Branding

Defined by me: Putting your logo/slogan out where your client finds is endlessly.

Branding is big piece of your business program. You shouldn't need to travel farther than your own living room to determine this. On your TV you experience scores of advertisments with entitys like Pepsi, Coca Cola, and Nike. These entitys don't sit around and attempt to go over with you why their product is better than their competitions during the 20 second commercial, their main goal is just brand recognition. All they want to accomplish is get you smile and possibly express joy during their commercial.

About 4 years ago I was able to attent a Hobbs Herder marketing seminar, a juggernaut in the real estate marketing world. They were going over the point I just mentioned about marketing a brand, not a product. Anyway they told us something which has stuck with me this whole time. Coca Cola was the number one pop entity at the time (I'm unsure of the year), and they sought to test something. They were certain that their brand was so solid and everyone drank it in Atlanta, their home base anyway. Then they ended billboard marketing all together in their home town. Their sales fell a few percent, which is zillions of dollars to Coca Cola. I don't posses any substantiation of this, but I recall it vividly. After Coca Cola saw a rapid drop in people purchasing their product, they promptly restarted marketing and the numbers got back to normal.

That story just exemplifies how important branding is. Of course you need a good logo and good marketing program too, but I believe constant exposure to your customers is primary.

As far as your logo for your business, you should strive for something simplified, clean, easily reproduced in in two colors, and appears great in all sizes of print. Most websites own an icon which becomes saved to a persons computer when they bookmark the website. Likewise if you are looking at a page, your browser shows what's identified as a favicon to users. This favicon should be a image you want related with your business. The trouble it only is permitted to be 16x16 pixels. That is extremely small, so you want to make certain your logo can reduce cleanly.

Once you determine on your businesses colors, logos, mascots, or what ever it is you use to get people to distinguish you, LEAVE IT ALONE. It's exactly the same as in search engine optimizing, if you own a web page that's famous for the keywords "Drupal, Business, Website" then all your customers (Google, Bing, and Yahoo) know you by those keywords. If you go and switch them to "Cheap Websites, Fast Web Sites" then they won't give you the same traffic they were before. Similarly, if you establish a brand in consumers head, they acknowledge you by that brand, and if you go and alter it too much, you take the risk of losing some loyal followers. 

Again, Coca Cola has not varied their logo EVER, while Pepsi has revamped theirs multiple times costing millions of dollars. That's simply one example, I acknowledge there are occasions when converting a logo might be essential, but if you can pick a simple, elegant, clean logo, it can stand the test of time and you won't want to revamp it every 9 years.