How Your Image Creates Your Brand

Are you like many business owners who think your logo is your brand or do you know how they are different?

English: Nike Zoom Elite 2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Below are my learnings over the last 30 years of working with advertising agencies, marketing departments and thousands of small business owners.

Your brand is a representation of the image you want to portray to your clients. Your brand includes things that are :

Visual representation of your business – your colours, your fonts when writing. Everything that your prospects, clients and customers see when they look at your business. It includes your logo, your photos and your place of business. How you look to others.
Auditory representation of your business – what people hear when they call your business, how the words you write sound in their head, the jingles and sounds associated with your business. If you create verbal materials like videos, podcasts, commercials these contribute to your brand. How you talk when face to face contributes to your brand and your image.
The smells that get associated with your business and you. Yes restaurants and bakeries easily have the smell image but every business has the smell of the people who work there and the atmosphere of the business as well. And if you work online, then the smell that affects your client is in their environment.
The feel of your business. Every client judges your image and brand on what they feel when they contact your business. If you make them feel valued, comfortable and important then that is what they feel. If they feel like they are intruding or a nuisance, then they may resist dealing with your business.
And finally we have taste but think of taste as the gut. We all use our gut instinct to judge the quality of the business we are dealing with. So think of what you want your client’s gut to say about your brand and your image.

Did you realise that your image is based on the senses? And because the senses are what your prospect uses to determine if they want to use your business, you need to appeal to the senses.

And then realise your image creates the picture and you are now able create your brand. Branding is the representation of your image that portrays you to others. A brand is like the mark that says it’s YOU!

Successful companies try to keep their brands separate for different products. The Coke Cola brand differs from other products make by Coke. Nike however uses the same image and brand across all its products and the message is consistent. Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft use the same brand and image across their full range of products as do businesses like WalMart, Sears and Nordstrum.

If you own a small business you have two choices.