Every company needs to be unique and set itself out from the competitors. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as it seems. You still have a lot of options to differentiate yourself from the competition and attract clients, even if your offerings are similar to those of another business. Developing a relationship with your customers through a branding strategy can help them remember who you are and what you do.

Beyond just designing a stunning logo, branding also includes a message and design to develop a brand identity and set of values that help customers recognize and remember your company. Furthermore, your branding ought to arouse feelings in prospective clients that support the development of deep, enduring connections with your company.

How your customers and potential customers view your brand isn’t something beyond your control. However, your branding efforts can directly impact how customers feel about you and start building trust with them before they even make their first purchase. By considering your branding, you can improve your reputation and get more exposure, increasing your revenue.

Branding is the process of creating an identity for your brands and business using design and messaging elements to set your business apart from the competition. Your branding represents who and what your business is to help it form long-lasting relationships with customers. Not only does it promote brand recognition by helping potential customers remember design elements and messaging elements when they see your marketing and advertising across various mediums, but it can also help you get more customers by creating better marketing strategies.

Your marketing must align with your brand values and positioning to maintain brand consistency across your marketing, whether they’re interacting with your brand online or offline. It can also help you begin to develop trust.

As you may know, different colors can evoke emotions from customers, making them subconsciously begin trusting you and forming relationships whether they realize it or not. Branding is an effective piece of the marketing puzzle that can help you find new ways to get attention in a crowded marketplace.

You need to get knowledgeable about the many forms of branding before you can grasp its fundamentals. Depending on your objectives, you utilize a different kind of branding. It may surprise you to learn that one organization can employ several branding strategies as long as they work well together and support your objectives. These are a few of the several branding strategies that could be effective for your company.

1. Corporate branding

Corporate branding includes every aspect of the business, including products, services, employees, and more. As a result, your corporate branding plays a huge role in your business reputation. Rather than focusing on one aspect, like your products, it focuses on the business as a whole. Good corporate branding focuses on the unique selling points (USP) and value proposition of the business as a whole and includes the creation of brand guidelines to cover the ways you’ll communicate those selling points with customers and the public.

Corporate branding affects more than just your marketing and sales efforts; it can improve your hiring strategies and help you find partners. With good corporate branding, you can attract top-performing candidates because they know your brand’s values and understand how they’ll be treated within the company. It can also help you find business partners and investors by establishing where your company stands in the marketplace.

2. Personal branding

Personal branding is how a single person brands themselves. Personal branding is best suited for self-employed individuals like freelancers, affiliate marketers, or influencers who must develop a personal brand identity to stand out from the rest. Personal branding can differ from your personal image. Who you are through your business doesn’t have to be the same person as you are in everyday life.

Personal branding allows you to specifically target a niche and leverage any existing fame you have to earn more business. When using personal branding to establish or grow your business, consider how something in your personal life can affect your business.

3. Product branding

Product branding is one of the most well-known forms of branding because it’s done for single product lines rather than the entire business. Every time a business puts out a new line of products, they do branding for just those products because they may have a variety of products with different price points, benefits, and end users in mind.

When considering how to brand products, always consider the end user and customer journey. You may also need to perform a competitive analysis to see how competitors are marketing a similar product. Ultimately, if you want to be successful at product branding, you must solve a customer’s problem in a unique way and advertise your solution to them, taking a different approach than your competitors.

4. Retail branding

Retail branding is branding designed just for retail businesses. This type of branding takes all of the different products under one roof and finds a way to market the seller rather than each individual product, which may come from multiple other businesses and manufacturers.

Retail branding allows you to sell products from multiple manufacturers and other brands. But, of course, you can also sell your own products only, in which case you’ll still need retail branding that conveys why people should shop at your business instead of somewhere else.

5. Geographic branding

Geographic branding focuses on the customers in your area and the traits of a specific region as a selling point. This type of branding is best for the tourism industry because it can attract people to a city, town, or state. But, of course, businesses can benefit from geographic branding, too, especially if your primary customers are located in the same region as your business.

By using visual elements that represent where your business operates, you can attract locals by building a sense of community through your branding efforts. For example, you could put a famous statue or attraction in your logo to generate interest from local customers.

6. Service branding

Service branding is a lot like product branding in that you’re focusing on one aspect of the business rather than the business as a whole. Unfortunately, service branding is much more difficult than product branding because you don’t have physical items like packaging or the product itself.

Read Also: What Are The 4 Elements of Branding?

Instead, you have to brand something consumers can’t see to generate trust. Branding your services requires you to understand the pain points of potential customers and be able to provide them with a service that can solve their problems.

7. Cultural branding

In the tourism and travel industries, geographic and cultural branding is common. This kind of branding uses recognizable cultural or regional symbols to promote a product or service. For example, a bakery that specializes in French pastries may use the symbol of the Eiffel Tower or the colors of the French flag in their logo to communicate their affiliation to their customers.

8. Online branding

Online branding refers to the aspects of a business’s identity that it manages on the internet or through apps. This could include social media accounts, online stores or other services offered digitally. Some businesses may only have an online identity, while others may use online branding as an extension of their physical branding.

9. Offline branding

Offline branding encompasses every type of branding that happens in the real, physical world. It can include print media, the design of a retail establishment or any physical materials you bring with you to a client meeting. This kind of branding might also include a company uniform that all associates wear to work or physical advertisements like those printed on billboards or distributed through fliers.

10. Disruptive branding

This kind of branding strategy challenges existing methods and introduces different ways of establishing a brand or marketing a product. Businesses may use this strategy to change the way the public perceives their brand, or they may use it as part of their marketing strategy to advertise a new service or product. Disruptive branding works by challenging accepted conventions and introducing new concepts.

11. Conscious branding

Conscious branding considers current social issues as part of its branding approach. It engages with social or environmental concerns and promotes a mission to make a positive social impact. An example of conscious branding may be a fashion design company that only uses sustainable methods to produce its clothing.

12. Innovative branding

Innovative branding focuses on introducing unconventional products or services. This kind of branding promotes products and services that are new in the marketplace or have not been publicly available before. Technology companies often use this kind of branding to promote new software or other hardware products.

13. Value branding

The value branding strategy promotes the cost-effectiveness of a product or service. For example, a grocery store may promote its brand by advertising the cost of its products compared to the same product at a competitor’s store. It focuses on developing a brand that attracts financially conscious customers.

14. Performance branding

This style of branding offers products that deliver a high-quality experience. Some product or service performance characteristics marketers may use in this type of branding include dependability, efficiency and consistency. An example of this kind of branding could be a car manufacturer that emphasizes the reliability of the vehicles it produces.

15. Luxury branding

Luxury branding may focus on the high quality and exclusivity of a company’s products or services. This kind of branding expresses that there’s a rarity, extraordinariness or expense to the product or service in question. Businesses that use luxury branding may include high fashion labels, luxury car dealers and jewelers.

16. Style branding

A style brand focuses on how products look and feel when compared to similar items. Sometimes this strategy may elevate the looks of a product over its performance. This style of branding often embraces a tone that endorses a creative and contemporary perspective.

17. Experience branding

Experience branding relies on promoting the interactions or feelings the customer has when using their product or service. This kind of branding is common in industries that promote specific events or opportunities. For example, an arena advertising for an upcoming concert at their venue may use experience branding to communicate the necessity of attending an event to potential customers.

18. Individual branding

Individual branding generally refers to any tangible, individual product. A specific toothpaste or soap can be an example of an individual brand. This kind of branding may extend a product brand, service brand or personal brand.

19. Group branding

A group brand is a situation where several brand identities overlap under a single entity. An example of group branding may be a company that owns an animation studio and a live-action film studio but also manufactures merchandise based on the entertainment media it produces. Though its merchandise brand, animation brand and live film brand may each have an independent brand identity, they are all united under the overreaching identity of the company that produces them.

20. Event branding

Event branding works similarly to experience branding. It promotes an event or opportunity for potential customers to attend. When used effectively, It entices participants to take part in a planned occasion. Examples of events could be a show, sporting game or contest.

21. Private-label branding

Companies that use private-label branding manufacture products that are sold by a different retailer. Private-label brands often include generic store brands or own brands, and some common private-label products may be cosmetics, clothing or cleaning products. The private-label branding strategy often promotes products as a more cost-effective alternative to brand-name products.

22. Media branding

Media branding specifically refers to how media outlets construct their company images. News outlets, magazines and television broadcast networks develop brands that communicate their content to a target audience. For example, the way a local news channel brands itself may differ from how a national news channel brands itself to distinguish the type of viewers they expect to watch and interact with their content.

Finally

The branding styles you select will rely on what makes your product or service stand out among the competition. For instance, a hotel might concentrate on corporate and service branding, but an eCommerce company should prioritize corporate and product branding. When developing a branding strategy, it’s important to keep in mind your target audience when selecting the appropriate colors, typefaces, and messaging.