Your brand is more than just the logo on your letterhead and business cards or your business name; it is your business’ identity. An effective brand tells the world who you are, what you do and how you do it, while at the same time establishing your relevance to and credibility with your prospective customers.
Your brand is also an essential part of how your business is perceived by your customers. If your brand has strength, you enjoy many advantages over your competition, especially when it comes to pricing. Strong brands leads to higher brand awareness, and higher brand awareness and good product quality leads to have a much higher customer perceived value. Similarly, Starbucks coffee successfully changed the perceived value for a coffee and people agreed to pay a higher cost for the same coffee they get in other places. Brand equity is the term for the amount of “extra money” that someone is willing to pay for a brand-named product, or because it comes from a brand-named store.
Name your company
Choosing your business name will be one of the most important decisions you will make when you are starting your company. It is the first opportunity you have to package – or brand – your company for everyone with whom your business will be dealing. Whenever your company name is heard or viewed in written form, it will be the defining factor as to how your company is initially perceived (branded) in the mind of your target audience. If your company manages to stay in business for the next twenty years, the name you chose will still be with you unless you changed it somewhere along the way.
Here are several tips in naming your business:
- Choose a memorable name.
- Stress your image. Don’t pick a silly name if your business relies on trustworthiness, credibility, and professionalism.
- Keep it short.
- Make it easy to spell so customers can find it in telephone directories or online.
- Strive for ease of pronunciation.
- Avoid generic terms, such as Orange Store or Pink Lotion, which are difficult to protect legally from copycats.
- Don’t sacrifice clarity for cleverness.
- Choose carefully. Having to change the name later can be costly.
- Use names suggestive of what your business does or a quality you want to project, such as Sparkling Water or Absolutely Perfect Carpet Cleaning.
- Reject names that have negative or offensive meanings in other languages.
- Steer clear of names that are too narrow to have “staying power” as your business grows and evolves.
- Check your business name’s URL availability for a Web site.
- Protect your business name with your state, and with the Patent and Trademark Office.
After taking into consideration all of the above, it is best to formulate a list of possible names for your business and then make your decision. You could enlist other people to help you come up with names and share your ideas with these people, preferably those who understand the nature of your business and the market you are targeting. After you make your list, sort the names according to priority and eliminate those you think does not meet your criteria, then resort it until you come up with the most desirable candidate or candidates for your business name.
Creating a Logo
To establish your business as a brand, your brand should reflect the merchandise you sell, the service you provide, the uniqueness you offer, and the kind of customer you want to attract. Creating a truly great logo is a good place to begin, and it will be more than an attractive picture or design. It is both a powerful image and a specific representation of your business. It can be as simple as the business name presented in a distinctive font style, a symbol that represents your business, or a combination of these.
When designing a logo, remember to keep it simple so that it’s easy to recognize. Even the font style can elicit an emotion-some fonts are very formal, while others look more casual or whimsical. A good graphic designer will know the difference. But it’s best to hire a designer only after you are certain you can explain your vision for the business-and that requires some homework.
When considering what kind of customers you want to attract to your business – your ideal customers-think about their income level, their education level, their lifestyle, and the media to which they are exposed. All this information helps you determine how best to build your brand to appeal to your ideal customer. What are their priorities? Where do they already shop? Remember, it is not enough to know them. You must also know what motivates them to buy. Otherwise, you can open an eye-catching store in a great location, or have an incredible animated Web site, distinctive products, and packaging, and your business will fail anyway.
Leaf through some of the magazines your ideal customer probably reads. Clip and collect logos that appeal to you. This input should help your graphic designer create one or two sample logos for you. Show these samples to friends and colleagues, family members, trusted business compatriots, and other retailers, and ask them to be completely honest as you gather opinions.
You can really make your brand stick in the minds of your customers if you can find a word or phrase that specifically represents your business, yet has a broad and catchy appeal. This is called “gaining ownership” of a word or phrase. Some famous catchy phrares are, “Where do you want to go today?” – Microsoft; “Like.no.other” – Sony; “Just do it” – Nike; “Connecting people” – Nokia.
If you decide to design your own logo, you may use professional graphic and image editing soft wares like Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator. But if you’re tight on a budget and doesn’t want to shell out a fortune buying these soft wares for a one-time logo design use, you may download a free trial of one of my favorite logo design software below.
Free download:
Regardless of your creative ability, you can blend shapes and text into an impressive logo in a few clicks with AAA Logo. Just choose a logo layout you like from the collection of pre-build templates, edit the elements of the logo, add your business name and slogan. And finally, apply some styling. That’s it. Now, you can export the logo project for printing or for the Web. In addition to pre-build logo templates, you can make logos by yourself from scratch. Here are some sample logos created with AAA Logo.
Tags: brand awareness, brand equity, branding, business name, company name, logo creation, logo design, marketing
