Branding Services

What Is Branding and Why Is It Important

When it comes to competition in the modern marketplace, one long-term viable option for making any business successful is the brand. Ellenom knows that branding is not just about a logo or an expression of a color. It's the internal development of unity, the identity, and the experience given to the client. It resonates in the hearts of customers and differentiates one from the competitors.

Starting your business and searching for that first impression, whether a startup or an old business in a refresh mode, our branding encompasses a full scope that will help you resonate with customers. We believe that wise branding is about establishing long-term business relationships with clients.

Now let us look at the elements upon which successful branding is based and how the team at Ellenom works on each one to ensure that businesses like yours can flourish in today's market.

Branding refers to the process of establishing the unique name and image for the business in the minds of its customers. It includes everything from visual elements like your logo and website design to the way your company answers the telephone. In effect, branding tells others who you are, what you stand for, and why customers should care about you instead of the competition.

We tell our clients at Ellenom that your brand is kind of like a person-a person with a look, a voice, values, and a personality. Just like when people meet someone, they form impressions with those interactions; it's the same with your brand. Those impressions dictate whether they want to do business with you again.

The effect of powerful brand establishment is real. The primary research shows that brands mentally­ presented are 3.5 times more inclined to have superior brand visibility than brands inconsistent in this respect. Furthermore, 59% of consumers declare a preference for purchasing products from firms that they know.

I used to work at a small tech startup that was struggling with traction despite having a great product. Their messaging was all over the place; their visuals were boilerplate, and there was nothing about them that made it easy for customers to understand why they were special. And after we helped them develop a simple, consistent brand strategy, they saw a conversion increase of 45% in just three months. That's the power of good branding.

The good news is that strong branding is not based on large companies with huge budgets. With the right approach, such businesses as small- and medium-sized businesses can have an impressive brand presence.

Brand Identity: The Visual Foundation

Brand identity forms the visual foundation of your business presence. It's what makes you instantly recognizable across all platforms and touchpoints. At Ellenom, we develop comprehensive brand identities that include several key elements:

Logo Design: Your logo is the centerpiece of your visual identity. We create logos that are memorable, versatile, and effectively communicate your brand essence. A good logo works across all mediums-from your website to business cards to large billboards.

Color Scheme: Colors evoke emotional responses and help customers recognize your brand quickly. We select color palettes that reflect your brand personality and resonate with your target audience. Did you know that using a signature color can increase brand recognition by up to 80%?

Typography: The fonts you use contribute significantly to your brand personality. Whether sophisticated, playful, traditional, or cutting-edge, your typography choices should align with your brand values and be consistent across all materials.

Graphic Design Elements: These include patterns, icons, illustrations, and imagery styles that give your brand a cohesive look. We create design systems that can be applied across various marketing materials while maintaining visual consistency.

Video and Motion Design: With the networking and communication technologies we have today, how your brand moves has become vital. We develop moving principles and video styles for your brand that move your potential customer audience within content that animates the brand.

They used to have really different signage, menus, and packaging at all their coffee shop locations. Prior to this, this local chain was confusing customers and destroying brand recognition. To counter this, we created a single visual system that honored their artisanal roots, giving them that same kind of experience no matter which location the client chose. The results? Improvements of 35% in customer recognition and 100% increase in social media engagement throughout the people taking photos of their packaging and in-store features.

Brand Positioning: Finding Your Unique Place in the Market

Brand positioning is about the way your company finds its way into the marketplace and into the minds of consumers. Creating a unique space that can take up only one brand is what positioning is about. Here at Ellenom, we think that the difference between being just an option and being the obvious choice for your target market is effective positioning.

Strong brand positioning develops through asking some fundamental questions:

• Who is your ideal customer?
• What real and unique problems does your business solve?
• How are you positioned as an alternative to your competitors?
• What unique value do you provide?
• Why your customers will choose you instead of an alternative?

The response to these questions actually forms the basis of your positioning strategy. We assist our clients with thorough market research to find a gap in the marketing field and develop identifying statements that sum up the unique value proposition in a nutshell.

In the not-so-distant past, I was involved with the branding for a housekeeping service that found it challenging to distinguish itself in a saturated marketplace. All competitors were touting their services with statements of being "thorough," "trustworthy," and "affordable." Through an extended discovery process, we found that the client's true differentiator lay instead in its business practices with respect to the environment, as well as a social-backend employee health-and-wellness program. We captured the essence of the brand by saying, "The sustainable cleaning service where happy cleaners make happy homes." This real positioning communicated to an environmentally conscious clientele that was also concerned with fair pay for labor, providing the client with a loyal base willing to pay a premium for their services.

Great positioning is not about being everything to everyone. Rather, it is about doing best that which the company does best for those whose needs the company serves best. Often, the most effective positioning comes from constraining rather than broadening your focus.

Brand Messaging: Finding Your Voice and Telling Your Story

The language, tone, and storytelling styles of communication represent the brand messaging and its other various aspects. Ellenom reasons that brand messaging must be as unique as a brand's graphic representation. Brand messaging is essential in converting your brand's perception into understanding.

Good brand-messaging has some elements in it:

Brand Voice: Is it friendly and casual with a sprinkle of warmth and fun, or authoritative and formal? Does it ever adopt a playful tone? The voice should resonate with the personality of your company and the target audience you're hoping to attract.

Core Messages: These are the core truths of the brand that must be perpetually and consistently said to all stakeholders: the mission, the value prop, and the key differentiators.

Brand Story: Each brand has a story: the conception of the idea, the challenges it has gone through, and what fuels its passion. A heartfelt brand story connects emotionally with the target audience.

Tagline: Some memorable phrase always stuck in customers minds which carry your brand essence.

We had a financial advisory firm, which uses overly complicated heavy language from the lexicon of its products. They think they can sound knowledgable but they are putting a barrier between the firm and potential clients through the intimidation by what they are offering. We helped in developing a brand voice you feel is learning yet approachable with understandable language relaying expertise whereas disappearing into the touchy subject matter. This virtually increased an inquiry by 40 percent within the first quarter of this messaging shift.

There's one secret behind effective brand messaging: it's consistent. With time, messaging that is always consistent with visual identity across different touchpoints; your website, across social media, and even in scripts for customer service builds trust and recognition.

Brand Consistency: Building Trust across all Touchpoints

Brand Consistency is the difference between making an indelible impact on the targeted group with occasional touches. At Ellenom, the figure is as high as 23% revenue increase for consistent touches. "Trust brings need and need places into actuality" is how consistency usually works-the trust builds loyalty.

Brand consistency is attention to detail across various elements:

Visual Intactness: Your logo, colors, typography, and design elements should apply uniformly across all of your touch points, that is to say your website, social media profiles, business cards, packaging, and where your company is actually located.

Message Consistency: The brand voice and the most important brand messages and value propositions should speak the same language regardless of the channel or audience segment you're addressing.

Consistency of Experience: The experience that customers have with a brand-whether in person, on a website, or during customer service interactions-must faithfully represent that brand's values and attention to detail.

For our clients to be able to maintain any consistency of what they do, we create exhaustive sets of guidelines that explain how to present their brand. These materials are a handy reference for anybody working on materials or experiences around your brand, MP, making sure that those core elements are held consistent even while marketing activities change.

For one of our retail clients, presentations across 12 stores were inconsistent. Each store manager with their own version of how to merchandise, how to guide customers with signs, and even how staff interacted with customers. We created a clear brand guideline and training program so they could offer the same customer experience that can be recognized and trusted irrespective of the store the customer visited. It has since contributed to a 28 percent growth in repeat customers in the next year.

Keep in mind that consistency does not mean that you cannot be flexible; a brand will, in fact, evolve but with intention and holistically, as compared to randomly or in a piecemeal fashion.

Customer Experience: Where Your Brand Comes to Life

The customer experience is where your brand comes to life. Here at Ellenom, we believe that every interaction a customer has with your business-from their first visit to your site until their conversation with your support person-should mirror your brand promise and embrace all your values.

A branded customer experience is about designing:

Customer Journeys: Mapping every step of the customer's interaction with your brand so that each touchpoint reinforces the brand identity.

Service Standards: Creating definitive instructions on how employees are to express brand values when interacting with customers.

Environmental Design: If you have a physical location, use it to immerse customers in your brand-from the look and feel, design, music, scent, and all other facets of the sensory experience.

Digital Experience: Making sure your website, application, or any other digital portals delivers a wonderful, intuitive experience from start to finish as per your brand personality.

We worked with a boutique hotel that wanted to make a difference in the crowded market. Beautifully done, the rooms and common areas--guest interactions delivered a generic and somewhat boring experience. So, we helped them create an entirely different customer service approach under their brand promise: "curated local experiences." Staff would serve as neighborhood insiders, thus sharing personalized recommendations and stories to match or align with guest's interests. This strategy overturned customer experience scores and achieved a 67 percent increase in positive reviews about interactions with the staff.

Brands that really succeed realize that customer experience will not just be a customer service function; it will be a very strong articulation of your brand that evokes emotion and loyalty.

Building Foundations With Startups Branding

We have worked with manystartups here in developing great brands from scratch. We know it is the creation of identity, rather than just building a product or service; an identity that catches the imagination and will endure many years along with how people will perceive your business.

Effective Branding for Startups Brings the Following Specific Benefits:

Every Competitive Market Needs: Differentiations make a unique identity for your startup from long-standing competitors to new entrants.

Creating Credibility: Good marketing bridges that gap of credibility which customers have between going to a "new business," and then actually trying your product to buy from you.

Investor Attraction: Building a brand that is professional shows an intention toward building a permanent business which encourages other investors to take note of you.

Team Alignment: Clear and shared brand values and brand vision will attract team members with similar ethos and common purposes.

Startups should focus on core areas of branding because essentials, which create flexibility for future growth, are very important. A definite visual identity will go with clear positioning, core messaging, and simple brand guideline.

I was engaged with a fintech startup currently about to launch its first product. Although their technology was quite innovative, this would mean entry into a crowded market: many customers already had traditional banking relationships. They thus actually needed a brand identity that would portray simplicity and transparency as values with which to reconnect the customer back to their frustrated ideals about traditional financial institutions. It would then be supplemented with a distinctive visual system and conversational brand voice-a sure win for market awareness as this startup would reach its first-year goal of acquisition just in seven months.

The most important fact startups could do is early-stage branding but combined with flexibility, so a brand becomes strong enough to establish recognition but changes with the business and market conditions.

Measuring Brand Success: Beyond Aesthetics

At Ellenom, we believe that effective branding should deliver measurable business results. While things like aesthetics are important, successful branding will directly affect your bottom line and grow your business.

This is how we assist our clients in measuring the impact of the branding performed on them:

Brand Awareness: What is the level of recognition of your brand in the eyes of your target market? We measure aided and unaided recall, social media mentions, and search volume corresponding to your brand name.

Brand Perception: Which attributes do customers link to your brand? Surveying and analyzing feedback allow us to assess the extent to which your brand is perceived the way you want it to be.

Customer Loyalty: Strong brands engender loyal customers. We monitor repeat purchase rates, customer lifetime value, and net promoter scores, which help us understand the measure of loyalty associated with the brand.

Price Premium: Customers are willing to spend more mean for brands they trust. We measure the price premium that your brand can command over an equal-quality generic product or less-known alternative.

Conversion Rates: Good branding will elevate conversion at all stages of the customer journey. We monitor the influences of branding on conversion rates on your website, in-store purchase rates, and closing percentages.

One of our e-commerce customers had doubts about spending on a proper refresh of their brand; they felt that it was just about aesthetics. We set the key performance indicators at the beginning of the project and tracked the result for 12 months after launch. We found a 38 percent rise in recurrent purchases, a 25 percent decreased price sensitivity, and a 42 percent increase in referral-rates-all emanating from their fortified brand image. When it comes to return on investment, the brand investment paid for itself in 7 months.

Long-lasting branding is something to keep in mind.

Common Branding Mistakes: What to Avoid

At Ellenom, We've witnessed what businesses frequently encounter as a challenge in building a brand. Here are some of the most common types of branding pitfalls which we help avoid:

Inconsistency across touchpoints: Your other brand touchpoints – website, social, packaging, and customer service – will only confuse customers when they are all saying totally different things about you.

Generic positioning: Being "high-quality," "customer-centric," or "innovative" without any differentiation from its competitors makes the brand easy to forget when out at sea with all those similar claims.

Copying Competitors: Adopting trends in the industry too closely can ipso facto create a blend of your brand so that it won't really stand out. Most often, the memorable brands break these category conventions with thoughtful approaches.

Irrelevance as to Brand Promise and Experience: Trust vanishes quickly when what you promise your customers in your marketing is not what they are experiencing.

Neglect Internal Branding: Your internal team members are your brand ambassadors, have no clue regarding or do not embody the brand values, and external branding should have no impact on your firm.

I remember working with a professional firm that had spent quite a lot in a very sleek new visual identity and website yet had failed to get impact. Our visits unearthed what their promised materials said of a "collaborative innovative approach" and what the client got in its onboarding process, which was rather formal and rigid. The result of activities aligning their customer experience with their brand promise-redesigning their processes to include true collaboration-was a 47% increase in client satisfaction scores.

Successful branding is not being perfect from the start, but it is about the aim and keeping at it over time. The brands that succeed are those which are clear about who they are, communicate that with consistency over time, and constantly align everything they do to their stated values.

How Ellenom Works on Branding Projects

Our branding is a collaborative, strategic process with a focus on result. Over a decade, we have honed this approach through successful projects in diverse industries. Here is how we endeavor to work with clients:

What really makes our method different is that we don't only consider strategic foundation, but quite the actual applying of the brand. What we provide is not pretty designs; we make sure, that your team learns how to cascade the brand across points consistently to achieve those results.

This is perhaps my best example. A family-owned business manufacturing things for more than 60 years was running with a strong loyalty base but lacked luring a perfect young buyer and talent. We co-created the heritage with the need for a more modern and relevant brand. The familiarities with the presumably older customers were retained in rebranding, while more open and friendly characters relevant to the new market segment were introduced. It took 18 months to gain a 12% increase in market share and create substantial footprints in attracting young professionals with skills.

Each branding project has its uniqueness, and therefore, we customize our approach according to the peculiar needs of your business, the context of the industry, and what the goals require. Whether it is a new brand launch, a refreshed brand, or a corporate merger and acquisition, we provide the formulaic structure to guide everything in this process.