The 5 elements of successful branding

A successful brand is always well-defined and relevant to the market. You might wrongly assume that if you have a tagline, logo and business card, your branding is complete. The process of branding is complete only when you have carefully defined and considered these five key elements: promise, position, personality traits, story and associations.

Only if you have built the discipline of consistency into every action, behaviour and communication, both externally and internally, incorporating your brand identity into every aspect of your organisation, will you be able to create a successful brand strategy.

The five key elements that go into a successful branding campaign are:

Brand position

The part which describes what your organisation does, whom it caters to, what your unique values are, what differentiates you from other companies and what the consumer can gain by using your product or service is collectively known as the brand position. Once you have concluded your brand’s position, the next step is to make it known to the world outside in different versions of 25, 50 and 100 words.

Brand promise

The single most important thing that the organisation promises to deliver every single time is a brand promise. In order to come up with your brand promise, you need to consider what employees, customers and partners expect from you in every transaction. Every business move should be weighed against this promise to be sure that it justifies it or at the very least it does not directly contradict it.

Brand personality

Brand traits are what will illustrate what the brand should be known for within and outside the organisation. You need to think about the specific personality traits you want your employees, prospects, partners and clients to use whenever they describe your organisation. You need to have at least four to seven traits that stand for your brand and describe what to expect from it.

Brand story

Alongside the organisation’s history, how it adds credibility, shapes the face of and lends value to the brand is called the brand story. It also usually includes a summary of your services and products.

Brand associations

Specific physical artefacts that make up the brand are known as brand associations. This includes your logo, name, colours, fonts, image tagline and so on. Your brand promise and your brand traits must be reflected through your brand association. Your brand association must also support your brand positioning statement.

Once you are done developing and defining a relevant brand, you need to start building the brand with customers, employees and partners. The key to the success of a branding process is repetition. Nobody will ever know or remember what your brand really is unless you decide to keep it the same every single time they are exposed to it. So, we recommend that you document all these brand elements in a brand book and provide it to all the employees.