What is branding?

Branding is basically the process of assigning an identity to your product or a single individual and then later using that identity in various marketing campaigns and promotions to build up credibility.

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. If the consumer (whether it’s a business, a buyer, a voter or a donor) doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that consumer.

- Seth Godin’s definition of a brand

What are the benefits of branding?

Every company, both offline and online, should strive to make the perfect identity for themselves. Other than just working hard to improve their product or service, branding can go a long way into improving sales even if your product is not as good as the competition.

The most important thing in branding is being consistent. Using the same colors, the same fonts, the same logo, the same catch-phrase. You want your identity to be recognizable by just looking at the color combinations and not even trying to read the text.

When you manage to turn your company logo, your personal name, surname or photo associated with the words “quality” or “success” – then you know you have done a good job.

Branding and blogging (example)

Let’s say you have a blog with great branding done on it. You continue to write good blog posts and you gain more and more readers/subscribers every day. Readers that trust you, that like and share your opinion. When they see your blogs name somewhere else on banners or they meet you on a forum and see read your name or signature links, they will associate you with quality and helpful content.

They will easily forgive you

One of the best benefits of having a recognizable brand is that your users/readers will easily forgive you if you make a mistake such as writing a low quality blog post or having some kind of manufacturing error on your physical product. They will not reach for the unsubscribe button as easily as they might when you are just somebody random and unknown without a recognizable identity. Having a excellent brand will not make up but a useless product or poor quality blog though.

Two types of online branding

When talking about existing online, there are two basic types of branding you can choose:

• personal branding
• personal branding with an alias
• company branding

Personal branding

When doing personal branding, an individual business owner or blogger chooses to brand his name alongside a photo of himself. He uses this name while commenting on other blogs, participating on forum and various other social networking websites.

Personal branding with an alias

Some bloggers or website owners that like to remain anonymous or if they have been using a certain alias for a long time, they might want to use that alias for branding. In some situations using an alias can be a good decision but it’s always better to not be anonymous. Check out my last post about The Importance Of Not Being Anonymous and find out why I think it’s better to use your read name instead of an alias..

Here are some examples of personal branding with and without aliases:

Head of the webspam team at Google, Matt Cutts (his blog) is a great example of personal branding without even having a logo, just the name itself.

Robb Sutton has a great thing going on with transforming his name into a stylish logo. Best way to do personal branding in my opinion.

Another blog I read is the David Shaw Blog which is another great and simple example of personal branding with your real name. Maybe not as stylish as Robb Sutton but still very effective.

Another simple and effective example of personal branding from my friend Ileane. I like this blog title because, compared to the other examples, the title is really a sentance that looks like an announcement: "Ms. Ileane Speaks!" that subconsciously demands attention.

18-year-old student and blogger Melvin Dichoso has another great example of personal branding with even a nice associative logo by his name. This is also a variation of using only your first name and not your entire name.

An "extreme" example of not using your entire name and maybe kinda going into the alias party of branding.

It is important to know that you don’t have to be a graphic artist to do good branding. Most of it is based on research and a good  and consistent catch-phrase can go a long way into improving your brand.

Company branding

If you have a business website or one which is run by a few people or a blog with a few friends, you will want to choose a name and logo that will represent your site online. I’ve came across some great examples in the last few months that I have been interested in branding and some of them have really WOW-ed.

So here are some examples of company branding that I would like to share with you:

One of the best, if not THE best example of online branding I have ever come across. This "Fat Cow Hosting" company has it all. They have this great cow mascot and an entire virtual world build around it. They invite visitors to join The Herd, they promise "good hosting, no bull", etc. Really a great job!

Brian Clark's Copyblogger is a simple and associative brand that everyone knows about. It is a blog about writing copy on blog and you can't miss it when you see the typewriter font even if it doesn't have a vector logo.

An excellent example of a clean and simple blog branding with a logo along with a 2-color scheme. This is great because even without the text, the logo itself would represent the blog.

An example of a sentence-like, color-scheme branding method with a nice catch phrase that makes it clear what the site is about.

It’s great to see an evolution of a brand. Jack Curtis from “Sequence Hosting” is doing a great job with the branding and re-branding of his hosting company website and I’m looking forward to seeing his results.

Branding and marketing

After a successful branding operation you will want to use your new brand for marketing as well. Like i mentioned before, it is very important to stay consistent with marketing material by using the same or similar color schemes. When each of your banners looks like it could represent a different company, then you know you have to go back to the drawing board.

Here are some useful links that can help you with branding:

Graphic Leftovers

Graphic Leftovers is a great stock site where you can buy among a lot of other graphic stuff, a great logo that can help you brand your product or website. The prices are quite low and if nothing else, some logos there can give you an idea to make your own. Besides logo designs, Graphic Leftovers can help you with hundreds of banner designs.

Graphic River

Graphicriver.net is one of the most popular stock graphics places on the Internet being a part of the also popular Envato marketplace chain. I’ve came across some fantastic and professional banner designs for affordable prices that can make a great difference in your branding. There are dozens of categories worth scrolling through so check it out!

Thanks for reading and sharing this post on your favourite social networking sites. I hope branding goes successful for you and that you have fun doing it! Feel free to ask and questions about branding in the comments because there is probably something I’ve missed.

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