How product branding can make or break your business? Branding is instrumental in all aspects of a company’s growth and success, and while it is certainly not the only factor at play, and should not underestimate its importance.
This is particularly apparent in relation to products, as good branding can catapult your latest launch to mainstream success; while bad branding can leave it languishing unnoticed or misunderstood.
To unpack this further, let’s consider some of the ways in which product branding can impact the trajectory a project takes.
How product branding can make or break your business
Shaping audience expectations
While branding can sometimes afford to be surprising, it needs to be an accurate reflection of the product so that consumers don’t get the wrong idea about what to expect.
Simply put, there’s a reason that hot sauce brands tend to go hard on the flaming lettering, and plaster their logos and labels with fiery imagery rather than choosing cooler color pallets and serene typography.
Maintaining product brand consistency
Product branding must be seen in the broader context of the design philosophy that defines your brand. You want customers to see products from your company; and know at a glance that they are part of the same brand family as one another.
This is where discovering the benefits of design ops can help. Rather than having design handled disparately, with the potential for lack of consistency that this can create; it allows you to develop branding inspiration in a more cohesive way; and provide product branding that gels with the ethos and aims of your organization; as well as with the needs of individual products.
Courting the right customers
Linking in with the idea that you must use product branding to give customers an idea of what to expect; you also have to think about how it aligns with the kinds of audiences you want for your products in the first place.
Researching what the competition is doing with their branding is useful in this context. Again, it’s not a case of trying to emulate their strategies; but of getting a sense of what clicks with the customers, you want to court.
You can take a completely different tack; but so long as you are doing it on the foundation of knowing your target audience intimately, this is no bad thing.
Avoiding product branding complexity
It is slightly odd to think of product branding as falling under the banner of user-friendliness, but it makes more sense when you consider the application of this in the modern market.
People need to be able to see at a glance what your product is for and so find the information they need without having to read a lot of text.
While there have been trends that go the opposite route to this, it will work better to prioritize clarity; and concision with product branding for most companies. Overtly outlandish logos, wacky wording of product info, and other leftfield, complex design decisions tend to work against products and make your brand harder to get to grips with.
Reinforcing your brand at every level
Finally, thinking about the best product branding will reveal one interesting asset shared across the board: taking multiple opportunities to showcase the brand to customers as they go through the unboxing process.
From consumer electronics to food items and beyond; if there is more than one element to your product and how it is packaged; then your brand-building should flow throughout.
Conclusion
It is impossible to overstate just how much of a difference good product branding can make; and how disastrous bad product branding can be.
Small brands, in particular, need to heed this advice; and act to make changes so that their branding efforts pay off in the future.
