5 Unusual Branding Tips To Create An Awesome Online Brand
Why should you care about branding or branding tips?
Branding is important for any business to stand out from its competitors. This is especially true for new, small businesses.
They need a unique identifier to differentiate themselves from the millions of other small businesses and even their much wealthier global counterparts.
Every successful business positions itself with its branding. However, the more creative and out-of-the-box you get, the more distinctive a brand you can create for your small business.
In this article, we discuss just that: five unusual branding tips for small businesses.
1. Use Color To Evoke Emotion
One of the most important branding tips for small businesses is creating a perception that emotionally attaches your customers to you.
In fact, according to a Harvard professor, 95% of purchase decisions are made with an emotional context.
How To Use Color
A neat way to evoke a certain emotion is with the use of color. There are a variety of theories that correlate the two. And Robert Plutchik’s color wheel of emotions is one very effective tool that does that.
Every shade in the wheel relates to a certain feeling and emotion. Brands can use these to their advantage by implementing certain colors in their logos, product lines, office decor, etc.
2. Write A Personal And Evolving Brand Story
A brand story is a must in a list of branding tips for small businesses.
Everyone loves a great narrative and new businesses have the ability to make that narrative personal and keep it moving faster.
Your reason for starting a business may be just as simple as “I wanted to”, but as a small business owner how are you adding your personal touch to it?
How To Write A Compelling Story
TOMS’s story, for example, talks about how its founder saw hardships faced by children without shoes and wanted to change that. Similarly, think about what your brand’s story is.
TOMS even lists the number of people they’ve provided shoes to. Just like that, how has your brand’s journey evolved?
Unlike their bigger counterparts, small businesses have the advantage of a faster-evolving narrative. Use that to your advantage and give your consumers a show.
3. Play The Challenger
Look back at the Apple ads of their early days and you’ll see a lot of shade being thrown at Microsoft.
Look at the earliest Samsung smartphone ads and you’ll at least find a jibe or two aimed at Apple.
Just like in boxing, everyone loves the underdog. The underdog is loud, brash even, and aims at dethroning the champion.
This insight has served as one of the most important branding tips for small businesses, over the years.
How To Play The Challenger
If there is a bigger business out there, draw attention to your brand by being its antithesis. If your products are superior and have an edge over a certain aspect of your larger competitor’s product, highlight that.
In fact, also highlight the kind of emotion your brand creates versus the larger business’s.
This strategy will serve you well until you yourself become ‘the man’.
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4. Make Use Of Carl Jung’s Archetypes
An easy to understand summary of Jung’s theory would be that conscious human behavior is determined by certain traits that can be summed into character archetypes.
While humans may exhibit multiple behavioral traits, brands can pick up one, or a mix of those archetypes and develop a brand personality around them.
This can serve as one of the most important branding tips for small businesses.
How To Use The Archetypes
There are 12 archetypes that you can employ to make your brand as identifiable as possible. These archetypes can be translated into:
- The kinds of advertisements you launch
- Who your audience is (this is most usually a factor of an archetype and not the result of)
- The kinds of colors you use
- The shapes of your products
- And others
Gaming giant Nintendo, for example, uses ‘The Innocent’ archetype very well. This translates in their ads, as well as their PG characters such as Mario, Zelda, Pokèmon, among others.
This has allowed Nintendo to carve a distinct identity and stay competitive with much the larger Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation.
Similarly, your brand can pick up an archetype and build an identity around it. You can even experiment and try out a mix of archetypes to give your brand identity depth.
A brand that caters to dads, for example, can mix ‘The Jester’ and ‘The Caregiver’ to talk to their crowd.
5. Make Something About Your Brand Exclusive
If there were a list of branding tips for small businesses that have picked up steam in recent years, this would be it.
In fact, even big businesses use it quite often.
Facebook, for example, was only exclusive to Harvard students, at first. Indian company Cred gained its success by being invite-only, at first. Coca Cola’s ‘secret formula’ is probably one of the smartest branding strategies of all time.
How To Add Exclusivity To Your Brand
These above examples all share two common traits:
- They’re exclusive to a few, trusted people.
- The object of their exclusivity is cool.
For the exclusive angle to work, the product should invoke curiosity. People must talk about it.
And people will only talk about it if the product has the ‘cool factor’ to it.
For this to happen, your product must be good. Very good. This is maybe part of the reason why Google+ wasn’t able to dethrone Facebook.
Sometimes, flaunting your best asset serves your interests. And sometimes, making it exclusive does the same.
Both types of branding/marketing strategies can work, but both have to be done right.
In Conclusion
There are plenty of branding tips for small businesses. For them to work, they have to be executed properly and have to be supported by a good product or service.
All of the companies mentioned above that got their branding right, also got their products right.
Oftentimes, the context of your product dictates what your brand identity should be.
Sometimes it is as straightforward as catering to your target market’s needs. And sometimes a marketing study can reveal a hidden insight you can take advantage of (think dads secretly wanting to be bad boys on motorbikes).
Whatever your strategy, the branding tips in this article can put you on the right path.