Branding is Alive and Well!

Our team received the ultimate compliment this past week when a technology client for whom we had done a complete brand makeover—including visuals, messaging, the whole works—informed us that three potential buyers had been attracted to purchase the company and that the work The Creative Alliance had done contributed to their interest.

OK, enough bragging about my team here, but it goes to make an important point:

Brand building is powerful and profitable.

Crafting a compelling brand out of the right words, messages, visuals and customer experiences results in a higher perceived value of the company or product being branded. Brands are belief systems, repositories of confidence, tools for alignment with customers.

In our client's case the customer was the buyer of his company; for other clients, it's the buyer of bottled water or a corporate aircraft, or a non-profit's need for support. Whatever the transaction looks like, branding is the shared mental model that unites buyer and seller. It creates a shared perceived value of a product, service or company.

The reason branding is profitable is that allows for some amazing advantages in the marketplace:

A strong brand commands premium pricing. Translation: less price-cutting and greater profits.

A strong brand cultivates more loyal customers. Translation: greater lifetime revenue per customer.

A strong brand makes product launches easier. Translation: earlier adoption by customers and faster ROI on R&D.

A strong brand increases employee loyalty. Translation: reduced HR costs.

A strong brand increases the value of a company. Translation: increased shareholder value + more profitable exit strategy.

Which brings us back to our client. The increased competition to buy his company, and its higher perceived value, will far outweigh the investment he made in the branding process. Thousands of dollars invested in branding can sometimes yield hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars in profit.

Given the stock market's recent instability, I think I'd rather invest in branding.