You’ve spent countless hours coming up with the perfect name for your business. It’s unique, brief, descriptive, and expandable. Beautiful. The next step is one that is often given a bit of a short stick… after all that brand naming wordplay, you now need to come up with a short, positive and catchy slogan for your business.

Many people are simply tired of words at this point. And that’s fine, but your tagline is important enough to warrant your full attention. So take a break, and come back to it when your mind is refreshed.

In today’s highly competitive environment, the strongest brands are the ones that transcend the products and services they represent, and form a solid connection with the consumer.

While new business owners invest substantial amounts of time and resources into product and concept development, package design, advertising, PR and distribution, the act of choosing a name for their brand is often treated as an afterthought. As a result, we end up with generic and damaging brand names like ‘x place’ or ‘y barn’… or names that are already shared with dozens of other companies.

The fields of branding and marketing have a credibility problem.

More often than not, consumers associate brand-speak with trickery, exaggeration, misdirection and outright deception. The sad thing is, I don’t blame them. A lot of brands are disingenuous. What those brand managers don’t realize is that tricking someone into buying once is far less profitable than earning customer loyalty and trust over the long term.

Investing in your Brand for the Long Haul

Branding is so much more than just looking good. You need to pick up where we leave off.

From disparate beginnings, Christmas has become largely a cultural celebration for my generation – one meant to bring people together and place our focus on the people we love.

It has also become an uber-brand that represents intangible, un-buy-able values (peace, love, joy, family, selflessness) simultaneously with supreme commercialism.

“I want our site to be number one on Google”

The number of times a client has uttered those words to us (or a close variation on the theme) is somewhat staggering.

Sure, we all want it. And for certain parameters, we can get it for you. But while Search Engine Optimization is a very important component of both web development and your overall marketing platform, it cannot stand alone.

Packaging. It’s something most people don’t necessarily think about, perhaps partly due to the fact that it is so overwhelmingly pervasive. Even just picking up groceries for the week, in a single forum we are subjected to the end results of thousands of individual design and branding endeavours; some good, some bad, and the rest forgettable.

In addition to taking advantage of outstanding growth opportunities, there are several factors driving the increasing interest in taking brands global…

Building a strong brand takes commitment, time and hard work, but the result is one of the most valuable assets a company can own. That said, not all assets are static, and your brand image is no exception.

In building your brand, you are creating a new definition with the aim of making it a household name. When people think of tissue, they instantly think of Kleenex. That’s the sort of association you want. Instant identification in the mind of the customer is not enough though… you also need that identification to represent competence, quality, authenticity and credibility. At the same time, your brand needs to remain dynamic, relevant, and at the top of mind while retaining its established heritage and identity.

In the end, the message your brand puts forward must ring true to your business, in its current state, its history, and in what you hope for the future. When your brand image doesn’t represent the message you want to convey, it’s time to consider making a change.

British Bakeries first launched Hovis Invisible Crust, the first ever crust-less bread, in August 2005, and has re-launched the product this January with a $4.5 million rebranding campaign. The company says, ‘It has performed brilliantly with great consumer feedback’. A perfect example of how rebranding can revitalize a product, British Bakeries is investing at a critical point to bring this revolutionary new product in line with the rest of the Hovis range, creating a sense of continuity and trust in the new product, and bringing fresh attention to the rest of the brand’s existing products.

Most of our readers own their own business, or at least run the marketing department. And for the most part, they know that the concept of branding has a much farther reach than just their company. But maybe you’re not the CEO of your own business – yet – do you really need to be thinking about issues like branding?

In recent years, the concept of personal branding has been getting more and more attention. The basic premise of this is that over the course of your career, you would benefit from creating “Brand You” as a way to differentiate yourself from other job seekers, business developers, vendors, and people in general.