Branding Strategies For Business Beginners

Branding Strategies For Business Beginners

Nowadays there are so many businesses or businesses. Many new businesses have sprung up so business competition is getting tougher. Selling products more and more imitations so that sales increasingly do not guarantee.

Branding Strategies For Business Beginners

Especially now that technology has made people more lazy. Looking for various needs no longer need to place a sale. Needs can be found online.

To open a business or business is not easy. Not as easy as you think. Capital is needed but mental and expertise in business must still be needed.

All businesses must be carefully thought out. And the most important thing is branding strategy so that your business is known to many people and become the people’s choice.

The following is a business branding strategy for you beginners:

Unique and Easy to remember logo

The logo is very important for business ventures. Logo is one of the most useful branding. Make your logo with a color that is characteristic. No need to have a complex picture that is easy to remember. For example like the Aqua logo which is identical to the color blue.

Social media

Use social media to do branding. Every business needs an official social media account to be accessed by the public. You can use social media to promote the latest products, promos, and for a selling platform.

The website

This is important! Business ventures will now usually have a company official website to inform the various needs of buyers. Such as providing contact information service numbers, and can also inform promotions at any time.

Nowadays most people will search online. So the website will be very necessary. You can use SEO for your website to see the people who need your business.

Endors

This is widely used for other products and businesses. Use the services of endors in contemporary celebrity artists or can use famous artists as ambasador brands. This is very effective for you to find customers. Indeed, branding using endors is quite expensive, because usually the post rates for artists can cost millions. But the more you use endors, the more people see your trademark.

Promo

At the beginning of the business, you should think of attractive promos for the opening. This can attract the attention of the public to get to know your merchandise and come to enjoy your promotion.

A new brand for Norwegian, mobile content provider – Europlay

Europlay wished to build on the experience and technological foundation of their unique lottery concept – “SMS Jackpot”. This lottery and its inherent architecture were licensed by the Lottery Authority in Norway to operate as a test project for a limited period of 3 years, from June 1st 2002 until June 31st 2005.

A new brand for Norwegian, mobile content provider – Europlay

In 2006, Europlay was awarded Class A and C licenses allowing it to operate a fully integrated gambling system. Bulldog was hired to develop a strategic brand platform that would align with the company’s business strategy, ensure differentiation in a highly competitive market and inspire investors to recognise the potential value of Europlay’s offering by becoming stakeholders.

Our first objective was to define what makes Europlay special and different in the competitive context of the igaming industry. We found that a key issue which prevents more people from participating in gambling as a pastime is that it is still seen as an activity that is a socially unacceptable. Much of this is down to the well publicised consequences of problem gambling.

Paradoxically, a common thread amongst a diverse demographic of people that strenuously claimed NOT to gamble is that many of them, regularly purchased lottery tickets or scratch cards. Inspired by this insight, we crafted a new brand aimed at people who like to play money games but who don’t consider themselves gamblers.

If this does not sound very original, given the gaming industry’s current obsession with appearing socially responsible, consider this; all major gaming websites, under the guise of social responsibility, allow players to set their own limit in respect of how much they can lose. Isn’t that like asking an alcoholic to decide when he/she has had enough to drink?

We saw this as a case of reach outstripping grasp and with low stakes, high involvement games, strict measures to ensure responsible participation and game themes that reflect emerging consumer attitudes to everyday life situations affected by politics, fashion, popular culture etc – the Mowjow brand was born.

In order to explain Mowjow’s intent, spirit and expression to potential investors, the brand kernel was outlined in a manual that included: audience insight, industry niche, competitors, vision, business objectives and key offerings. The manual also contained a comprehensive identity – defining: key messages, symbolic expressions, architecture and standards to ensure consistent application.

Bulldog also designed Mowjow’s

Bulldog also designed Mowjow’s first mobile phone game: “Seduction Lottery”. This is a downloadable Java application that works on the majority of current mobile phones. Built around a dating theme, Seduction Lottery adds role play, escapism and greater involvement to the traditional lottery game experience. This is important because experiencing a lottery game on a mobile phone is not the same as physically participating. The main difference being, the length of time between the stake and the outcome. On a mobile phone, this is instant, making a more involved user experience imperative – especially when the player loses (even though the stake is very low). Seduction Lottery rewards players with a simple but highly enjoyable experience whether they win or lose.

That said, because of the risqué nature of the game theme, not everyone will like Seduction Lottery. It is designed to appeal to an 18 25 age group and reflects a world which they will recognise as what is around them. This is not to say that all 18-25 year olds should be stereotyped as belonging to a homogeneous ‘sex obsessed’ subculture. What it does say is that there are attitudes and feelings which this age group are likely recognise, and these have been used to develop a game theme that celebrates both commonalities and differences.

In any case, the technical architecture behind the game was designed in such a way as to allow the skinning of new themes on to the existing back end. This allows the creation of multiple games that target very different groups of people with relatively low development costs.

Visually redefining a brand won’t fix its problems

As a creative professional working in Malta, there’s much to fault with our industry but what annoys me more than anything is when I see some of Malta’s biggest brands gratefully swallowing tripe for cream, served to them by foreign creative companies because of some misguided belief that if it’s made abroad, it’s somehow better.

Visually redefining a brand won’t fix its problems

For example, take Air Malta’s rebranding, executed last year by FutureBrand London for a reported total cost of 1.9 million Euro. As an agency with a global reputation, do I hold FutureBrand to a higher standard than other local branding firms? Of course I do! Yet they still failed to get anywhere near my expectations with this exercise. In order to demonstrate why, I’m going to compare Air Malta’s new aircraft livery with a spectacularly successful piece of Maltese ‘vernacular design’ – the Malta Bus

Visitors to our island thought the experience and style of the Maltese bus so novel, they queued up in their thousands to have photos taken with it, bought replica souvenirs of it, depicted it in paintings and recounted stories about journeys taken on it long after they returned home. In fact, they coveted the brand so much that they were willing to overlook performance issues (these were hot and noisy contraptions) and customer service flaws (some of the drivers were said to be surly). Only time will tell if Air Malta’s aircraft will acquire such a fanatical cult following with their new and expensively decorated aircraft but somehow I doubt it.

So, how is it possible that a bunch of local bus drivers are able to outperform one of the world’s foremost marketing companies, armed with a sizable budget? The answer is simple; it’s not easy to fake culture and traditions – customers see straight through it. While the bus drivers may not have had an expensive design education, they understood that holiday makers wanted an authentic Maltese experience, rather than something manufactured and did not need tablet-wielding creatives from The City to tell them this.

Bus Malta

Also, let’s not forget that the Malta bus brand was effective not because of its style and novelty but in addition to it. The drivers built the buses to a practical design which worked for the local climate, terrain and budget. Unique to Malta, these became as much an icon in our country as red double-deckers are in London. For decades they gave us a cheap, workable, frequent bus service that rarely ever broke down. They did not have to look important because they really were important and their brand identity reminded people of this

By contrast, Air Malta’s lack of a meaningful position (who is this brand for and who does it exclude?) and flaws with its product, value perception, reputation, company culture etc leave its brand communications with a very tall order indeed – to create preference with nothing much of substance to say. In a roundabout way, this rebrand kind of reminds me of a sketch British comedian Eddie Izzard used to perform about imperialists going to foreign shores and claiming countries under their flag.

“But, you can’t just come here and take our land, we live here” the indigenous people would say. To which the imperialists would reply “Yes, but do you have a flag?”

Trying to fix a company’s problems by visually redefining it is unrealistic and anyway, today it’s no longer possible to manage an external image to talk to audiences on behalf of companies. No matter how well scripted and slick the brand communications are, people have the means to probe for their own truth and if they find any kind of discrepancy, share it with the world.

The internal dynamics of a company play a critical role in its performance in the marketplace. This is where the branding should start – placing core truth and values at the heart of any effort to build (or rebuild) the brand.

It seems to be out of fashion for branding companies to advise clients to fix their businesses and build the reality they are so keen to portray in their brand communications. Too many brands seem content to portray a pig’s ear as a silk purse and hope that nobody notices. Of course, since this is a much easier course of action, there’s no shortage of ‘branding’ firms happy to oblige – both in Malta and everywhere else.