Branding is the story you tell your audience about your business. It helps in clarifying your business’ vision, mission, and offers to your target market. With the right brand image and brand identity, it’s easier to attract and retain customers. And, as long as you serve your customers by providing beneficial products and value through your brand, you will win.
Building a brand in a place like Dubai is not a piece of cake. The brand has to be localized to the native languages to be able to gain the trust of your target audiences.
Building an internal team in Dubai to help with business branding will not only cost you $200,000/year but also the results aren’t guaranteed. Hiring a branding agency in Dubai will cost you anywhere between $20,000 – $200,000 per year with experienced professionals working on your branding with proven frameworks.
In this article we will discuss the following:
1. How branding agencies work
2. 4 Examples of successful branding
3. Why is branding crucial to any business
4. Is hiring a branding agency in Dubai worth it?
How branding agencies work
A branding agency is a firm that specializes in creating your brand’s face based on consumer psychology, designing and communicating the positive aspects of your business. The ultimate goal of a branding agency is to increase brand awareness and business reputation while helping you achieve your sales goals.
Gone are the days when branding was just logos and color palettes. Branding today is the face value of your business. Branding starts from logos and goes all the way up to building an emotional connection with your target audience.
Businesses with strong branding have higher customer acquisition and retention rates. And branding agencies can help in building your brand from the ground up and running. They provide a range of services depending upon the client’s needs, varying from brand strategy to brand management.
Here are the various services branding agencies offer:
1. Build a brand from scratch
2. Design business logos
3. Rebrand an established brand/business
4. Create a brand strategy
5. Develop brand positioning and messaging
6. Prepare brand guidelines for style, design, and tone of voice
7. Create a social media strategy that aligns with the brand identity
8. Write copy that reflects the brand’s tone of voice
A brand isn’t built overnight. It takes research, strategy, project management, and a hell lot of creativity for a brand to be up and running. It’s no wonder that branding seems like a daunting task. To make it easier to implement and comprehend, branding is divided into thorough processes.
Here are the 5 stages a branding process includes:
- Conducting research: A thorough research helps you identify the brand’s current positioning and determine which direction the brand should head towards. It includes
- asking questions to the businesses to understand their mission, vision, and values to build an overview of the brand.
- asking questions to the customers to understand their expectations to create a brand strategy.
- conducting a thorough brand audit to understand what works and what needs to be improved.
- conducting competitor analysis to learn the audience’s perception of the brand and gather the data to perform better than them
- Crafting a strategy: A brand strategy guides the next steps of a business to grow. Crafting a brand strategy takes logic and creativity for it to work for a business internally and externally for the audience. Oftentimes, it isn’t required to create a fresh brand strategy and usually requires tweaking certain areas. A good brand strategy clarifies vision, target audience, benefits, brand values, and positioning.
- Designing brand identity: Designers study the brand strategy and carefully curate the visual representation of the brand. The design process starts by designing a logo graphically representing the brand. Everything from the color palette, fonts, shapes, and icons is the illustration of the brand. The overall brand identity is designed to give a look and feel to the brand.
- Creating customer touchpoints: After creating the brand identity, it is included in various customer touchpoints to analyze if it works. A touchpoint is the point of contact between businesses and consumers like websites, leaflets, brochures, advertisements, uniforms, business cards, product design, packaging, etc. In a way, it is to create a consistent look and feel for the brand both online and offline, targeting potential customers.
- Brand management: If the brand identity and touchpoint have yielded successful results, then comes brand management. Managing a brand takes long-term consistent efforts. It is essential to create brand guidelines for the employees to know the ins and outs of the brand before launching it to the audience and assigning the roles to the individuals to manage different aspects of the brand.
If everything works out together well, then a successful brand is established. If you need help with any of the 5 stages of branding then talk to us, today.
Examples of successful branding across the world
Global branding is not just about translating your website and showing a few ads here and there to the international market. If you want to become the go-to brand known for its high-quality products, you have to build a strong global brand presence. And, for that let’s understand how the leading global brands did it.
Apple
Every second person owns an Apple phone even though it’s more expensive than certain laptops. Still, Apple customers will buy it because people consider the brand to be synonymous with high-quality, innovative technology, and creativity – all thanks to powerful branding.
The brand’s logo represents Newton’s apple which led to the discovery of gravity. The logo stands for wonder and creativity. And, when we see that logo, we feel the emotions associated with it – luxury, power, and high quality.
Apple’s uniform consumer touchpoints have led to increased brand awareness and brand recognition. It works on an emotional branding strategy that’s targeted to the audience that wants to feel luxurious. It is a status symbol rather than a necessity nowadays.
Apple operates on a customer-centric approach. From their slogan ‘think different to the ‘shot on iPhone’ campaign, they put their customer first. With strong branding, Apple is the most famous brand globally.
Coca Cola
It’s been over 130 years since Coca-Cola was established and it still ranks among the top brands. The company focuses on its brand more than the product and keeps the marketing message fresh and exciting. Coca-Cola has become one of the popular brands ruling for decades, all thanks to its consistent branding.
Coca-Cola has maintained consistent branding throughout with its marketing being done in all red featuring happy faces and wide smiles. The brand gives the impression of happiness, enjoyment, etc and it has successfully made itself synonymous with these emotions.
Coca-Cola has always focussed on selling people the enjoyment of being in the company of their loved ones with a coke. See how smartly the brand is selling an experience rather than its product!
Starbucks
Becoming a renowned name globally for selling coffee is quite astonishing. Selling coffee is one part of their business but what makes them the consumer’s choice is the great customer service, personalization, cozy atmosphere, classy logo, etc.
You might be living under a rock if you’ve not seen a Starbucks outlet or someone on social media uploading a picture of Starbucks coffee. The brand has made itself synonymous with luxury.
It was founded to be a cozy warm space where one could relax, recharge and spend time with other people. It was built to be the third space one could go between home and office.
Starbucks logo the visual identity is a siren and according to Greek mythology, sirens represent temptation and seduction. Hence, the logo is made to attract people into getting inside the store and grabbing a latte
The Starbucks brand messaging focuses on inclusivity, belonging, togetherness, etc.
Nike
Nike started the trend of jogging and joggers needed shoes. Instead of selling shoes to its target audience, Nike began to distribute valuable content to its audience and positioned the shoes in a way that they happened to be in the spotlight.
Nike built their first shoe keeping serious athletes in mind. Their products are focussed on performance and creativity. Even though they started off manufacturing only shoes, now they’ve expanded their business to sportswear.
Nike’s branding is focused on empowerment. It is evident from their tagline ‘Just do it”. The brand’s adverts and campaigns show the athletes engrossed in practicing or performing with serious faces.
Nike’s branding strategy tells us that providing value to your customers will always bear fruitful results and it never goes out of style.
Why branding is crucial for all kinds of businesses
Branding is everything. Branding goes beyond the logo and design. It is the audience’s perception of the brand and the feelings they associate with it.
According to a study conducted by Motista, 71% of consumers recommend the brand they’re emotionally connected with. Hence, a brand needs to instill the emotions it wants the audiences to associate it with.
Establishing a powerful brand to gain name and fame in your industry will make your target audience recognize you. And, being recognizable means the audience will choose your products/services over your competitors. By ensuring consistent branding across all platforms, you will be the default choice of the customers.
Consistent branding explaining your values and how you/your product can benefit the consumer will help you stand apart from the crowd. Harvard business review, 64% of consumers say the primary reason they build relationships with a brand is when they share common values. Brands that communicate their values are more likely to attract customers.
With 92% of potential customers relying on personal recommendations rather than any kind of marketing, we can safely say customers transfer brand loyalty to their social circle. You will have plenty of referrals and repeat customers if you ensure quality customer service is incorporated into your branding.
In a nutshell, a brand:
1. Improves recognition
2. Builds trust
3. Supports advertising
4. Generate leads
5. Ensures repeat customers
Hence, big or small, every business needs branding to be able to market its products well, foster customer relationships, and generate leads.
Conclusion
Branding helps your target audience distinguish you from other brands. It gives you a competitive edge over others by providing your potential customers a reason to choose you over and over again.
With everything being said, we’ve ultimately reached a conclusion branding helps you emotionally appeal to your consumers into trusting them. And, a brand that wins trust is a brand that wins the game of business.
Hiring an in-house team is expensive and burdening the existing team with the branding process will only delay it further letting your competitors win. If you hire a professional branding agency in Dubai you will have all the resources, skills, and tools you’ll need to build a brand.
The Go-To Guy! can help you build a magnetic brand that’ll stay on top of your audience’s minds while you take care of other important business aspects.
Talk to us, today!
