Branding

Defined by me: Having your brand in front of your target clients as much as doable.

Branding is an important piece of a business plan. You don't need to go farther than your house to determine this. On your television set you experience heaps of commercials from Pepsi, Coca Cola, and Nike. These businesses don't stand in front of you and attempt to go over with you the reason their merchandise is better than their competitors during the 30 second commercial, their main goal is just brand recognition. All they are attempting to do is make you grin and possibly express joy during their commercial.

In 2006 I attended a Hobbs Herder marketing seminar, a real estate marketing juggernaut. I remember them talking about marketing a brand instead of a product. At Any Rate they said something which has stuck with me over the years. Coca Cola was the top ranked soda entity at the time (Don't know how long ago), and they wanted to see how powerful their brand was. Coca Cola were certain that their brand was so powerful and people drank it in Atlanta, their home base anyhow. So they discontinued billboard advertising around town. Their gross revenues dropped a few percentage points, which is gazillion of gross revenue to Coca Cola. I lack any verification of this account, I just recollect it easily. After they realized a instant drop in sales numbers, they rapidly resumed advertising on billbards and their numbers got back to normal.

That story merely exemplifies how powerful branding is. Of course you want a strong logo and strong marketing program as well, but I believe continuous exposure to your clients is essential.

When picking your business logo, you should try for something simplified, clean, easily reproduced in in two colors, and looks great in all sizes of publish. Most websites have an icon which gets saved to a users computer when they visit the website. Likewise if you are viewing a page, your browser displays what's identified as a favicon to users. This favicon should be a image you desire related with your business. The trouble it only is permitted to be 16x16 pixels. That is really small, so you want to be certain your logo can scale down cleanly.

Once you settle on on your businesses colors, logos, mascots, or what ever it is you use to get clients to recognize you, LEAVE IT ALONE. It's exactly the same as in search engine optimizing, if you own a web page that's recognized 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 refer you the same traffic they would before. Similarly, if you build a brand in consumers head, they recognize you by that brand, and if you go and switch it too much, you chance losing some loyal followers. 

Once More, Coca Cola has not varied their logo EVER, while Pepsi has revamped theirs multiple times costing probably upward of 100 million dollars. That's only one example, I recognize there are occasions when converting a logo might be needed, but if you can pick a smooth, elegant, clean logo, it can stand the test of time and you won't want to revamp it every 6 years.