Branding

How Your Brand Effects Your Entire Business and Your Ability to Sell

Incase you don't already know, "AGMLS" is not a great brand. Abbreviations and letters as your main brand name will make the task of branding overly difficult and expensive. Sure we all know who IBM and AIG are, but they are BIG brands with BIG budgets to spend on marketing and advertising. If you fall into that category, this site is not for you. This site is for all the people who are trying to build their brand without millions of dollars to spend in the process. So why is "AGMLS" not a great brand? Well for starters, what does it mean? What do they do? Who do they serve? I think "Speedy Muffler King" is a much better brand. What do you think? Can you figure out what "Speedy Muffler King" does? Do you think they do it fast? (A very good position by the way.) How about their size? Are they big? Are they really the King? I don't know, but they have the makings of a great brand. They have a brand I sure remember.

After we wrote the example above, we did a Yahoo! search for "Speedy Muffler King." we found a few interesting things. First of all, they seem to have changed their brand to "Speedy Muffler, Brake and Wheel." Interesting. They also seem to be doing quite well. They really have this branding thing down. Guess what their web address is? Believe it or not, it is SPEEDY.com. We applaud them for strengthening their position and brand promise with their web address. Their original branding, "Speedy Muffler King" had served them so well, that they have grown, expanded, and truly succeeded as an organization. I'm sure there were a lot of other factors, but it all started with a great brand.

So what does your brand say? Does it describe the business you are in? Does it offer a position within your market? Does it include a value proposition? These are all questions that require a yes response in order for your brand to serve your company properly. How about color? Does your brand include a color? What does the color represent? Quick, think of a brand that uses orange. Did you think of Cingular or ING Direct? Both of these companies do a good job using the color orange as part of their brands. ING goes as far as to call their savings accounts "orange savings." Right now it is safe to say that ING and Cingular have cornered the orange market. How about brown? What company do you think of when you think brown? UPS has made sure you think of them. Do you know who Big Blue is? I would accept either IBM or the New York Giants as an answer. Let's play a game. I'll name a company or product and you guess the color. Yellow Book (Only kidding), Coke, Pepsi, Tide, T-Mobile, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Hershey, and Target? I hope you understand our point. You don't have to be Target or UPS to incorporate color in your brand. Color plays an important role in strengthening your brand impression and can help trigger effective recall of your brand.

A good brand is based on a competitive position. The position helps to make the brand relevant and desirable. Check out our page on positioning for more on branding and positioning. Also check out any of these great books on the subject.

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Check out our page on positioning