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A brand is a collection of objects and concepts representing something, in this case, we are talking about a commercial based thing, ie. A company, a product, or a service.In a simple definition, it can be some objects refer to visually defined icons/symbols such as a name, logo, slogan, and design concept. Though it is actually not as simple as that, but this can be the very basic of getting an image of what a brand is.

Brand has increasingly becoming part of our daily life, some of us might not knowing it. For instance, You might prefer to shop for a branded clothes rather than the one we don’t recognize.

Okay, you might get some basic idea of what a brand is after reading the above. Let’s go deeper…

Brand Image
Brand image is not something that you have or don’t! it doesn’t have to be only one, but several. One of two of them might be more obvious compare to the other one though. Brand image is developed for people to associate easily with the company, product or services it refers to.

Good brand image should be visually positive, unique among competitors and easy to be remembered. Brand image can be push outward by marketing and communication tools, such as promotion, advertisement, packaging, public relations and word-of-mouth. Just a note, This word-of-mouth is the most important tool. Why did I said so? Because when consumers can recommend you to other people, that means you have gain a good step in branding, ie ‘Trust’, and also, this is the cheapest marketing tools, it doesn’t even cost you money!

Anyway, when the visual appearance of the brand is easy to be recognized, you’ve created a good Brand Image. The brand image will gained popularity when it stays in consumer’s mind.

Brand Mapping
Brand mapping makes vast quantities of numerical information into an easy visual appealing format. It can help drawing the results and their impacts from different angles.
This way, we can build good strategy for each of the area.

Quite hard to understand? Okay, let’s make it simpler, imagine you are traveling around a city with many stopover to make, if there’s a map in hand, it will be much easier to travel around, save time and money. The same rules applies to branding strategy as well. To start develop your brand, you need to write down all things related for your the purposes, ie. Brand’s target market, local economy of your targeted market, price adjustment, advertising cost, frequency of advertisement, etc. This is the simplest and basically what you need to draw before starting on.

This mainly helps to inform strategy i.e. where is the brand direction in the future.

Brand Personality

In daily life, you’ll find that every person have their own personality. Good, fun, kind, easy going, bad, etc. are some of human personalities.

Brand personality describes brands in terms of human characteristics. Brand personality works as a valuable emotional factor in developing its relation to consumer. It’s much the same as how a human communicates and bind with other human.

In developing a brand personality, you need to know how it can be connected to your customer. You must clearly understand them, such as their habits, desires, preferences, motivations, insecurities, and prejudices. You must do a good research on how your brand fits in their life style and how they might respond to the brand message.

In a point of clarification, when a consumer sees, hear, touch, taste or smell a brand, they can feel some relation to it.

Brand Recognition

Brand Recognition is the extent to which a brand is known by the experiences felt by consumers.
All huge companies have their brand recognized very well, Nike with its swoosh, Ferrari with its fast car or KFC with the Col. Sanders.

So, what will you do to try achieving your brand recognition? These two ways came up in my mind:

Firstly, build a good and easy to remember identity standard. One of the factors, which is related to design is, forget about putting too many colors in your logo. 2 or 3 colors will do well.

Secondly, be consistent! Your branding consistency has to go along the way. For instance, your advertisement should have a standard of how it should laid out. It is a fact that it takes five to seven exposures to an advertisement before someone may look further. If your advertisement is not consistent to the standard, consumer won’t identify it.

Conclusion
Branding is more than just your company logo or name. It is the whole set of experience a company can offer. It is something that people feel when they are connected to it. That means your coffee can’t just taste good. But it has to feel good, too.

Building a brand is not easy though, It is not a one day work. It needs lots of hard work, correct strategy and cost. But the result is huge. Good branding can increase your business revenues, lower customer acquisition cost and raise profit. Successful brand doesn’t really sell its products or services anymore, but the brand itself.