Brand Building 101

In today’s world, you can’t succeed without having an effective brand. With the Internet, everyone is connected to everyone else all the time. With so many other people competing for your audience’s attention, you have to stand out dramatically, because it’s all too easy to click the other way. You can hire a brand building consultant, like A Hundred Monkeys, to help you through the process; however, it’s not enough to sit back and passively let someone build your brand for you. Brand building is an ongoing process that will last for the rest of your career. So it would help to learn a thing or two about the fundamentals.

Naming

Brand building begins with something really simple to understand but challenging to produce: an excellent company name. In most cases, the name of your company is going to be the first point of contact with a potential customer. That point of contact may last for only a second, but an important part of brand building is understanding how critical that first second can be. The reason there are a lot of clichés around the idea of first impressions is that first impressions matter. Without even being conscious of it, people make snap judgments that become really hard to shake off down the line. A good company name creates a strong and clear voice that immediately makes you stand out from the crowd.

Voice

Once you’ve established a creative name that makes an impact, the next step in the brand building process is to back it up. Your name is the first point of contact with potential customers, but there are many other points of contact that need to express your brand as well. Some of these, like your company logo and the colors you choose for your website, will help to create a significant unconscious perception of your company. Other aspects, like your content and voice, need to actively persuade potential customers that your company will make a difference in their lives.

Building Human Relationships in Business

One mistake a lot of people make when brand building is focusing on the mechanics of what expresses a brand without thinking about the audience. At A Hundred Monkeys, we take an approach to branding that focuses on establishing human connections between businesses and their customers. We take the same principles that are in place when you’re building a relationship, and we apply this thinking to a brand building strategy for your business. As we do this, we show you how to sustain this way of thinking as you continue the ongoing process of brand building.

While you need to learn enough about brand building to maintain the brand on your own, you can get a lot out of working with a brand consultant. If you’re interested in seeing what brand consulting can do for you, give the experts at A Hundred Monkeys a call today.