What is Total Branding and how it helps your business?
- Mariya Vasileva
- Aug 9, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 5
Total Branding covers everything from naming your products, services or company to the way stationery materials look like. It includes the very essentials any brand has - its promise, values, strategy, unique selling points and ultimately, its goals. For without a clear roadmap from the get-go and without a rationale behind it, hardly any brand can achieve greatness.
The Importance of Total Branding
It could come to your mind, especially as a start-up business, that developing branding elements such as brand story or imagery might be too much of an investment early on. Some brands that you have never heard of skip the "non-essentials" entirely. The previous sentence contains a hint how successful these brands eventually became. Branding is about recognition - if it is consistent and easy to associate with, it helps raising customer base - a thing of utmost importance, especially for start-ups.
What Branding Entails
The Cambridge definition: "Branding is the act of connecting a product or business with a particular name, symbol, or features and ideas to make it recognizable." That more or less sums it up. The best brands are built around a strong idea, maintained by the management, followed by the employees, recognized by the market and loved by the customers. It really does not make much difference if the brand is about a product or a service, even whether if it is about physical or digital merchandise, as long as the "how to get there" is comprehensively outlined, understood and pursued.
How Total Branding Fits In
Here comes the Total Branding service as the "how to get there" part. At Mariya Design, we concentrate our best efforts to tailor fit a structure around your product, service or even help develop an idea. Your business needs to be more than a range of products and services. A strategy should be outlined and followed, as customer experience is a huge factor towards long term business success. Total Branding is a dedicated and thoroughly considered approach, helping your brand reach its goals easier and faster.
Case Studies
CAPAURA, an innovative brand developing personalized cooling caps for sport enthusiasts and professionals alike, reached out to Mariya Design to create a Total Branding for them. As usual, the service was done collaboratively, from the ground up. The brand name was established, then followed the logo, color palette and typography, together with respective usage guidelines. Everything was crafted to reflect CAPAURA’s blend of innovation, approachability and functionality. All brand elements were then placed inside a comprehensive brand book to provide consistency across all digital and physical touchpoints, laying a strong foundation for the brand's recognition and market presence.
Tame Nutrition, a sports nutrition brand, collaborated with Mariya Design to create a comprehensive brand identity from the ground up. The process included market research, logo creation, color palette selection, typography, and packaging design to name a few. This resulted in a 58-page brand book - a cornerstone for consistent, effective brand communication across platforms, positioning Tame Nutrition as a premium brand in the competitive wellness market.
Benefits of Total Branding
If your brand feels unique to the target audience and presumably offers a solution to its needs and desires, this will set you apart from your competitors, thus you can expect more exposure and bigger market share. lrrelevant of the product/service your brand promotes, it has to be perceived as something worthwhile and able to create emotional connections with customers. This builds brand loyalty and keeps the consumer base running high - from each returning consumer you will probably get another one. Total Branding gives your business a personality. It is far easier for the target audience to attach to a personality rather than just items or promises.
Beyond Just the Design
Total Branding is not a service covering just the visual design - it goes a lot deeper by establishing the philosophy and core values of a brand, its rationale for existence. It should be that products and services are perceived as an emanation of brand's mission, vision, promise, and not be offered just because. The reasons for which the brand exists are outlined by its story and goals, then visually illustrated via logos, taglines and colors. Everything is tied closely together and one element logically leads to the other, furthering towards offered products and/or services. Total Branding is a premise for your brand to be trustworthy, coherent and recognizable in its market. It gives an incentive to customers to deliberately choose your business over all the rest.
Impact on Company Culture
Last but not least, Total Branding shapes a straightforward company culture to follow, respect, adore and blend into. Employees are the vital element of any company. It is a lot easier to attract the best talent for the job and maintain their satisfaction, if your business has a roadmap and clear guidelines what it desires to achieve, from the get-go. An employee who understands and shares your brand's values will be happy to work. Having a supportive staff will strengthen your endeavor a lot. This will maintain a positive brand image and will undoubtedly increase the sales, thus your business success. Brand loyalty does not concern only the customers, but also your potential workforce. For a fact, employees often intentionally choose to work for their favorite brand, even if the payment is less than what the competition offers for a similar position.
Conclusion
Total Branding enables all the advantages and benefits described above. Then why not choose to have it, is it really necessary? Yes it is, judging from my professional background and more than a decade of experience in branding. At Mariya Design, we believe that in order to emerge from obscurity and achieve prominence, a brand should invest in its comprehensive development. This will ensure their business stands on a strong foundation and not just thin air. Is Total Branding a guarantee for success? Taken on its own, maybe not necessarily. But as a cornerstone for having a rationale and getting to the top, and more importantly staying there, it will indeed make the difference.
Ready to take your brand to the next level? Contact Mariya Design now. Whether you are looking for new brand identity, either a complete rebranding or just a touch here and there to refine your existing one, we are able to help with that.
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