What are the 3 types of brands?
Brand Defined
In the book Principles of Marketing (by Philip Kotler and Gary Amstrong), this simple definition for brand is given: Brand is a "name, term, sign, symbol (or combination of these) that identifies the maker or seller of the product."
This is a good definition, at least as a start, but we know that brand means more than the identity of the manufacturer of a product. In this social, connected, high-tech world, branding has come to mean so much more.
Personal branding expert Gary Vaynerchuk explains brand as reputation. "Whenever you hear the word brand," he says, "just think of 'reputation.' They mean the same thing!"
Thinking of brand as a reputation, let's look at the three types of branding we marketers need to be thinking about and be prepared to master.
The Three Types of Branding
What are the three types of branding? Think of the different things or people that could gain a reputation. These might be:
1) A corporation or company brand
2) A product brand
3) A personal brand
Many companies may have all three of these brand types, so we want to make sure we understand each of them.
Company Branding
A company or corporation may have a brand of its own.
Strike that. A company or corporation *should* have a brand of its own. Any company has a reputation of some kind, be that good or bad. The trick is in crafting a positive reputation and helping as many people as possible know about it.
Your company needs to have a specific brand they want to put out into the world, a reputation they want to have. This brand can be reinforced through your content.
Product Branding
Even within a company, individual products may also have their own brand.
In your company, you may have several products or services that you market through content. What brand do these offerings have? What reputation do they have? How would your entire company benefit if some products developed their own brands, related to but separate from the overall company brand?
Personal Branding
Within a company or organization, there may be anywhere from one to many people that also have personal brands
In much the same way, your company may have a leader, a CEO, or even a lower-tier member with a brand of their own. How can your content help boost that personal brand's reputation?
Here are the 8 types of branding you need to know:
Personal branding
At first, it can feel kind of strange to think of a person as having a brand. After all, we’re not products, we’re people. And we have inborn personalities, not cultivated brands.
Personal branding happens on social media and in face-to-face environments where others’ perception of you can have a massive impact on your professional and social reputation—in a good or disastrous way. So how do you “do” personal branding? By cultivating a public persona that directs the people who see you to assign certain traits and values to your character. How you style yourself for headshots, the kinds of images and quotes you share to social media, the platforms where you choose to spend your time and the way you interact with others are the pieces of personal branding that come together to show the world who you are as an individual.
Product branding
Product branding is the action of branding a specific product. Just like personal branding involves cultivating a public vocabulary and aesthetic for yourself, product branding shapes how the world perceives your product through deliberate aesthetic choices.
With product branding, the goal is to connect the right audience to your product.There’s a specific type of buyer—also known as a customer avatar—who’s responsible for most of your sales. Through thoughtful product branding, you can make sure people who fit this customer avatar:
If you’re not sure how the color and font choices you make for your branding shape potential buyers’ perception of your products, check out our posts on color psychology and choosing the right font.
Service branding
Unlike products, which are easy to brand in visible and tangible ways, services are a little more challenging to brand. But that doesn’t mean brands can’t do it effectively—they just have to be willing to think outside the box.
Often, service branding comes in the form of “extras”, like an insurance company sending all their customers rebate checks at the end of the year or a hotel offering free cookies at the concierge desk. Service branding can also come in the form of meeting specific expectations that set a company apart from its competitors, like a cable company connecting customers with human customer service reps rather than automated prompts, when they call.
People want quick, efficient, friendly service and in some industries, simply providing this kind of service consistently is enough. In others, a brand has to actively go above and beyond by providing unexpected perks to stand out from the crowd. Any company that provides a service, whether the service is their sole offering or something provided alongside tangible products, needs to create trust with their consumer, especially as not all services have immediate outcomes. The way that they can do this is by connecting to their consumers on a deeper, emotional level.
Take Air New Zealand, for instance. The airline brand has carved out a reputation as an airline with a sense of humor, primarily through their reimagining of stuffy, traditionalist airline safety videos as funny, unorthodox marketing opportunities. During the heights of The Lord of the Rings’ and The Hobbit’s cinematic success, when there was a huge increase in tourism in New Zealand, Air NZ partnered with the films’ makers to become “the official airline of Middle Earth”.
Still from Air NZ safety video, via Adweek
This elaborate collaboration spawned an A-list air-safety video, featuring the most-loved stars of the films. In 2014, as the country celebrated the Sports Illustrated Swimwear Issue’s 50th anniversary, the airline again created a novelty safety-video, this time featuring major international supermodels such as Chrissy Teigen. The latter example may have caused some controversy for the airline brand but both campaigns distinguished Air NZ from competitor airlines: these well-timed marketing collaborations connected to potential customers through their sense of humour and ultimately promoted Air NZ as a quality, contemporary airline offering such an enjoyable customer experience that it excels expectations of any “standard” airline.
4. Retail branding
When you walk into a brick and mortar store, its physical appearance has a look and feel specific to that brand. That’s retail branding in action. Deliberate design choices like its layout, the light fixtures, the decor, the music played, the display fixtures and even the type of flooring are all carefully selected to build a living brand experience for every shopper who enters the store.
3D design by HTM13™
3D design by Ozzyvill
3D design by AndreaMarquez
Retail branding is a must-do for any business operating in a physical location. eCommerce has seen immense growth in the past few years and that trend isn’t changing any time soon. So, to keep shoppers coming through the doors, retailers need to up their branding game and turn their stores into experiences that shoppers want to come back and relive.
5. Cultural and geographic branding
Cultural and geographic branding is actually two separate, but similar, types of branding. Both are popular in the tourism industry.
Geographic branding is branding for cities, states, regions, and even countries. Think of “I Love New York” to represent New York City and the Eiffel Tower as a symbol of Paris. Cultural branding is similar but focuses on the cultural aspects of a region over the geographic ones. Think “a sidewalk cafe” versus the Eiffel Tower to represent Paris or “the Japanese tea ceremony” versus Mount Fuji to represent Japan.
So what kind of businesses can benefit from cultural and geographic branding? Tourism and tourism-adjacent businesses, like hotels and airport taxis for sure, but also any kind of business that makes its region of origin a focal point in its branding.
6. Corporate branding
If a company is a person, their corporate branding is how they express their personality. Corporate branding, just like other kinds of branding, is the series of design choices and actions that communicate key points about the brand, like its:
7. Online branding
Online branding, as the name implies, is branding that happens online. Unlike specific types of branding, like personal or product branding, online branding is a broad category that refers to all types of branding that happen on the internet. It’s how an individual positions themselves on social media, it’s the kind of online ads a service provider runs, it’s all the design choices that go into email newsletters, landing pages, responsive web design, and automatic message replies.
For brands that have both a brick-and-mortar and digital presence, effective online branding often feels like an extension of the company’s offline branding. Digital customer service guidelines, for instance, often include using the same vocabulary as the brand’s in-store associates would. Otherwise, you may notice the digital design choices of a certain brand may mimic those of the physical store, bringing its offline ambiance online.
If online branding is part of your branding strategy (in this day and age, it needs to be) the key to getting it right is making sure it fits into your wider brand identity like a glove. Going from a soft, minimalist eCommerce website to a brash, overloaded packaging design can be jarring for customers when receiving products and so undermines your attempt to build a meaningful relationship between them and your brand.
When you design your branding, think about all the places it will appear. You’ll need to think about how you’ll express the brand on and offline and, more specifically, where it will appear in both of those areas. Your website and social media profiles are a given, but what about print ads? What about merchandise your target audience would love? Think about your favorite brands and all the places you interact with them. How does their branding differ from place to place while still staying consistent? Walking into an Apple store isn’t the same experience as swiping through your iPhone, but the two feel like they’re connected somehow—that’s branding.
8. Offline branding
In case it isn’t obvious from the name, offline branding is branding that happens offline. Much like online branding can encompass types of branding like personal branding, product branding, corporate branding, and cultural and geographic branding, offline branding can encompass these as well.
Merchandise and print products are offline branding. Retail branding is offline branding. So is the personal branding you might bring to a client meeting or an industry conference. It can include your wardrobe, your choice of venue for sit-down meetings with clients, the make and model you choose for your company cars, and even the brands of equipment you and your team use.
It’s not uncommon to endorse your choice of brands in your own branding strategy—one notable example is McDonald’s offering Coca-Cola products. Compare that with Taco Bell offering Pepsi products. One partnership is between two family-friendly, fun, red brands that fit into our perception of classic Americana. The other is slightly more niche, somewhat edg,ier and not at all concerned about not being #1.
The five key elements that go into a successful branding campaign are:
Brand position
The part which describes what your organization 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 organization 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 organization. You need to think about the specific personality traits you want your employees, prospects, partners, and clients to use whenever they describe your organization. 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 organization’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 artifacts that make up the brand are known as brand associations. This includes your logo, name, colors, 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.
What types of branding tools are there?
As we noted earlier, branding tools cover a lot of ground and touch every corner of digital marketing. Consider these 9 branding tools the must-haves for your marketing strategy:
Branding for email: HubSpot Email Signature Generator
After all these years, email marketing is still going strong. With an average return on investment of 42:1, it’s not hard to see why email marketing has enjoyed such longevity. To realize that kind of eye-popping ROI, though, you need your email strategies to be firing on all cylinders. Every part of every marketing email should reflect your brand identity and deliver the right message.
That includes your email signature.
There are a bunch of branding tools to help marketers design a winning email signature, but for our money, HubSpot’s Email Signature Generator is one of the best around. It’s so user-friendly and straightforward, you can create a professional email signature that’s easy on the eyes and aligns with your style guidelines. With different themes, templates and features to choose from, you can create the right email signature for your brand in no time at all.
How can we possibly know all this? Because Brafton uses HubSpot’s tool to design email signatures for every one of our employees. Check it out:
Branding for social media presence: Lightroom
Social media is a critical marketing channel for B2C and B2B companies alike. According to Sprout Social, 84% of consumers will buy from a brand they follow on social media platforms rather than go with a competitor.
Branding for search: SEMrush
Every good marketing strategy accounts for search engine optimization (SEO), and that includes ranking for the right search terms to raise your business’s online profile and increase brand awareness.
SEMrush is a great tool for all things related to SEO, providing keyword research, competitive analysis, and content guidance. The platform also tailors results according to location and device, letting businesses craft their SEO marketing strategy around their specific target audience.
Branded content: Instagram Branded Content
Creating content for your social media feeds doesn’t need to fall squarely on your shoulders. Working with influencers, industry thought leaders, business partners, and other brands to publish social media content is a great way to reach new audiences and build brand awareness.
Branded content can be tough to execute, especially since social media users are often suspicious of promotional posts. To help walk that line with all the grace and balance of a tightrope walker, marketers can turn to Instagram’s Branded Content tools.
Instagram allows brands to easily tag other business partners in their posts and let followers know when content is published as part of a commercial agreement.
When it comes to building a good social media reputation, it pays to be transparent, and Instagram gives you the right tools for the job.
Visual branding: Piktochart
Infographics, custom images, and other visual content should all reflect your brand identity, incorporating your color scheme and style guidelines into every design.
Nothing beats having a team of talented graphic designers to whip up infographics whenever you need them, but if that’s not feasible, you can always take advantage of visual branding tools to fill that skills gap. Piktochart is a great tool for marketers who don’t have the design chops to create professional graphics, images, and artwork on their own.
It’s easy to jump in and start building out infographics, newsletters, eBooks, and anything else you need to promote your visual branding.
Video branding tools: Wistia
You can’t have a well-rounded content marketing strategy without video content.
Of course, as anyone who’s dipped their toes into the video water can tell you, creating professional video content doesn’t come cheap. Adobe Spark may be the gold standard when it comes to video branding software, but if you’re not a professional videographer or animator, you may struggle to get your full money’s worth out of it.
But there are video branding platforms out there to help level the playing field for marketers who lack the budget for a full-fledged video animation team.
Wistia, for instance, augments its video-hosting platform with tons of customization options, so you can add company logos, tweak colors, overlay text, and incorporate calls to action.
Branding tools for a logo design: Adobe Illustrator
A great logo can tell prospective customers everything they need to know about your brand without you having to utter a single word.
That’s easier said than done, of course, but logo design software can help. The undisputed king of the logo design world is still Adobe Illustrator after all these years, as the platform continues to add new features to make it easier for marketers to create attention-grabbing company logos.
Perhaps the coolest feature is the ability to scan your hand-drawn designs and use them as the foundation for a killer logo.
Adobe Illustrator requires a paid subscription, but it’s worth the money if you’re serious about graphic design.
Brand style guide tools: Frontify
Every piece of content you publish, every interaction you have with a potential customer and every message you send out into cyberspace needs to adhere to the same brand guidelines to ensure your business is always represented the way you want it to be. Once you start branching out into guest blogging, social media branded content and business partnerships, it becomes even more important to maintain strict brand guidelines.
Web-based style guide platforms like Frontify can help you cover all of your bases, from building a style guide with preloaded templates to sharing your guidelines with creative teams, third-party vendors and your closest business partners.
Brand voice and writing tools: Quordoba
After you’ve spent hours painstakingly crafting your style guide, how can you be sure your in-house writers, outsourced creative teams and assorted freelancers stick to those rules? You need a content audit platform to continually review blog posts, articles, case studies, social media posts and other written content to flag any deviations from your brand guidelines.
Quordoba bills itself as “content intelligence software,” meaning it uses advanced AI to check that every landing page, guest blog and article on your website follows your in-house style. The digital age calls for cutting-edge solutions, and an AI-driven content review platform could be just what your brand needs.
Types of marketing tools
Below are some marketing tools with an explanation of what they are and why businesses use them.
Classified adverts
Classified adverts or classified ads are useful for generating leads. In this context, the word ‘leads‘ means potential customers.
Classified ads can direct people to a specific website or webpage (the word exists as one or two words, i.e., ‘web page’). They can also attract people who seek further information.
Social media
In the world of Internet marketing, social media is a marketing tool where you try to develop an interactive online relationship with consumers. Your aim is not, for example, to surreptitiously mine customer data.
Blogging, posting, sharing and tweeting are popular social media marketing tools. Media sharing, pinning, bookmarking, and commenting on social media websites are also popular.
Internet marketing refers to marketing that only occurs online. Search engine optimization (SEO) and online advertising are examples of Internet marketing. There are several ways to increase your SEO. One of the first steps is to secure a reliable and simple domain name that is relevant to your site, industry, or keywords you want to match for.
Search engine optimization refers to techniques to increase one’s website’s appearance on search engines.
Surveys
Surveys are useful for determining which products to create and also for improving or upgrading existing goods. The word ‘goods‘ in this context means ‘products.’
Surveys are also useful if you want to rate your and your rivals’ products. A survey can ask a representative sample of consumers what they like about your and your competitors’ products.
You can carry out a survey face-to-face, on the telephone, by normal post, o
Most marketing professionals will mention surveys when you ask them to list their most important marketing tools.
Google Analytics
If you have an online business or your company has a website, Google Analytics is extremely useful. It gives you an overview of where your visitors are coming from. It also tells you what type of people are visiting, and which content on your website performs best.
You can also use Google Analytics to work out visitor conversions. This data will help you set up conversion goals.
Organic CTR (organic click-through rate) is a way you can utilize Google Analytics to improve your website traffic. You can optimize page titles and descriptions and see how they perform by implementing A/B testing.
Direct mail
Direct mail or direct mail marketing specifically targets potential customers. Traditionally, we have referred to the letters as ‘mailshots.’ Ever since the advent of the Internet and emails, we also have ’emailshots.’
Regarding emailshots, MediaTraining.Ltd.uk says:
“Designing an emailshot differs from creating a webpage or designing for print as you have to consider the specific needs of your target audience and the technical requirements of different email applications.”
This brings us to modern-day email marketing tools which many marketers still consider to be more effective than other types of digital marketing.
Media monitoring tools
These marketing tools scan the web and inform you of conversations that are relevant to your company, product, or brand. These tools scan, for example, social media sites, forums, blogs, and videos.
Four brand strategies
When it comes to brand development, there are four main brand approaches, as shown in the following diagram.
As you can see, this diagram is a matrix built around the two attributes of existing/new product category and existing/new brand name. This then determines one of the four boxes, namely:
Product line extension
A product line extension is introducing a new product – that is similar to what the company already offers (that is, within an existing product line/category) that is targeting an existing market by using the current brand name.
This is a very common approach in marketing. This is because the existing brand name has a customer following, and new products/variations will tend to be relatively well received by these loyal customers.
We frequently see this approach with products sold through supermarkets channels, where you variations of tastes/flavors and packaging sizes have some appeal with the marketplace.
Multi brand
A variation of the product line extension above, is to run a multiple brand strategy within the same market. As you can see from the matrix, a multi-brand strategy involves having more than one brand competing in the same product category.
Again this is a relatively common approach for large companies. For example, a manufacturer of frozen vegetables may have multiple brands – that to the consumer appeared to compete against each other – but have the same corporate ownership.
The main reasons for this is that these brands can have different positioning in the market, dominate the overall shelf space, and reduce opportunities for competitors to enter the market or to win market share.
The disadvantage of this multi-brand strategy (as opposed to a product line extension strategy) is the cost and time of developing a new brand name successfully in the marketplace.
Brand extension
A brand extension involves broadening the market’s understanding of the brand. This is achieved by offering more products (of a different nature/category) under the existing brand name.
An example of this in recent years would be McDonald’s competing in the gourmet coffee product category – effectively broadening the positioning of McDonald’s from fast food only to be perceived as also competing against Starbucks to some extent.
Brand extensions they usually approached with care, as the market may not fully accept the brand’s expertise in another product category. As a hypothetical example, consider if the Coca-Cola brand was extended to shampoos and detergents – the market would see little connection and the overall brand would be damaged.
Therefore, brand extensions work best if the new product category has some relationship to the brand’s existing product category and perceived area of expertise.
New brand
The final brand development strategy is a new brand. A new brand occurs when the firm is expanding is offering – by developing a new product line that they haven’t not offered before – and as a result, need to build a new brand.
How the Four Ps Work
Product
Product refers to a good or service that a company offers to customers. Ideally, a product should fulfill an existing consumer demand. Or a product may be so compelling that consumers believe they need to have it and it creates a new demand. To be successful, marketers need to understand the life cycle of a product, and business executives need to have a plan for dealing with products at every stage of their life cycle. The type of product also partially dictates how much businesses can charge for it, where they should place it, and how they should promote it in the marketplace.
Many of the most successful products have been the first in their category. For example, Apple was the first to create a touchscreen smartphone that could play music, browse the Internet, and make phone calls. As of November 2018, Apple stopped providing public sales figures for the iPhone. However, as of November 1, 2018, total sales of the iPhone equaled $2.2 billion. Apple revealed that it had sold its one billionth iOS device on November 22, 2014. And in 2018, the company announced they were approaching selling their two billionth iOS device.12
Price
Price is the cost consumers pay for a product. Marketers must link the price to the product's real and perceived value, but they also must consider supply costs, seasonal discounts, and competitors' prices. In some cases, business executives may raise the price to give the product the appearance of being a luxury. Alternatively, they may lower the price so more consumers can try the product.
Marketers also need to determine when and if discounting is appropriate. A discount can sometimes draw in more customers, but it can also give the impression that the product is less exclusive or less of a luxury compared to when it is was priced higher.
What makes UNIQLO unique is that it creates innovative, high-quality products. It is able to accomplish this by procuring its fabric from its material manufacturer partners, securing stable, high-quality materials at low cost by ordering in large volumes, and continuously seeking the highest-quality and lowest-cost material in the world. The company also directly negotiates with its manufacturers and has built strategic partnerships with high-quality and innovative Japanese manufacturers.
UNIQLO also outsources its production to partner factories; because it doesn't own its own factories, it has the flexibility to change production partners if the best production location changes over time. Finally, the company employs a team of skilled textile artisans that it sends to its partner factories all over the world for quality control. In addition, production managers visit factories once a week to resolve quality problems.3
Place
When a company makes decisions regarding place, they are trying to determine where they should sell a product and how to deliver the product to the market. The goal of business executives is always to get their products in front of the consumers that are the most likely to buy them.
In some cases, this may refer to placing a product in certain stores, but it also refers to the product's placement on a specific store's display. In some cases, placement may refer to the act of including a product on television shows, in films, or on web pages in order to garner attention for the product.
Promotion
Promotion includes advertising, public relations, and promotional strategy. The goal of promoting a product is to reveal to consumers why they need it and why they should pay a certain price for it.
Marketers tend to tie promotion and placement elements together so they can reach their core audiences. For example, In the digital age, the "place" and "promotion" factors are as much online as they are offline. Specifically, where a product appears on a company's web page or social media, as well as which types of search functions trigger corresponding, targeted ads for the product.
4 Ps of Marketing FAQs
What do the 4 Ps mean in marketing?
Product, price, promotion, and place form the 4 Ps of the marketing mix. These are the key factors that are involved in the marketing of a good or service.
What are the 4 Ps of marketing and examples?
The 4 Ps of marketing are place, price, product, and promotion. By carefully integrating all of these marketing strategies into a marketing mix, companies can ensure they have a visible, in-demand product or service that is competitively priced and promoted to their customers.
Place refers to where and how people buy your product. Some examples of places consumers can buy products and services include online via a web browser, through a smartphone app, retail locations, through trade shows or events, through marketplace channels like Amazon or Walmart, or through a sales professional.
Price refers to how much your product or service costs. How you price your product depends on your competitors, demand, cost to produce the product, and what consumers are willing to spend. Companies also need to consider their pricing models, including choosing between one-time purchases and subscription models.
Product refers to the product or services your business provides to your target audience. The product a company provides can vary significantly depending on the type of company and what they do. For example, McDonald's provides consistent fast food, including hamburgers, french fries, and chicken products, whereas Salesforce provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and marketing automation tools for businesses.
Promotion refers to specific and thoughtful advertising that reaches a company's target market. A company might use an Instagram campaign, a PR campaign that showcases a product, or an email campaign to reach its audience at the right place and the right time.
How do you use the 4 Ps of marketing?
The model of the 4Ps can be used when you are planning a new business venture, evaluating an existing offer, or trying to optimize your sales with your target audience. It can also be used to test your current marketing strategy.
Brand Defined
In the book Principles of Marketing (by Philip Kotler and Gary Amstrong), this simple definition for brand is given: Brand is a "name, term, sign, symbol (or combination of these) that identifies the maker or seller of the product."
This is a good definition, at least as a start, but we know that brand means more than the identity of the manufacturer of a product. In this social, connected, high-tech world, branding has come to mean so much more.
Personal branding expert Gary Vaynerchuk explains brand as reputation. "Whenever you hear the word brand," he says, "just think of 'reputation.' They mean the same thing!"
Thinking of brand as a reputation, let's look at the three types of branding we marketers need to be thinking about and be prepared to master.
The Three Types of Branding
What are the three types of branding? Think of the different things or people that could gain a reputation. These might be:
1) A corporation or company brand
2) A product brand
3) A personal brand
Many companies may have all three of these brand types, so we want to make sure we understand each of them.
Company Branding
A company or corporation may have a brand of its own.
Strike that. A company or corporation *should* have a brand of its own. Any company has a reputation of some kind, be that good or bad. The trick is in crafting a positive reputation and helping as many people as possible know about it.
Your company needs to have a specific brand they want to put out into the world, a reputation they want to have. This brand can be reinforced through your content.
Product Branding
Even within a company, individual products may also have their own brand.
In your company, you may have several products or services that you market through content. What brand do these offerings have? What reputation do they have? How would your entire company benefit if some products developed their own brands, related to but separate from the overall company brand?
Personal Branding
Within a company or organization, there may be anywhere from one to many people that also have personal brands
In much the same way, your company may have a leader, a CEO, or even a lower-tier member with a brand of their own. How can your content help boost that personal brand's reputation?
Here are the 8 types of branding you need to know:
- Personal branding
- Product branding
- Service branding
- Retail branding
- Cultural and geographic branding
- Corporate branding
- Online branding
- Offline branding
Personal branding
At first, it can feel kind of strange to think of a person as having a brand. After all, we’re not products, we’re people. And we have inborn personalities, not cultivated brands.
Personal branding happens on social media and in face-to-face environments where others’ perception of you can have a massive impact on your professional and social reputation—in a good or disastrous way. So how do you “do” personal branding? By cultivating a public persona that directs the people who see you to assign certain traits and values to your character. How you style yourself for headshots, the kinds of images and quotes you share to social media, the platforms where you choose to spend your time and the way you interact with others are the pieces of personal branding that come together to show the world who you are as an individual.
Product branding
Product branding is the action of branding a specific product. Just like personal branding involves cultivating a public vocabulary and aesthetic for yourself, product branding shapes how the world perceives your product through deliberate aesthetic choices.
With product branding, the goal is to connect the right audience to your product.There’s a specific type of buyer—also known as a customer avatar—who’s responsible for most of your sales. Through thoughtful product branding, you can make sure people who fit this customer avatar:
- Hear about your brand
- Visit your website
- Like, follow and subscribe to your various social media channels…
If you’re not sure how the color and font choices you make for your branding shape potential buyers’ perception of your products, check out our posts on color psychology and choosing the right font.
Service branding
Unlike products, which are easy to brand in visible and tangible ways, services are a little more challenging to brand. But that doesn’t mean brands can’t do it effectively—they just have to be willing to think outside the box.
Often, service branding comes in the form of “extras”, like an insurance company sending all their customers rebate checks at the end of the year or a hotel offering free cookies at the concierge desk. Service branding can also come in the form of meeting specific expectations that set a company apart from its competitors, like a cable company connecting customers with human customer service reps rather than automated prompts, when they call.
People want quick, efficient, friendly service and in some industries, simply providing this kind of service consistently is enough. In others, a brand has to actively go above and beyond by providing unexpected perks to stand out from the crowd. Any company that provides a service, whether the service is their sole offering or something provided alongside tangible products, needs to create trust with their consumer, especially as not all services have immediate outcomes. The way that they can do this is by connecting to their consumers on a deeper, emotional level.
Take Air New Zealand, for instance. The airline brand has carved out a reputation as an airline with a sense of humor, primarily through their reimagining of stuffy, traditionalist airline safety videos as funny, unorthodox marketing opportunities. During the heights of The Lord of the Rings’ and The Hobbit’s cinematic success, when there was a huge increase in tourism in New Zealand, Air NZ partnered with the films’ makers to become “the official airline of Middle Earth”.
Still from Air NZ safety video, via Adweek
This elaborate collaboration spawned an A-list air-safety video, featuring the most-loved stars of the films. In 2014, as the country celebrated the Sports Illustrated Swimwear Issue’s 50th anniversary, the airline again created a novelty safety-video, this time featuring major international supermodels such as Chrissy Teigen. The latter example may have caused some controversy for the airline brand but both campaigns distinguished Air NZ from competitor airlines: these well-timed marketing collaborations connected to potential customers through their sense of humour and ultimately promoted Air NZ as a quality, contemporary airline offering such an enjoyable customer experience that it excels expectations of any “standard” airline.
4. Retail branding
When you walk into a brick and mortar store, its physical appearance has a look and feel specific to that brand. That’s retail branding in action. Deliberate design choices like its layout, the light fixtures, the decor, the music played, the display fixtures and even the type of flooring are all carefully selected to build a living brand experience for every shopper who enters the store.
3D design by HTM13™
3D design by Ozzyvill
3D design by AndreaMarquez
Retail branding is a must-do for any business operating in a physical location. eCommerce has seen immense growth in the past few years and that trend isn’t changing any time soon. So, to keep shoppers coming through the doors, retailers need to up their branding game and turn their stores into experiences that shoppers want to come back and relive.
5. Cultural and geographic branding
Cultural and geographic branding is actually two separate, but similar, types of branding. Both are popular in the tourism industry.
Geographic branding is branding for cities, states, regions, and even countries. Think of “I Love New York” to represent New York City and the Eiffel Tower as a symbol of Paris. Cultural branding is similar but focuses on the cultural aspects of a region over the geographic ones. Think “a sidewalk cafe” versus the Eiffel Tower to represent Paris or “the Japanese tea ceremony” versus Mount Fuji to represent Japan.
So what kind of businesses can benefit from cultural and geographic branding? Tourism and tourism-adjacent businesses, like hotels and airport taxis for sure, but also any kind of business that makes its region of origin a focal point in its branding.
6. Corporate branding
If a company is a person, their corporate branding is how they express their personality. Corporate branding, just like other kinds of branding, is the series of design choices and actions that communicate key points about the brand, like its:
- Values
- Mission
- Price point
- Exclusivity
- Ideal consumer
7. Online branding
Online branding, as the name implies, is branding that happens online. Unlike specific types of branding, like personal or product branding, online branding is a broad category that refers to all types of branding that happen on the internet. It’s how an individual positions themselves on social media, it’s the kind of online ads a service provider runs, it’s all the design choices that go into email newsletters, landing pages, responsive web design, and automatic message replies.
For brands that have both a brick-and-mortar and digital presence, effective online branding often feels like an extension of the company’s offline branding. Digital customer service guidelines, for instance, often include using the same vocabulary as the brand’s in-store associates would. Otherwise, you may notice the digital design choices of a certain brand may mimic those of the physical store, bringing its offline ambiance online.
If online branding is part of your branding strategy (in this day and age, it needs to be) the key to getting it right is making sure it fits into your wider brand identity like a glove. Going from a soft, minimalist eCommerce website to a brash, overloaded packaging design can be jarring for customers when receiving products and so undermines your attempt to build a meaningful relationship between them and your brand.
When you design your branding, think about all the places it will appear. You’ll need to think about how you’ll express the brand on and offline and, more specifically, where it will appear in both of those areas. Your website and social media profiles are a given, but what about print ads? What about merchandise your target audience would love? Think about your favorite brands and all the places you interact with them. How does their branding differ from place to place while still staying consistent? Walking into an Apple store isn’t the same experience as swiping through your iPhone, but the two feel like they’re connected somehow—that’s branding.
8. Offline branding
In case it isn’t obvious from the name, offline branding is branding that happens offline. Much like online branding can encompass types of branding like personal branding, product branding, corporate branding, and cultural and geographic branding, offline branding can encompass these as well.
Merchandise and print products are offline branding. Retail branding is offline branding. So is the personal branding you might bring to a client meeting or an industry conference. It can include your wardrobe, your choice of venue for sit-down meetings with clients, the make and model you choose for your company cars, and even the brands of equipment you and your team use.
It’s not uncommon to endorse your choice of brands in your own branding strategy—one notable example is McDonald’s offering Coca-Cola products. Compare that with Taco Bell offering Pepsi products. One partnership is between two family-friendly, fun, red brands that fit into our perception of classic Americana. The other is slightly more niche, somewhat edg,ier and not at all concerned about not being #1.
The five key elements that go into a successful branding campaign are:
Brand position
The part which describes what your organization 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 organization 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 organization. You need to think about the specific personality traits you want your employees, prospects, partners, and clients to use whenever they describe your organization. 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 organization’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 artifacts that make up the brand are known as brand associations. This includes your logo, name, colors, 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.
What types of branding tools are there?
As we noted earlier, branding tools cover a lot of ground and touch every corner of digital marketing. Consider these 9 branding tools the must-haves for your marketing strategy:
Branding for email: HubSpot Email Signature Generator
After all these years, email marketing is still going strong. With an average return on investment of 42:1, it’s not hard to see why email marketing has enjoyed such longevity. To realize that kind of eye-popping ROI, though, you need your email strategies to be firing on all cylinders. Every part of every marketing email should reflect your brand identity and deliver the right message.
That includes your email signature.
There are a bunch of branding tools to help marketers design a winning email signature, but for our money, HubSpot’s Email Signature Generator is one of the best around. It’s so user-friendly and straightforward, you can create a professional email signature that’s easy on the eyes and aligns with your style guidelines. With different themes, templates and features to choose from, you can create the right email signature for your brand in no time at all.
How can we possibly know all this? Because Brafton uses HubSpot’s tool to design email signatures for every one of our employees. Check it out:
Branding for social media presence: Lightroom
Social media is a critical marketing channel for B2C and B2B companies alike. According to Sprout Social, 84% of consumers will buy from a brand they follow on social media platforms rather than go with a competitor.
Branding for search: SEMrush
Every good marketing strategy accounts for search engine optimization (SEO), and that includes ranking for the right search terms to raise your business’s online profile and increase brand awareness.
SEMrush is a great tool for all things related to SEO, providing keyword research, competitive analysis, and content guidance. The platform also tailors results according to location and device, letting businesses craft their SEO marketing strategy around their specific target audience.
Branded content: Instagram Branded Content
Creating content for your social media feeds doesn’t need to fall squarely on your shoulders. Working with influencers, industry thought leaders, business partners, and other brands to publish social media content is a great way to reach new audiences and build brand awareness.
Branded content can be tough to execute, especially since social media users are often suspicious of promotional posts. To help walk that line with all the grace and balance of a tightrope walker, marketers can turn to Instagram’s Branded Content tools.
Instagram allows brands to easily tag other business partners in their posts and let followers know when content is published as part of a commercial agreement.
When it comes to building a good social media reputation, it pays to be transparent, and Instagram gives you the right tools for the job.
Visual branding: Piktochart
Infographics, custom images, and other visual content should all reflect your brand identity, incorporating your color scheme and style guidelines into every design.
Nothing beats having a team of talented graphic designers to whip up infographics whenever you need them, but if that’s not feasible, you can always take advantage of visual branding tools to fill that skills gap. Piktochart is a great tool for marketers who don’t have the design chops to create professional graphics, images, and artwork on their own.
It’s easy to jump in and start building out infographics, newsletters, eBooks, and anything else you need to promote your visual branding.
Video branding tools: Wistia
You can’t have a well-rounded content marketing strategy without video content.
Of course, as anyone who’s dipped their toes into the video water can tell you, creating professional video content doesn’t come cheap. Adobe Spark may be the gold standard when it comes to video branding software, but if you’re not a professional videographer or animator, you may struggle to get your full money’s worth out of it.
But there are video branding platforms out there to help level the playing field for marketers who lack the budget for a full-fledged video animation team.
Wistia, for instance, augments its video-hosting platform with tons of customization options, so you can add company logos, tweak colors, overlay text, and incorporate calls to action.
Branding tools for a logo design: Adobe Illustrator
A great logo can tell prospective customers everything they need to know about your brand without you having to utter a single word.
That’s easier said than done, of course, but logo design software can help. The undisputed king of the logo design world is still Adobe Illustrator after all these years, as the platform continues to add new features to make it easier for marketers to create attention-grabbing company logos.
Perhaps the coolest feature is the ability to scan your hand-drawn designs and use them as the foundation for a killer logo.
Adobe Illustrator requires a paid subscription, but it’s worth the money if you’re serious about graphic design.
Brand style guide tools: Frontify
Every piece of content you publish, every interaction you have with a potential customer and every message you send out into cyberspace needs to adhere to the same brand guidelines to ensure your business is always represented the way you want it to be. Once you start branching out into guest blogging, social media branded content and business partnerships, it becomes even more important to maintain strict brand guidelines.
Web-based style guide platforms like Frontify can help you cover all of your bases, from building a style guide with preloaded templates to sharing your guidelines with creative teams, third-party vendors and your closest business partners.
Brand voice and writing tools: Quordoba
After you’ve spent hours painstakingly crafting your style guide, how can you be sure your in-house writers, outsourced creative teams and assorted freelancers stick to those rules? You need a content audit platform to continually review blog posts, articles, case studies, social media posts and other written content to flag any deviations from your brand guidelines.
Quordoba bills itself as “content intelligence software,” meaning it uses advanced AI to check that every landing page, guest blog and article on your website follows your in-house style. The digital age calls for cutting-edge solutions, and an AI-driven content review platform could be just what your brand needs.
Types of marketing tools
Below are some marketing tools with an explanation of what they are and why businesses use them.
Classified adverts
Classified adverts or classified ads are useful for generating leads. In this context, the word ‘leads‘ means potential customers.
Classified ads can direct people to a specific website or webpage (the word exists as one or two words, i.e., ‘web page’). They can also attract people who seek further information.
Social media
In the world of Internet marketing, social media is a marketing tool where you try to develop an interactive online relationship with consumers. Your aim is not, for example, to surreptitiously mine customer data.
Blogging, posting, sharing and tweeting are popular social media marketing tools. Media sharing, pinning, bookmarking, and commenting on social media websites are also popular.
Internet marketing refers to marketing that only occurs online. Search engine optimization (SEO) and online advertising are examples of Internet marketing. There are several ways to increase your SEO. One of the first steps is to secure a reliable and simple domain name that is relevant to your site, industry, or keywords you want to match for.
Search engine optimization refers to techniques to increase one’s website’s appearance on search engines.
Surveys
Surveys are useful for determining which products to create and also for improving or upgrading existing goods. The word ‘goods‘ in this context means ‘products.’
Surveys are also useful if you want to rate your and your rivals’ products. A survey can ask a representative sample of consumers what they like about your and your competitors’ products.
You can carry out a survey face-to-face, on the telephone, by normal post, o
Most marketing professionals will mention surveys when you ask them to list their most important marketing tools.
Google Analytics
If you have an online business or your company has a website, Google Analytics is extremely useful. It gives you an overview of where your visitors are coming from. It also tells you what type of people are visiting, and which content on your website performs best.
You can also use Google Analytics to work out visitor conversions. This data will help you set up conversion goals.
Organic CTR (organic click-through rate) is a way you can utilize Google Analytics to improve your website traffic. You can optimize page titles and descriptions and see how they perform by implementing A/B testing.
Direct mail
Direct mail or direct mail marketing specifically targets potential customers. Traditionally, we have referred to the letters as ‘mailshots.’ Ever since the advent of the Internet and emails, we also have ’emailshots.’
Regarding emailshots, MediaTraining.Ltd.uk says:
“Designing an emailshot differs from creating a webpage or designing for print as you have to consider the specific needs of your target audience and the technical requirements of different email applications.”
This brings us to modern-day email marketing tools which many marketers still consider to be more effective than other types of digital marketing.
Media monitoring tools
These marketing tools scan the web and inform you of conversations that are relevant to your company, product, or brand. These tools scan, for example, social media sites, forums, blogs, and videos.
Four brand strategies
When it comes to brand development, there are four main brand approaches, as shown in the following diagram.
As you can see, this diagram is a matrix built around the two attributes of existing/new product category and existing/new brand name. This then determines one of the four boxes, namely:
- Product line extension
- Multi-brand
- Brand extension
- New brand
Product line extension
A product line extension is introducing a new product – that is similar to what the company already offers (that is, within an existing product line/category) that is targeting an existing market by using the current brand name.
This is a very common approach in marketing. This is because the existing brand name has a customer following, and new products/variations will tend to be relatively well received by these loyal customers.
We frequently see this approach with products sold through supermarkets channels, where you variations of tastes/flavors and packaging sizes have some appeal with the marketplace.
Multi brand
A variation of the product line extension above, is to run a multiple brand strategy within the same market. As you can see from the matrix, a multi-brand strategy involves having more than one brand competing in the same product category.
Again this is a relatively common approach for large companies. For example, a manufacturer of frozen vegetables may have multiple brands – that to the consumer appeared to compete against each other – but have the same corporate ownership.
The main reasons for this is that these brands can have different positioning in the market, dominate the overall shelf space, and reduce opportunities for competitors to enter the market or to win market share.
The disadvantage of this multi-brand strategy (as opposed to a product line extension strategy) is the cost and time of developing a new brand name successfully in the marketplace.
Brand extension
A brand extension involves broadening the market’s understanding of the brand. This is achieved by offering more products (of a different nature/category) under the existing brand name.
An example of this in recent years would be McDonald’s competing in the gourmet coffee product category – effectively broadening the positioning of McDonald’s from fast food only to be perceived as also competing against Starbucks to some extent.
Brand extensions they usually approached with care, as the market may not fully accept the brand’s expertise in another product category. As a hypothetical example, consider if the Coca-Cola brand was extended to shampoos and detergents – the market would see little connection and the overall brand would be damaged.
Therefore, brand extensions work best if the new product category has some relationship to the brand’s existing product category and perceived area of expertise.
New brand
The final brand development strategy is a new brand. A new brand occurs when the firm is expanding is offering – by developing a new product line that they haven’t not offered before – and as a result, need to build a new brand.
How the Four Ps Work
Product
Product refers to a good or service that a company offers to customers. Ideally, a product should fulfill an existing consumer demand. Or a product may be so compelling that consumers believe they need to have it and it creates a new demand. To be successful, marketers need to understand the life cycle of a product, and business executives need to have a plan for dealing with products at every stage of their life cycle. The type of product also partially dictates how much businesses can charge for it, where they should place it, and how they should promote it in the marketplace.
Many of the most successful products have been the first in their category. For example, Apple was the first to create a touchscreen smartphone that could play music, browse the Internet, and make phone calls. As of November 2018, Apple stopped providing public sales figures for the iPhone. However, as of November 1, 2018, total sales of the iPhone equaled $2.2 billion. Apple revealed that it had sold its one billionth iOS device on November 22, 2014. And in 2018, the company announced they were approaching selling their two billionth iOS device.12
Price
Price is the cost consumers pay for a product. Marketers must link the price to the product's real and perceived value, but they also must consider supply costs, seasonal discounts, and competitors' prices. In some cases, business executives may raise the price to give the product the appearance of being a luxury. Alternatively, they may lower the price so more consumers can try the product.
Marketers also need to determine when and if discounting is appropriate. A discount can sometimes draw in more customers, but it can also give the impression that the product is less exclusive or less of a luxury compared to when it is was priced higher.
What makes UNIQLO unique is that it creates innovative, high-quality products. It is able to accomplish this by procuring its fabric from its material manufacturer partners, securing stable, high-quality materials at low cost by ordering in large volumes, and continuously seeking the highest-quality and lowest-cost material in the world. The company also directly negotiates with its manufacturers and has built strategic partnerships with high-quality and innovative Japanese manufacturers.
UNIQLO also outsources its production to partner factories; because it doesn't own its own factories, it has the flexibility to change production partners if the best production location changes over time. Finally, the company employs a team of skilled textile artisans that it sends to its partner factories all over the world for quality control. In addition, production managers visit factories once a week to resolve quality problems.3
Place
When a company makes decisions regarding place, they are trying to determine where they should sell a product and how to deliver the product to the market. The goal of business executives is always to get their products in front of the consumers that are the most likely to buy them.
In some cases, this may refer to placing a product in certain stores, but it also refers to the product's placement on a specific store's display. In some cases, placement may refer to the act of including a product on television shows, in films, or on web pages in order to garner attention for the product.
Promotion
Promotion includes advertising, public relations, and promotional strategy. The goal of promoting a product is to reveal to consumers why they need it and why they should pay a certain price for it.
Marketers tend to tie promotion and placement elements together so they can reach their core audiences. For example, In the digital age, the "place" and "promotion" factors are as much online as they are offline. Specifically, where a product appears on a company's web page or social media, as well as which types of search functions trigger corresponding, targeted ads for the product.
4 Ps of Marketing FAQs
What do the 4 Ps mean in marketing?
Product, price, promotion, and place form the 4 Ps of the marketing mix. These are the key factors that are involved in the marketing of a good or service.
What are the 4 Ps of marketing and examples?
The 4 Ps of marketing are place, price, product, and promotion. By carefully integrating all of these marketing strategies into a marketing mix, companies can ensure they have a visible, in-demand product or service that is competitively priced and promoted to their customers.
Place refers to where and how people buy your product. Some examples of places consumers can buy products and services include online via a web browser, through a smartphone app, retail locations, through trade shows or events, through marketplace channels like Amazon or Walmart, or through a sales professional.
Price refers to how much your product or service costs. How you price your product depends on your competitors, demand, cost to produce the product, and what consumers are willing to spend. Companies also need to consider their pricing models, including choosing between one-time purchases and subscription models.
Product refers to the product or services your business provides to your target audience. The product a company provides can vary significantly depending on the type of company and what they do. For example, McDonald's provides consistent fast food, including hamburgers, french fries, and chicken products, whereas Salesforce provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and marketing automation tools for businesses.
Promotion refers to specific and thoughtful advertising that reaches a company's target market. A company might use an Instagram campaign, a PR campaign that showcases a product, or an email campaign to reach its audience at the right place and the right time.
How do you use the 4 Ps of marketing?
The model of the 4Ps can be used when you are planning a new business venture, evaluating an existing offer, or trying to optimize your sales with your target audience. It can also be used to test your current marketing strategy.
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