Ecommerce Experience IX

The Superpower of Branding

With Charlotte Berthet Co-founder & Creative Director of concept on

Ecommerce Experience IX

The Superpower

of Branding

With Charlotte Berthet Co-founder & Creative Director of concept on

Text Version:

Charlotte started the talk with a fun little experiment. She played a sound and saw the audience show different reactions. She started to break down what happened during this experience.

What happened was that the audience received a stimulus from their sense of hearing. Next, they associated the sound with one of their experiences. In Charlotte’s case, this sound reminded her of when she was on the computer and had to wait for 15 minutes for the Internet to connect. She recalled her mother being angry because the phone call wouldn’t work. Lastly, this generates a feeling. Charlotte felt happy because this evoked a sense of nostalgia for her childhood.

According to Charlotte, this is what branding is. It is the intentional engineering of this process depicted earlier. The combination of experience and feelings makes up your brand personality. Expressing your brand personality is done in the stimulus and experience stages.

Charlotte explained why branding and marketing often get mixed up. She said marketing is very similar to branding because it involves a similar approach. “… [Marketing is] a stimulus that links to your experience to create a message.” The main difference is that branding is more about creating a feeling.

She then shared what she hears most from her clients as a branding specialist. “I just want a logo.” She claimed that logos alone are only a tiny part of the brand expression. Brand specialists are here to not only create a logo but to make sure that it efficiently works alongside your brand’s personality.

Charlotte moved on to explain why it is crucial to define your branding strategy. She said it is because branding is everywhere in your company, influencing and guiding all of your decisions in the company. It ranges from marketing material to customer service.

Now, what kind of problems does branding solve? First, it helps build legitimacy and trust in your business. This leads to better lead conversions, enhanced customer loyalty, more organic leads and helps to promote upselling. Charlotte re-words this by saying that branding maximises all of your efforts.

Next, Charlotte talked about how to execute your branding strategy. According to her, we have to follow the 5 commandments of branding.

First, be intentional. Charlotte said there is no room for randomness inside branding. Every choice you make must have intention. Every detail will count.

Second, be clear. When delivering context, don’t assume your audience will understand immediately. Be careful to refine your context as many times as needed. The best way to start is to collect data from customers and conduct market research.

Third, be authentic. “If you want to make an impact, you need to believe in what you do. … To believe in what you do, you need to know who you are [the company is].” Your employees are your brand ambassadors. Therefore, you need to make sure all of them know as well. If you have a structured branding strategy, you can create training courses and empower them to be your company’s best advocate.

Fourth, be attentive. You will need to observe, analyse, adapt, grow and repeat. You should never stop going through this cycle. Charlotte emphasised adapting to your surroundings, referring to the situation during the pandemic.

Lastly, be consistent. Consistency provides familiarity for your audience and brings trust to your business. However, consistency should not be mixed with stagnancy. Charlotte raised an example by comparing concepton’s digital and print brand visuals.

Charlotte went through some real-life examples of branding. She went through various aspects of expressions and personality that can be applied in branding. Some examples involve fonts, diction, tone and choice of colour.

Next, Charlotte presented a little test for the audience. The audience was shown several images that are supposed to represent a brand. The audience guessed which brand and was able to recognise all of the images with ease. A great way to show how big companies were successful at branding.

Lastly, Charlotte refers back to the difference between marketing and branding. She concluded that “… marketing is asking someone on a date, branding is the reason they say ‘yes’.”

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