Seven Reasons Why Branding Matters for Your Startup

Branding is the art of crafting your startup’s brand. Your brand is the gut feeling your customers have when experiencing your products. Although there is no way to know how your users feel about your brand, since it depends on their cultural background and individual interpretations, you can steer that gut feeling towards your intentions.

This can be achieved through your brand assets, which include the brand mark (logo), typography, color palette, messaging, strategy, essence, feeling, emotions, packaging, sound/music, smells, personality, marketing, public relationship, and so much more.

Through consistent use of these assets (which doesn’t mean you should use the same resources over and over again), you may generate a unified idea related to your brand.

Now, why is branding important? It lives in the intangible world so at first glance it seems it can’t be measured. But not only it can be measured, but it also provides an array of important benefits to any business or organization. To name a few, based on research:

1. Universal positioning, your brand transcends the limits of your products.
2. Commercial competitiveness, your brand allows you to differentiate yourself from your competitors and provides customer loyalty.
3. Your brand is your image, a good brand gives confidence when making buying decisions. For example, a new tech product from Bolivia may give the client less confidence than a similar product from Japan (Sony), even if the Bolivian product is better. By having a well-crafted brand, the Bolivian product may reposition itself as a trustworthy product.
4. Steer the irrationality of the purchase, today, purchase decisions aren’t usually made by rational decisions. We buy without knowing the process and components of the products we buy, we tend to buy based on emotions rather than knowledge.
5. Doing things right. Good branding gives a professional and appealing look to your users.
6. Handle market volatility, by positioning your organization in the mind of your users you gain market security and stability.
7. Coming from the lean philosophy, startups need to adapt fast and constantly change, good branding permits you to evolve your business offer, product, sector while maintaining your brand capital. Countless times poor branding forced an organization to change its name and logo after a sector or product change.

Nowadays, branding is given little thought by small businesses and startups, but these are just some of the reasons why it matters. It is important to be aware that the branding foundations made in the early stages of your business will end up lasting a long time; changing a name or logo that is already alive in the mind of your clients is risky.

Good branding means thinking the logo decisions through and not just having a pretty and meaningful artwork. Yes, you should feel represented by your brand, but most of the brand decisions should be made strategically, not emotionally.

Contact us at Pesto if you want to do a strategic diagnosis and know your brand’s current status: info@pesto.com.uy