Get your Brand / Corporate Identity & Branding your website

What is a Brand?

A brand is a collection of images and ideas representing an economic producer; more specifically, it refers to the concrete symbols such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme. Brand recognition and other reactions are created by the accumulation of experiences with the specific product or service, both directly relating to its use, and through the influence of advertising, design, and media commentary. A brand is a symbolic embodiment of all the information connected to a company, product or service. A brand serves to create associations and expectations among products made by a producer. A brand often includes an explicit logo, fonts, color schemes, symbols, sound which may be developed to represent implicit values, ideas, and even personality.

The brand, and "branding" and brand equity have become increasingly important components of culture and the economy, now being described as "cultural accessories and personal philosophies".

Introduction

On the internet branding is crucial in starting a successful commercial site. Some good examples of successful brand names are eBay, Yahoo, Google and Amazon. Brand names require a lot of time, effort and money to create, however promote brand loyalty, and make your site much more memorable.

Choosing a Brand Name

• The first step to be done in making your web site a successful one is to brand it. If you look in a marketing book for the definition of “brand” you’ll see that it means a mixture of information about a service /a product/a company and it has to include a name, a logo and visual elements such as images or symbols in order to make it distinctive from the others on the market. So when branding your web site you have to be aware of the following:

  1. Choose a quality name for your site so that people can easily remember from the memory;
  2. Your logo should be very suggestive and no longer than a sentence (think of the famous “Just do it” form Nike or “Always Coca Cola”)’;
  3. Pay attention when choosing a visual imagine or a symbol for your site; it has to be connected somehow with your area of products/services or be very suggestive (a hawk for example);
  4. Each page of your site has to have its name, the logo and the symbol/image;
  5. Put your web site name everywhere where it can attract attention: (business cards, envelops, electronic signature, letter heads, statements, job cars);
  6. Allow the visitors of your site to share their opinion about it, to ask question that concern them about your services/products; create forums on topics of interest if the field of your activity is compatible with the idea;
  7. If you have forums, create a “thank you” page to thank the visitors for using your forum;
  8. Add newsletters (you can send information, weather reports, horoscope, latest news etc);
  9. Exchange banners and links with other websites form an auxiliary field of activity with you; 

Choosing a Domain Name

All of the factors above are important for your brand name as well as your domain name (usually the same as your brand name). You may be the best marketer in the world but without an easily accessible website you won't be going far in the online world.