To All Indie Artists:
Have you discovered the beauty of branding yet? If not, let me help you. Branding is necessary for so many reasons, but let me just give you a few, to prove my point. The reasons for branding are:
- Entity ID. You need for people, customers, fans to identify you by what you do, not just who you are. When you network, people may not remember your name, but if you give them an interesting tagline, such as a jingle, or rhythmic tagline, people will remember and ID you much easier the next time around. For example, our tagline is, Transforming indie artists into indie empires. When people hear or read that, they know exactly what we do, even if they won’t remember who we are. Of course, everyone knows Nike’s tagline, “Just do it.” You can’t hear that line and not think of Nike. What about, “Nationwide is on your side.” What a jingle. It’s kind of hard to forget, and the jingle includes their name and what they want you to remember about them.
- Personality. Branding your business allows you to converse with your audience. Your messages should have a particular personality that coincides with what your business offers. For instance, if you were a software company, you might choose a factual and nerdy type of personality, but for a trendy clothing company, you might use slang or take on a silly personality to connect with your target audience. It ties in with your identity and helps to create more memorable experiences for customers.
- Consistency. Consistency communicates reliability, which leads to trustworthiness. Consistency is crucial in branding. When a business identity is inconsistent, all of its elements tend to go in different directions. For example, no logo design might mean no brand colors and no brand colors could lead to a very random website, and a very random website could set the path for strange and confusing messages.
- Makes You Social. Once the business is branded, you can create social media accounts. This is key if you would like to communicate with your audience easily. Most people have Facebook profiles and use them to communicate with brands about issues or rave about how much they love the product or service. Social media platforms are the perfect place to showcase your excellent customer service skills and express gratitude to loyal fans.
And if that’s not enough, branding can become big bucks. When a company like Microsoft sells their business, the greater value, believe it or not will be their name. It’s called, “Goodwill.” Think about it, when you hear the name “Microsoft,” it expresses quality, stability and big bucks. If Microsoft was to sell their business, but decides to keep the name, how many takers do you think they would get? It’s all in the name.
