To ensure the future growth and profitability of your company, you must use a brand management strategy to continually build, strengthen and revitalize your brand. Building and maintaining a valuable brand isn’t easy.

Brand positioning is a process, not an event. Your brand blueprint (vision, areas of focus and touch points) and your brand voice (main messages, approach to language, type, color and imagery) come from ongoing emotional connections made with your customers every day.

You must focus on the emotional aspects of your brand – the proposition, making a quick and intuitive emotional connection with your customers that creates awareness, has influence, and elicits their buy-in and loyalty.

Exceptional brand performance is no accident. Implementing a strong, actionable brand plan is crucial to achieving standout market performance. You can’t simply rely on the functional differences of your products or services. Customers have too many choices. Differentiating and communicating your brand’s unique value to the marketplace is essential. You need to craft messages that stir up specific words or emotions when someone hears or sees your company’s name, products or services.

Your brand serves as a powerful motivation tool to all your stakeholders such as employees, investors and customers. Companies are constantly looking for ways to grow their brand image, using new ideas and initiatives in the market. Many are creating innovative ways for building their brand and pushing boundaries to influence customer buying behavior, getting their messages across clearly and effectively. Branding today must include social media across multiple platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many more social communities.

Customer loyalty, commitment and collaboration are the key to business success in today’s competitive environment. Brand strategies need to be relevant, have a differentiated offer and reflect values that are credible and believable. This is only achievable by ensuring consistency in product and service quality with your brand promise.

Your branding identity strategy will be more successful if you closely target your market. Focus on getting your company name and your products or services in front of your current customers and best potential customers. An effective brand marketing strategy creates the kind of loyalty that leaves customers indifferent to the advertising and marketing factors of your competitors.

Branding is the intangible part of your business. A brand, unlike your product or service offerings, is a collection of ideas, feelings, word associations and visuals that represent your value proposition. Customers choose one particular brand over another because of its intrinsic value. Your brand serves as the link between your product’s promise and the customer’s desire.

Branding is a way to differentiate your company, product or service from competitors. It means having a personality that is unique and appeals to customers. This would include your brand name, graphic representation, tagline, key descriptive phases and brand story.

Well-focused and consistent attention to brand identity marketing will create a favorable, memorable position of your products or services in the minds of your prospects and customers. You must brand consistently to compete and become a factor in the industry sector in which your company participates.

A powerful brand identity and active brand strategy can prevent poor market awareness, insufficient product or service recognition, weak customer retention, lack of loyalty, inadequate lead generation flow, longer-than-expected selling cycles and low product valuation.

Whether you are a new or established business, one looking to refresh or solidify your brand, your company’s brand identity is crucial to your company’s success. A strong brand communicates to your customers a promise and expresses your unique value through words and images.

Developing your brand doesn’t happen overnight. Consistent communications that differentiate your company are imperative to the success and life of your brand.

In today’s fast-paced, multimedia world, it is more important than ever to promote recognition of your company, and its product or service by stressing the quality and the unique value of your brand.

Author: Jennifer Dinehart     Jennifer Dinehart on the Web Jennifer Dinehart RSS Feed

Jennifer is an award-winning communicator and brand strategist. She is president of Concentre Communications, Inc. Drawing on 25 years of broad international communications and marketing experience, Jennifer leads the firm’s client engagement teams and provides senior-level strategic counsel and brand marketing expertise. Her broad background gives her a unique strategic… View full profile

This article originally appeared on http://concentreblog.wordpress.com and has been republished with permission.

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