| Why do companies go through the branding process? Should you?
To get to the answer, it helps to look at the advantage of gaining market exposure through branding.
One reason is that establishing a brand plays into several facets of human nature.
For example, when we are presented with a choice between the known and the unknown, we’ll naturally tend towards the known. And if there are several known entities, we further sort by the one we trust most.
Indeed, if someone says “search engine”, we often think Google, Yahoo and MSN by default. Which one of these becomes our default will correlate to the one that gives us the best results. Deciding which of these is the best often comes from our personal experiences
But just a few short years ago, none of us knew what a Google was. (Unless you’re a mathemetician, in which case we remembered it as a one followed by one hundred zeroes.)
Where would Google be without some sort of brand identity? And what if they’d never been able to leverage Yahoo’s brand, when they once provided search results for what would one day become their direct competitor?
Branding provides a message to our potential clientele, a way to summarize what our companies see as our mission to provide. It also sets us apart from our competitors. Godiva and Hershey are both chocolate brands – each one evokes a distinctive set of expectations.
So in this way, a brand is a representation of our company picture. It is also a focal point for our internal and external clients, a way to distinguish ourselves.
All of these components are ingredients in a arecipe for success. So as we learn more about branding and its tie to growing a known product, the answer to whether we should brand is simple. If we want to create a niche and dominate it, online or off, we need to shape that niche, to define it.
Subconsciously or not, if we want to be the best, the most profitable, the most recognizable, we brand.
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