Since branding influences your brand’s appearance, it’s often confused with corporate identity. To explain the difference clearly, it’s worth looking at what branding actually means.

Thus, branding includes the visual aspect of your brand, such as your colour scheme, logo, and fonts. In other words, your corporate identity. Corporate identity is an execution of your branding, a part – not the same.

We’ve just established that branding forms the basis for how people experience your brand. It’s therefore an understandable assumption that branding is the same as your brand strategy. But this is not correct.

Your brand strategy is the foundation of your brand. In your brand strategy, you make fundamental choices for your brand; who is your target audience, how do you position your brand compared to competitors, and how will you grow your brand. This is where you determine your vision, mission, and objectives.

Brand strategy is where the core of your brand is established. This forms the foundation of your branding. That’s where the translation happens from strategy to concrete expressions and emotion.

“There’s less competition in B2B than in B2C, so branding isn’t necessary at all.”

And: “In business, you don’t need to build an emotional bond, those are all rational decisions, right?”

But no: branding is just as important in the B2B market as it is in B2C. Perhaps the influence of branding within B2B is less directly visible due to more complex purchasing decisions and multiple stakeholders in the purchasing process, but it still has a strong impact. Don’t forget that you’re not doing business with companies, but with people. People who have high expectations regarding the quality of service, products, and services, shaped and fed by their experiences as B2C consumers. They also seek quality in a B2B environment.

In B2B, branding is essential to:

• Differentiate and make your company recognisable in the market

• Build trust, with consistent communication and clear core values

• Foster loyalty by building a relationship with your customer

Additionally, effective branding can also affect your attractiveness as an employer, attracting more new talent. Branding focused entirely on the job market is a different field, though. If that’s your ultimate goal, read more about employer branding here.

Just because you tell people you’re something doesn’t mean it’s true. And it certainly doesn’t mean people will see you that way.

In fact, who you are, who you say you are, and how people think about you are three different things. And in a successful brand, all three align seamlessly. To achieve that requires more than just branding.

Who you are starts with your brand strategy.

Who you say you are is shown through branding.

And who people think you are is the sum of all interactions and experiences they have with your brand and what others tell them about you.

Authenticity is very important. If who you say you are doesn’t match reality – for example, you claim to care about your customer but offer no effective customer support – it will certainly affect how people see you. And not in a positive way.

Especially in an era where a negative review can be shared online in no time and bad experiences can spread quickly, this can greatly influence the perception of your brand. Word of mouth remains one of the strongest influences on brand perception. If you only care about quick sales in the short term, this might not be so important. But for those who want to establish a sustainable brand, authenticity, individuality, and credibility are essential.

You may be great at branding, but everything has to align: who you are, who you say you are, and whether your actions and words match.

Doing business would be much simpler if you only had to do everything right once and then could check it off forever. Setting up your IT landscape, conducting a market analysis, building your website.

But in reality, everything around you keeps evolving, and so should you.

This doesn’t mean you need to overhaul your brand identity every few years. Paradoxically, consistency is also essential when it comes to your brand. So, how do you find that balance?

In your branding.

The key is to get everyone in your organisation on the same page on a fundamental level (your brand identity) and strive for the same goals. This consistency ensures efficiency, giving you more room to anticipate and respond to your target audience’s needs.

While your brand identity is something you want to stick with long-term, you can be more flexible and adaptive in your branding – the expression of your brand identity. This way, you can move with changes in the organisation and the market without losing your recognisability.

Therefore, it’s good to periodically evaluate whether your branding still fits who you are as an organisation, the changing market, and your target audience’s needs, and whether it’s still distinctive enough.

Branding is crucial to appeal to your (potential) customers and partners. But it’s not only important for external audiences. It’s equally important internally.

First, strong branding can be a highly motivating factor internally. Making sure your employees also feel the emotional weight of your brand can create a sense of purpose and connection with the company.

If branding resonates among multiple (or ideally, all) employees, it’s a strong unifying factor. This way, branding contributes to a strong corporate culture, where everyone is on the same page and works together towards the same goal and mission.

And along the same lines – and okay, this is a bit of a cheat – strong branding also guides and ensures consistency in how your employees work, communicate, and interact with customers. So, it shapes the experience offered to the outside world as well. Branding from within, but also outwards.

To be successful with your target audience, you look at what they want, and you do exactly that. Sounds logical, but is not advisable.

It’s very tempting to let your branding be entirely determined by your target audience’s wishes. And while your target audience is a crucial factor, you are as well. If you’re completely led by external factors, are you still true to yourself? Ensure that your branding always aligns with who you are to maintain your authenticity.

Additionally, if you fully follow the target audience, there’s a higher risk that someone else will do the same and you will lose what differentiates you and makes you stand out.

And let us tell you a secret: the most interesting brands are those that have something interesting to say themselves. Not the brands that just follow. You can never make everyone happy anyway.

By approaching your branding correctly, you give your brand meaning and a unique place in the market. And iO is here to help you with this.