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Five Tips to Create and Manage Brand Equity

Design Lots recently updated their corporate image and a new update in their own website is due soon. Add to this a new face or two and one might not even recognise us anymore. This is an all to common scenario in business, as the corporate culture of your business changes, your identity sometimes fails to.

As your company grows, so should its corporate identity. If you are a new business, developing a corporate identity is crucial. A corporate identity includes your logo, relevant branding, a style guide and a set of best practices for using your logo, fonts, etc when communicating with customers. Consistency between employees is crucial in developing a set of standards for effectively managing customers and clients as well as your brand.

Keeping your website and corporate image up to date is an important aspect for any business. When first impressions last; having the foresight to recognise where potential customers first make contact is important. Then, implementing tools to both convey the correct message and draw those potential customers through the door is paramount.

Below is a set of five tips to help you make the best first impressions and convert potential customers into real ones as well as managing change within your brand.

1. Invest in developing brand equity. Branding assists in developing brand equity and brand equity is very important to business.  This is because it is the value consumers are willing to pay for your product or service based on a set of factors like, name awareness, perceived quality, and brand loyalty.

In 2004, Coca-Cola’s brand (not their assets) was worth $122.55 bn, Microsoft was worth $111.64 bn and Toyota was worth $41.27 bn. That is simply the price someone would pay to own that companies name; why? Because they’ve successfully built a brand, they have positioned themselves as leaders in their respective fields.

When you strengthen the factors that contribute to brand equity, like name awareness, through consistent branding, then you slowly build and strengthen your brand equity, which in turns leads to a more profitable business for yourself.

2. Develop a corporate identity and use it. Included within a corporate identity is your company’s name, logo, specific font sets, email signatures, letterheads, invoices, and business cards, just to name a few.

The corporate identity is the first step in branding your business. These both lead to increased sales, loyalty and eventually, a better price point for your products or services. Branding is the basis of marketing your company, and even small business can begin to harness its potential power by using consistently branded and formatted emails, letters, business cards, and even your company’s website.

3. Develop a website and use it. According to the Sensis 2007 eBusiness Report, 92% of businesses in Australia utilise online services when running their business but only 51% of businesses have a website.

While these statistics will have changed marginally over the past two years, they still show that Australian businesses utilise the Internet to find information and make purchases as well as showing that Australian businesses are not fully embracing the Internet as a medium to disperse information and sell products.

Increasingly, we use search engines like Google to help us find what we are looking for. Slowly, phone books and telephone information services are disappearing, giving way to a new medium for conveying accurate and useful information; the Internet.

4. Use a professional graphic or website designer. Below are three websites examples (linked), one site is a D.I.Y., one site is designed with a web template, and one site is one of our recent projects.

DIY website | Able Roofing
Web template website | R&T Home Insulation
dlc website | Impact Insulation

Take notice of the quality of the three different designs, and ask yourself how long you would give each site when browsing them as a potential supplier of home insulation for your home; 3 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute?

The time it takes to dismiss a potential supplier of a product has decreased in the past two decades as a direct result of our over exposer to marketing messages. Meaning, those businesses who can capture your attention and hold it for 30 seconds to a minute are already well ahead of the competition.

5. Finally, if you have a website or corporate identity, update it. The vast majority of sites that we build are built with Content Management Systems (CMS). That said, only a small minority of our clients fully utilise this invaluable tool to update their sites with current and useful information.

One simple thing that you can do to help your site improve its page ranking is update the information on it. Google (and other search engines) occasionally ‘crawl’ your site looking for updated content. If it finds updated content, that works for you, if not, it works against you.

A common mistake is to say we built it, they will come. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. Having a website and having a website that gets found are two very different things. Developing a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign is a more comprehensive way to effectively market your website online through search engines. It does cost money because it takes time to do effectively, but when done correctly, the pay off is huge.

When it comes to a logo or corporate identity, fonts and colour schemes come and go over time. What was hot in the 80’s and 90’s isn’t so much anymore. Embrace change and make it work for you and your business.

Design Lots Creative is a client focused website design, custom web development and graphic design firm. Our Brisbane based web design team can assist on any project worldwide.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/branding-articles/five-tips-to-create-and-manage-brand-equity-1243197.html

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September 20th, 2009 | Category: Product brand strategy | Comments Off
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