Better Blog Branding: Your Successful Brand
How do you know when your brand is successful?
A successful brand comes in two parts:
- Recognition
- Feelings
While those two properties are powerful, they are also imprecise enough to be frustrating for many people.
How do you quantify feelings? How important is recognition?
Recognition can be achieved simply enough. Repeated interactions with consistency. Just like Pavlovs experiments with his hounds, there needs to be a positive pay-off with those repeated exposures.
We are back to customer experience and evoking positive feelings again. Oh-no, the touchy-feely stuff!
Think about it though, we do feel different about certain brands. Some brands just make us feel good.
Consider Apple. I would bet a good portion of their valuation is based on how their products, customer experience and brand combine to make their customers feel.
People tell me, Apple is not just a company, it’s a “state of mind”. You know, I think there might be some truth to it 
I enjoy going into my local Apple store. No, not just enjoy, I look forward to it and get a “kid in a sweet shop” buzz from it! While I can’t fathom quite what it is about Macs, I know my little laptop rejuvenated my enjoyment of computers.
Are Apple products recognisable? I would say so, despite competing MP3 player brands and computer manufacturers parroting a lot of their design features. What do you think of when you think of “Apple”?
Most of us could probably recognise Coca-Cola from a corner of a piece of packaging. I could recognise a Subway by smell alone, driving past in a bus with my eyes closed.
Too many people think a brand is a logo.
(I’m looking at you London Olympic Committee, heh).
All the pieces work together to create an overall before, during and post experience.
- Design
- Materials
- Product
- Promotion
- Service
- …
When you get it right, any small part of the brand evokes the whole, and it is a pleasurable experience. Of course, when you get it wrong, the negative version is also true.
On your blog, in your company, do you put as much effort into making people feel good as you do your content, design and product?
A poor experience can’t be fixed with even the worlds best logo.
Design your image carefully, yes have a professional looking logo, make sure everything you do fits together neatly, but make sure what you actually deliver within all that great packaging delights. That is what gives your brand meaning.
When your prospects recall your brand, make sure it makes them smile. If not … you would be better not being recognised at all.
Tags: branding, marketing, blog, blogging, design, tips
Table of contents for Better Blog Branding
- Better Blog Branding: What's In a Name?
- Better Blog Branding: 10 Ways To Destroy Your Brand
- Better Blog Branding: Domain Exclusivity
- Better Blog Branding: Is Your Brand Breaking Promises?
- Better Blog Branding: Finding Your Uniqueness
- Better Blog Branding: How to Stand Out By Being First
- Better Blog Branding: Your Blogs Hidden Messages
- Better Blog Branding: Your Successful Brand
- Branding and Changing the Rules of the Game
Posted on June 28th, 2007 by Chris Garrett in Marketing
Brand creation is an organic process. Hyped brands don’t take longer to fail. You should be recognized by others, not enough you feel that you are known all over.
With Brands, you blend your values, company values. It’s the reflection of customer aspirations. If you are branded, you get repeat customers. If Chris does not treat my blog post reference as spam, let me share you the URL from my blog on that
Brand is brand, not necessarily brand is important only for big companies. Every one of us have our own brand - good or bad. Brands which can add more values to customers, they stand out from the crowd.
Rajesh Shakya
Helping technopreneurs to excel and lead their life!
Yes it comes down to value, and value that the customer/reader sees and remembers and not just what you tell them
Repeat customers… this is sliding just slightly off-topic, but Rajesh has reminded me of a thought that flitted across my mind just last night:
We tend to measure blog success (in large part) by stats, right? So, if “unique visitors” is the holy grail of numbers for a conventional direct-monetization blogger, wouldn’t the equivalent for an authority blogger be the number of subscribers? And in that case, maybe it’s time to re-jig the conventional “80% search engines, 20% direct traffic” wisdom that’s widely touted…
Yes subscribers, repeat visitors, pages viewed. Anything that infers stickiness and loyalty really
Top metric in addition to subscribers in my view will always be conversion rate - “how many people do the thing you wanted them to?”
One of the things I enjoy from a blog that evokes feelings and makes me remember the brand better is when I receive a personal email in response to a comment I have left as well as a comment response for everyone else to see.
I think that more can be expressed in a personal email to a blog commenter and it adds an extra touch. Then adding a brief comment response on the blog shows your other readers that you truly value the opinions of others.