Why is branding absolutely necessary for any business?

Can you do without branding? Yes. You can “do”, “survive”, and “manage” without branding. All three of them. But can you make it big? No. Definitely no.

Without a unique image, your business will not reach the stage where your offering or product spreads like wildfire. Now, I indeed mention connotations like wildfire throughout my talks on all things branding but don’t get me wrong. I am not selling branding as the ultimate catalyst you always needed. Nope.

Instead, what I am trying to communicate is that branding helps you build a business that grows, makes a profit, and is deemed a success in general on all reasonable standards. In other words, others look at you and see a success story, business acumen, and proficiency.

If your product misfires, surely no amount of branding will save you (though it has, in the past). And all parties indulging in refining their own brand’s individuality by getting good identity design done (in other words, competitors) benefit from it. So, unlike the real notion of a wildfire, this perceived notion of spreading like wildfire is good and happens simultaneously for multiple (often competing) brands.

Every business needs good branding to rise from the crowd, the general business competition. Once you rise from there, you’re in the league of businesses that thousands of people know, talk, and preach about. In other words, you’ll become a company with brand advocates – advocates that don’t charge you to spread the word.

At this stage, it’s no more about having good branding, bad branding, or no branding. It’s mostly about three things:

• the problem you solve and how,
• how good your communication design is, and
• how well you make use of opportunities and market windows.

But to reach this stage where you can manufacture great communication design, do cutting-edge research to beat your competitors, and use the opportunities that the market presents, you need good branding.

Otherwise, even with a killer product, you’re left with only 100 buyers. Even if 100% of your buyers become brand advocates, their preaching will not help because word of mouth actively requires some justification. People don’t blindly believe, you see, except in some extraordinary circumstances. And running a business with a bunch of problems is not an extraordinary circumstance.

To make the word of mouth, referral, brand advocacy, etc. work, you need a proper image, a face that inspires trust among those who come looking for justification for the referral they just received. More than getting the problem solved, they want to trust the brand. They don’t want to do a lot of research and cross-check your facts, they just want to believe at this point.

And with bad branding or no branding, they will just ignore you. You had promise, sure, but it’s not worth their time, honestly. Nothing glues them. Your stale design makes them just dismiss you, rather than actually try to find out what you do, how you do it, why you’re really good at what you do, and so on. That magnetism and attraction that you’re lacking can only be crafted through good and meticulous branding.

Having a unique image, one that’s appealing and communicates all your plus points in a criminally short span of time is the elixir of good business.

Wildfire and magnetism aside

Sure, all that talk is full of glitter, but what actually happens down on the psychological level when a business has good branding? What does the customer feel such that they’re instantly prompted to set the business apart from others? How does this whole shebang of having a unique identity and a highly effective communication design help the customer make decisions?

Well, here’s what happens technically. And it’s no rocket science.

With good branding comes direction. It gives purpose. It acts as a reassuring voice telling the consumer that they should trust the brand. But why should they? Well, that’s not important. The only thing that matters in business and outdoing your competition is building meaningful loyalty towards your brand.

And loyalty cannot be built if you lack the basic foundation of trust. Clean, organically orchestrated trust.

Sure, the more people learn about your business, the more they interact, and the more product or service experience they go through, the more they trust you. But you’re not the only one out there to choose from. How do you start them on their journey towards building trust for your business and yours only?

You speak through branding.

Building a good branding goes beyond choosing a logo and getting a website done. It spans across marketing material, publication design, social media strategy, communication design, and even newsletters, the tone of your copy, and the overall packaging and presentation of your offering.

Rich, unique, consistent, concise, informative, clutter-free, appealing, trustworthy, you name it – branding needs to be a lot of things to work just right. Your branding is the envelope and your product is the letter. Except, you want more and more people to go for your message out of many others. Besides trying to make the best letter, you also need to have a unique envelope. Choose a stamp that will connect with your potential buyers, choose a font that will hit them as trustworthy in their subconscious mind, maybe color your envelope radically different from others – what you can do is infinite.

But what you should ideally do to succeed is good branding. There lies the difference.

And therefore, it requires more than just design software to craft the perfect branding experience for consumers. It requires the gumption to push through long-standing, archaic boundaries.

To wrap it up here’s why branding is absolutely necessary for any business:

• It gives you purpose and direction.
• It helps you outdo the competition.
• Good branding tells people the story of your brand, which makes them trust you, notwithstanding the contents of the story for the most part.
• Consistent branding across your touchpoints makes sure customers, on a psychological level, go through seamless experiences that are easy to recall, thus increasing your brand awareness and advocacy, as well as return business.
• Branding helps you assert authority and sound like a leader. No amount of actual information and meaty research can accomplish that in most scenarios.

Let's see a live example.

Tell me, what a consumer would rather read when they’re buying a health supplement (let’s say some good MCT oil products):

1. “Medium Chain Triglyceride Oil Consumption as Part of a Weight Loss Diet Does Not Lead to an Adverse Metabolic Profile When Compared to Olive Oil” – this research paper on Center for Biotechnology Information, NIH; or
2. “Can’t lose weight? Whisk off 30 pounds in 21 days with MCT oil” on Woman’s World?

The latter includes numbered pointers that are short and direct – how does MCT oil work? Hunger vanishes. Metabolism soars. And so on. The research paper includes information that’s technically more in-depth but not necessarily better for the consumer’s needs.

We can draw more parallels between these two (you can see the research paper here and the article here).

Unbranded or badly branded NIH research papers include problem-solving information but they fail to communicate that information to the everyday user of MCT oils (which is natural, as the target group for these papers is other scientists mostly). What the Woman’s World article does is break down the information in meaningful chunks that can be fed quickly to the consumer.

I hear you, we’re not here to discuss the better way to do copywriting. But bear with me a little longer.

Communication design has to be appealing (bold text headings in this example) and to the point. You cannot waste time beating around the bush. Your competitors are not.

What good branding does is glue your consumer to your message. And then good communication design helps you sell and teach more about your offering so that trust can be built and sales can happen.

Sounds pretty easy but trust me, cracking good branding and communication design concepts isn’t easy. It takes strategy, planning, and experience, sure. But most of all it needs the willingness to build a good market understanding. Once all that’s in place, creativity, skill, and even imagination come into play.

And voila, you have a successful business that builds trust like a non-stop machine.

Disclaimer: I have no clue whether MCT oils burn those pounds or not. My neighbor claims they do, but I don’t trust him.