of those milliseconds and influences the impressions a consumer forms of your business.

Let’s dig into the ways branding affects your business:

It introduces your business

Brand awareness refers to the ways in which both the market and consumers perceive your business. Ideally, you want customers to have a positive impression of your brand and your offered service or products. Strong brand awareness encourages your target audience to select your brand explicitly, even over cheaper or alternative options.

It set you apart from the competition

Regardless of your industry, competition is always fierce. Whether you’re opening a bike repair shop, selling CBD-infused products or becoming a social media consultant—branding allows you to differentiate yourself from your competitors. By highlighting what you offer, you can distinguish why your brand is the better choice.

It creates a sense of familiarity

A key component of brand awareness, brand recognition applies more pointedly to the ways in which consumers remember your product or service, also known as brand recall. Visual branding assets, like brand colors, a logo or a catchy slogan, can prompt this brand recall. For example, imagine you’re on a road trip, and on the highway in the distance, you see golden arches—without even thinking about it, you already identified McDonald's.