Corporate Branding Strategy

What Is the Difference Between Brand and Corporate Image?

You must create your company’s brand identity to become recognizable to your clients or users. It is essential to establish a connection between your brand and potential customers. The tool for this is called a corporate branding strategy. It helps to position your business as a trusted partner or service provider to stand out from all competitors in the industry. In addition, a well-developed strategy helps boost brand awareness and promote customer retention.

We want to provide a short description of such branding strategy conception, its benefits, and how to develop it properly.

So, what is a corporate branding strategy? The concept of corporate branding implies the development of the company’s identity and the ways of presenting it to customers. The brand can indicate its values, messaging its goals and intentions, and the overall brand voice. This is implemented via a corporate brand image and design, often used by marketing professionals. When you think about the brand image, try to be consistent. You should continuously include the brand’s logo, characteristic images, styles, and voices in all marketing materials. Your potential clients will recognize your company, make conversions, and, as a result, enhance revenues.

How to Compare Brand vs. Logo Notions

The difference between these two conceptions is obvious, though both of them are important components of your business’s image. A brand should define its purposes, describe the products and services you offer, and consider the target audience for them. You can look at some corporate brand examples in Audi or Adidas' newest promotions to understand how it world.

A logo is a visual representation of the brand. People notice the logo and associate it with the brand and its performance. Even if you are a startup or a mature corporation, your logo should be placed consistently on all sales or marketing materials. If people see it pretty often, they will remember it and be aware of what you are doing. It is especially important for attracting new customers and investments.

How to Establish a Persuasive Corporate Brand?

Your team should work consistently to formulate and promote your company’s mission, values, goals, purposes, and vision. All corporate branding strategies are normally based on the ability to straightforwardly communicate all those conceptions to the target audience. Building a strong corporate brand should follow such stages as:

1. Discussing the Goals, Missions, and Visions

You have to decide for yourself and explain to your team what aims all the marketing materials and messaging policies should pursue. Think about discussing with them all the company’s statements related to its values and goals. Formulate your overall purpose and vision. The management team needs to understand what your business aims to achieve so that they can develop more accurate and detailed materials and messaging techniques.

2. Doing a Brand Audit

A brand audit involves reviewing the company’s identity via messaging and image. It can include a thorough look at the website, marketing representation, and cooperation with partners and clients, as well as reviewing all sales materials and offers. Check everything your potential target audience can see and evaluate. Ensure that all these materials accurately represent your company’s goals and mission. After that, you will be able to define the areas that need improvement to show your brand more positively and consistently.

3. Conducting Surveys with Employees

Your employees have to continuously work on the company’s improvements, so they should be motivated. They will produce high-quality task completion only when they trust the company and share its values. Their input in the branding strategy can grow when you conduct surveys or distribute questionnaires among them meant to find out how they view the company and what values they would rather promote in the marketing materials. You can ask them the following:

━ What helps you work for this company?

━ What do you think is unique within this business?

━ What is the main purpose of the company, in your opinion?

━ Why do you think customers will choose this company among many others?

━ How can this business influence our customers’ life?

━ What is special about our customer service?

━ There may also be some other questions that will help understand how well your employees are integrated into the company’s environment and performance.

4. Researching Target Audiences

All examples of corporate branding demonstrate close bonding with target audiences. You should convey your branding strategy in accordance with your target audience’s expectations. That is why regular research on who your target customers are, seems essential. You need to know how they access the content, what they expect from it, and what values they have. That will help you communicate your brand appropriately to potential clients, choosing the ways and techniques they best understand. You also have to learn their goals, needs, and challenges related to your industry. When you know them, you will be able to convey the details about how your product or service can improve their life. That will enhance your company’s connection with the audience and the trustworthiness of your offers in their eyes will quickly increase.

5. Developing a Brand Strategy and Style Guide

You can represent your brand’s identity due to the feedback from your employees. The brand strategy based on this identity will be very effective. Start with reviewing all the available materials about your brand to highlight the areas that need changes. The branding strategies should be flexible related to that, so the renovated ones need to embody all the fixes and alterations. Develop a style guide for understanding your brand’s messaging, imagery, and purposes. The guide will provide details on how to display the brand which will be pretty helpful for your staff. Your employees need to understand better how they should communicate with the audience to sound enthusiastic, positive, consistent, and brand-loyal.

Benefits of Corporate Branding

So, why is successful corporate branding so important? It helps characterize the uniqueness of the brand, its values, goals, and main features. Customers can decide to choose your product or service among many others because they like your purposes and offers. Corporate branding can support their trust in your company, especially if they share similar values. When you manage to enhance the potential clients’ commitment to your company, it is called emotional marketing. The customers will demonstrate high retention rates, the number of useful referrals will increase, and the revenue will boost.

Now, let’s consider the benefits a strong corporate branding strategy can provide to customers, partners, and other stakeholders of your business in detail.

1. Human Resources and Organizational Development Boosting

The behaviors of all your employees should be aligned with your business goals. If your workers understand it properly, staff attention will increase, as well as staff satisfaction will go up too. They will attract the most consistent word of mouth due to that. Attracting talents to your company will reduce recruitment costs. If the employees are satisfied with their workplace and conditions, that will increase their productivity.

2. Improvements in Corporate and Business Functions

Focusing on the company’s goals and purposes will help stakeholders get a more profound idea of what your business is like and how it is different from competitors. The increased trust will attract more stakeholders - employees, customers, partners, intermediaries, and distributors. The improved customer experience and higher levels of innovation will help communicate the company’s intentions with more confidence, conviction, and clarity. There will be less confusion and ambiguity while making important decisions. The improved company’s functionality will result in an increased business presence on the market.

3. Boosting Marketing Techniques

The improved corporate branding strategies will result in a positive perception of the company, increased acceptance of new products launched by your business, and a boost in reliability and reputability.

4. Increase in Sales

A stronger corporate branding strategy results in stronger negotiating positions and more favorable terms of cooperation. Sustainable relationships between the existing customers and the company will provide new customers with indisputable reasons why to choose your products and services. So, your sales will grow.

5. Improvements in the Portfolio Value

Since the company’s products will become more popular and recognizable, the benefits of using the business will enter the company’s brand portfolio. That will provide more opportunities for expansion. Your company will be able to move into new or additional markets.

6. Better Relationships with Media and Governmental Organizations

A strong corporate branding strategy can support the government as a stakeholder and provide it with the possibility to support the company. The increased number of positive commentaries in the media will account for a more stable company’s position in times of crisis.

7. Benefits for the Community

The company’s role in the community will grow alongside the increased awareness of the organization’s advantages among the members of the community. More and more stakeholders will get involved in your business. Its expansion will bring a lot of benefits to all the members because they will be able to receive high-quality products and services at lower prices.

Final Thoughts

Thus, you can see what the corporate branding strategy is and how the brand differs from the conceptions of the company’s image and logo. You have received more information about how to establish the corporate brand and develop its strategy correctly. The appropriate choice of corporate branding strategy can be pretty beneficial to your company, its employees, customers, partners, and other stakeholders. You may also assume that it will be beneficial to the entire community.