Fall In Love With Your Brand Again
Branding is the stamp you put on your business to let the world know who you are and what you do. It tells potential customers everything they need to know about you at a glance. Colours, typography and imagery all play a huge part, and these go on to inform the design of your marketing, your premises… everything customer-facing about your business.
This might sound incredibly basic — most business owners know the importance of great branding, and it’s often one of the first things that get nailed down when starting out on a new venture – but what happens when some time has passed, and things are looking a bit dated and unloved?
This Valentine’s Day we’re talking about brand love — including the steps you can take to fall in love with your brand again, and how great branding and marketing can make your customers your greatest admirers.
Why We Fall Out Of Love With Our Branding
Whether it’s time, changes in the market or a pivot in your business strategy, there are many reasons why you might fall out of love with your branding. In the day-to-day running of a business, looking after your image sometimes falls down the priority list until it just can’t be ignored any longer.
When you devised your branding you probably did so with careful consideration of your audience, your product and your values — or maybe you went with your gut and chose something that reflected your personality. Either way, times and people change, and your branding might not be sending out the right messages anymore, resulting in missed opportunities for sales and growth.
Change can be challenging, but acknowledging that change is required to move forward is the first step to transforming your business’ identity. It doesn’t have to be a complete overhaul either — many brands find success in focusing on a few key elements and updating them — a kind of brand facelift. Rather than a total identity change, what your business might need is a brand refresh.
Pulling Off a Successful Brand Refresh
Sometimes a bit of care and attention is all that’s needed to re-invigorate your business, rejuvenate awareness and build engagement, and a brand refresh is an excellent way of achieving this. Whether you choose to evolve the imagery in your logo, update your colour scheme or change your tagline, a bit of modernisation goes a long way in getting customers to discover you again.
Much like updating your wardrobe or trying out a new hairstyle, a brand refresh makes people take another look. Sticking with the same branding for too long can make you fade into the background, whereas a refresh is an excellent excuse to do something new.
Of course, when your brand refresh takes shape this can go on to inform an update of your marketing as well — from your website to your social media and print promotions, this is a chance to show your new branding off to the world, and you should take the time to ensure your messaging is consistent across all of your channels.
When A Refresh Becomes A Brand Redesign
You might be in the position where a refresh isn’t enough — perhaps your business has fundamentally changed and your branding needs to reflect this new direction of travel. In this case, a brand redesign might be the best course of action — fresh messaging, reinvented imagery and brand new marketing. A total redesign is also one of the best reasons to redesign your website — bringing it in line with the design, technical and security standards that customers expect.
A brand redesign is an excellent opportunity to try new branding ideas and totally transform your business’ personality. If you or your customers have fallen out of love with your business’ branding then a redesign allows you to start fresh with a new look and importantly — get heads turning. This is the time to think ahead for the future — what do you want customers to be saying about you in 5-10 years time?
A redesign lets you craft strong branding that not only looks and reads great but taps into your audience’s emotions and foster positive emotional responses — building brand love.
What is Brand Love?
You’re probably familiar with terms like “brand trust” and “brand loyalty,” but believe it or not “love” is exactly what many consumers feel towards their favourite brands. If you’ve ever known someone to make a pilgrimage to a certain shop or line up for the release of a new product, chances are that person has a great deal of brand love.
Love is built from strong, positive emotions — and building brand love means keeping customers coming back again and again. This is the basis of emotional marketing, and it works. Businesses that focus on fostering strong emotional connections with their customers outperform rivals by 85% in sales growth.
Taking a good look at your branding is the first step in fostering stronger emotional bonds between you and your customers. Put yourself in their position, what ‘emotional touchpoints’ does your business excel at meeting? Whether you always go the extra mile to fulfil orders ahead of time, provide genuinely friendly and effective customer service or are part of the foundation of your community, building emotional literacy into your branding and marketing is the best way to build brand love and encourage repeat trade.
Make Brand Love The Center Of Your Marketing Strategy
If emotional marketing and brand love haven’t been part of your strategy up until now, this is a great opportunity to talk to the experts. At Velocity Design we know about building great customer relationships — our Google reviews are full of stories from happy clients about how we excelled at meeting their needs. Why not chat to us about building brand love for your business?
Whether your branding could do with a bit of attention or you require a marketing overhaul, our friendly, expert team will be happy to offer help and advice — contact Velocity.Design today at engage@velocitydesign.co.uk or call us on 01463 861467.
