Why Brand Development is Mission Critical

One of the most fundamental roles of a marketing team is to build a strong brand. Over the past decade, as marketing has become obsessed with bottom-funnel growth tactics that deliver short-term volume uplifts, the power of brand has been overlooked. Thankfully, it’s making a comeback.

Marketing undeniably plays a role in driving sales volume, but our true value is in driving profit and this means delivering sustainable demand and higher price. The beauty of a strong brand is that it drives both—expanding demand for the long term while boosting pricing power. And yes, this is just as relevant in B2B as it is in B2C.

Brand development and brand awareness are not the same thing

Before diving deeper into the importance of brand building, let’s clarify a common misconception. Many leaders in small businesses shy away from brand development because they mistakenly equate it with investing in brand awareness. For smaller businesses, it isn’t practical to spend on broad brand awareness campaigns, efficient growth comes from harvesting latent demand within highly focused audiences. However, investing in brand development almost always makes sense whatever your scale.

Let’s set the record straight: brand development and brand awareness are two distinct efforts, and as a marketer, you need to help stakeholders understand the difference:

Brand development is about having a clear identity. Defining what you stand for, how you’re different, why this matters to your target audience and how you’re going to stand out versus the competition. This strategy is then expressed through your verbal and visual identity, which should be applied very consistently across every brand touchpoint from product design and website to customer service and sales pitches.

Brand awareness is about making yourself known to a larger audience. It’s about reaching people with your brand and driving a specific outcome within a specific population. Investing in higher-reach paid media is usually required to do this effectively. When and how to do this is a subject for another day, but it’s usually not necessary for smaller brands/earlier stage companies.

Why developing a brand matters (especially for smaller businesses)

Creating a solid brand foundation early-on can contribute to your company’s growth in several ways.

1. It gets customers to trust you

As a relatively new and unknown business, having a polished identity can pay dividends in building credibility with customers. Both consumers and corporate clients are inherently risk-averse and so naturally wary of smaller, less proven brands. Creating a slick brand makes a positive statement. It demonstrates that you put care and attention into what you do which makes people perceive your product as higher value due to a cognitive bias called the labour illusion. This doesn't just apply to your product but to all customer touch-points where potential customers come across you. In particular, making sure that the first exposure to your brand (i.e. an advert or landing page) creates a positive impression is vital due to the primacy effect, a phenomenon whereby people are more likely to remember the first time they come across something and this shapes their enduring feeling towards it.

2. It gets you noticed

The average person is exposed to over 5,000 different pieces of marketing messaging every single day. One of the fundamental jobs of any marketing department is simply getting your company noticed among all this noise. Developing a strong brand is the most effective way to be distinctive in the market. Defining your audience and positioning yourself to be relevant, will give you a clear point of view when you communicate and this will help to cut through the clutter of other brand communications. A good local example is the telco Circles Life who used competitive positioning and a very bold tone of voice to stand out versus the traditional incumbents.

3. It shapes understanding and perception

Getting noticed is the first step, but small companies then need to make sure target customers believe their offering is relevant to them. A brand is an important way to communicate what you deliver to customers on a rational level, but it’s even more powerful than that. People use brands as signals to convey their identity to themselves and others. Developing a brand identity builds desirability among people looking to associate with the values you represent. This isn't just about using logic to explain yourself, but about the emotional and often unconscious impression you create through your whole visual and verbal identity. Colour, imagery, tone of voice, aesthetic style, partners, and semiotics are all things our brains process at different levels to form an impression and determine if choosing you will enhance their desired social status. This is as true in B2B as it is in B2C. For example, whether a company chooses Microsoft Teams or Slack as their chat application likely affects how you perceive them without any knowledge of how they use the tool itself.

4. It supports a healthy pricing strategy

Companies with strong brand identities usually command higher prices because when a customer perceives a brand as valuable or aspirational they’re less price-sensitive. Behavioral science backs this up: a famous experiment by psychologist Brian Wansink found that people were willing to pay more for the same brownie depending on how it was presented—53 cents on a napkin, 76 cents on a paper plate, and $1.27 on a china plate. This is a significant increase, with no change to the core product, and shows the extent to which presentation and packaging can influence pricing power. Fashion ecommerce site Zalora are an example of a company who have not invested in building brand and quick look at their website shows you how heavily they depend on discount mechanics to drive sales.

Developing a brand is about much more than a logo

The way you feel about a person is not solely shaped by their facial features. Your impression is formed by every aspect of how they present themselves, from what they wear to the vocabulary they use and their physical mannerisms. The same is true of your brand, its identity is shaped by much more than just the logo. The famous Jeff Bezos quote goes “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room” and this is spot on, everything your brand does contributes to an overall impression that people carry in their memory and retrieve as needed when they’re ready to act.

The job of the brand marketing is therefore as much about educating the wider internal business as it is about communicating externally. The best brands live throughout organisations and therefore show up consistently at every single touchpoint. Marketers must work with the rest of the organisation to ensure the brand gets delivered through product, customer service, sales materials, corporate communication and any other place where customers may interact with you.

What about those who say developing a brand is just “fluff”?

Some financially driven leaders dismiss brand-building as a “nice-to-have.” While branding does involve creative skills, it’s also deeply rooted in data and behavioral science. Evidence of brand power is everywhere—consider how branded painkillers like Nurofen and Panadol command price premiums of up to 800% over generic alternatives. To illustrate the point, try asking your CEO for a purely functional explanation of why she bought that expensive watch over a much cheaper unbranded alternative that would tell her the time just as accurately. And it’s not just about pricing, brand-led and emotive advertising is proven to be more effective at driving long-term growth than highly rational product led advertising and when done effectively will increase the ROI on your advertising spend.

Your role as a marketer includes educating your stakeholders about these dynamics and securing the necessary investment to develop your brand.

And finally, it doesn’t need to cost a lot

Spending on brand development can vary wildly in scale. Pepsi famously spent US$1million on a very simple refresh of their logo in the mid-2000s to much ridicule in the media. But this is not the norm. For smaller businesses there are ways to invest in quality creative support well within your means. Boutique agencies or skilled freelancers can often deliver excellent results with the right strategic guidance. A basic brand identity project might cost US$8,000 - 30,000 with a freelancer or US$30,000 - 90,000 with a small agency. Once the guidelines are set, a junior in-house designer should be able to handle ongoing deployment of various collaterals. Just remember that to get the value from any investment in brand identity work, your internal marketing team must work hard to ensure consistent implementation and continuously educate the wider business on maintaining the brand’s integrity.