Branding and marketing have always been core parts of any business strategy. When looking to grow your business, increase the number of clients and revenue; you need to employ a sound marketing strategy. A big part of this is branding. You can get sales execs to hammer the phone talking to as many prospects as possible, and this will likely produce results. But to really optimize your businesses growth, having top-notch branding is central.
A major part of having efficient and successful branding is keeping up with modern trends. What’s popular right now? Are there any particular styles or favored flairs that are taking hold lately? Keeping up to speed with modern trends will allow your customers to see that you’re on the ball and that you’re a modern, forward thinking organization.
At Ingimage, we like to keep an eye on all things marketing related, so like to occasionally take a look at what other people are saying in regards to what the future holds for branding. What we’re seeing this year boils down to two main components. Firstly, brands are going to need to have a human side to them through the 2020’s. Yes, sure, the algorithmic side of branding and consumer demographic prediction will still have a massive presence, but adding a human element that consumers can reach out to will likely be a big difference between the winners and losers here. For example, automation is a key part of many businesses these days, allowing them to reduce time constraints, costs and manpower. One example would any online video streaming service (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video etc.) where it makes predictions on what you may like based on your previous viewing history. This means that the service provided, while intelligent, can occasionally be rigid and give us only a set amount of information. Anything outside of this could be more difficult to ascertain.
It’s not just humanization of service that will contribute to a strong and positive brand image, but also the modernization of logo designs. We’re seeing this from brands such as Yves ST Laurent, Zara, and Burberry. The changes these companies have made share certain similarities such as a bolder font and a typeface that is more tightly compressed, with letters closer together. Brilliant Agency report that in some cases, typographers have described this updated style as “claustrophobic” in some cases. So why the update? And why now? It is possible that demographics play a large part in the motivation behind this, partly because older, more archaic styles of logo or font have had their day. This compounded by the fact that the younger generation are rapidly becoming the primary buying group may have made companies consider their branding, and have updated it accordingly to appeal to a new audience of potential consumers.
So how do SME’s and other businesses capitalize on their own branding for 2020? First of all, do an analysis of your own branding. Is it modern? Is it in-line with other competitors? Secondly make sure that you have a human element to your business. Is your help line an automated system that answers pre-defined questions or an actual person who can provide more complex, personalized solutions? Always go the extra mile when it comes to the customer. To help you kick things off, we’ve put together a collection for upcoming Valentine’s Day to give your branding an extra helping hand.
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