How Collaboration & Data Can Help Refine Your Brand Image
The importance of your brand image to the success of your company cannot be understated. Your brand image is what potential and current customers think of first when your company comes to mind. Developing and maintaining a positive public perception of your brand can cement your company as a “good” brand in the eyes of consumers. However, a positive brand image doesn’t just create itself, and through the use of collaboration and data, you can ensure that your brand’s public perception is where it needs to be.
Design And Business Working Together
The most distilled form of your brand image comes in the form of the logo that you’ve chosen for your business. A good logo can elicit an emotional response that you want to be tied to your product, and the best logos are immediately recognizable even without any indication of the name of the company or what product or service they provide. Companies like Nike with their iconic swoosh, McDonald’s with their golden arches, and Starbucks with their siren have achieved this and their brands benefit greatly for it.
Considering the importance of a logo to your company’s brand, it is imperative that you put a great deal of time and energy into developing your logo. This can be achieved through collaborative efforts with skilled designers who understand the mission statement of your brand. Through effective collaboration, your business can develop a logo that encapsulates your brand identity, improving and refining your image.
Working with a design team to develop a great, iconic logo to represent your brand essentially follows the same collaborative processes you will use throughout your business. While other collaborative efforts will facilitate long-term financial gain and involve product managers and strategists, a design team and a development team, the creation of a perfect logo will revolve more around the skills of a talented design team.
Refining From The Ground Up
Sometimes when you’re looking to sharpen up your brand image, you have to start with the basics and work your way up. Reexamining the foundational aspects of what makes your public image unique to your business can seem daunting, but sometimes it is necessary to do so when you’re trying to refine that image. At the end of the day, taking a good hard look at what you’re trying to achieve with how your brand interacts with the public can be one of the best ways to improve it.
Reexamining your brand’s public perception simply requires you to go back through the steps you took when creating your brand image. Defining your core values can help you to understand what it is that you want your image to achieve, and also help you to better understand who your target audience is. When you get to the basics of what your brand is, what it means, and who it is for, you are able to effectively trim the fat and create a streamlined and refined brand image.
Sometimes businesses take a huge risk when they decide to redefine their core values, risking the loss of some customers in the hopes of appealing to many more. For example, Nike’s decision to have Colin Kaepernick star in a recent advertising campaign was a calculated move. While many within the organization might feel strongly one way or another about the controversy surrounding Colin Kaepernick in the NFL, Nike’s decision to feature him in an ad campaign was ultimately a business decision. Nike saw an opportunity to show what they want to mean to people as a company and they capitalized on it.
It can even be wise to take a look at your brand name, depending on just how far you want to go in refining your brand image. Ideally, a brand’s name is both unique and familiar at the same time while simultaneously representing your brand in a memorable and positive light. Landing on the right sound and spelling is incredibly important as untraditional spellings or clumsy portmanteaus can be confusing to potential customers. Additionally, brands should do their best to avoid names that limit their business operations by associating the business with one single product or service. Imagine if Apple was instead called “Steve’s Personal Computers” — do you think that it as a company would have been able to break into so many different markets if it was restricted in this way?
Data Gives Invaluable Insights
Utilizing the data that your brand generates can make the process of refining how your brand is viewed publicly infinitely easier. Big data and data analysis are not valuable exclusively to massive corporations but can be incredibly useful to brands of any size.
While many associate the idea of big data with improving their supply chain or measuring the effectiveness of marketing and advertising, it also yields information that can help brands improve their image. Big data is much more than a trendy buzzword and can help a brand to refine its image through the insights that it provides. Yes, data privacy laws must be given their due attention. Even so, there’s a wealth of insights to be had.
Good data analysis can help a brand to better understand its core customer base as well as any potential new customers. Just by analyzing the data that is already available to your brand, you can gain a better understanding of how your brand is effective in retaining or acquiring customers.
Data can help you to achieve the longevity essential to any brand by showing you exactly who is and is not likely to be affected by your brand’s public perception. Refining your brand image is only made easier through the utilization of data, and doing so can help you to achieve your desired goal much faster than it would otherwise occur.
Engaging in collaborative efforts and implementing data analytics are some of the best ways to improve and refine your brand image. Even if you have to start from the ground up, utilizing data and collaboration can help your brand reach new heights of success and cement it as a lasting institution.
This guest post was authored by Brooke Faulkner
Brooke Faulkner is a writer, mom and adventurer in the Pacific Northwest. She spends her days pondering what makes a good leader. And then dreaming up ways to teach these virtues to her sons, without getting groans and eye rolls in response.
