Product Branding: Everything You Need To Know

Whether you're launching a new product line or sprucing up your existing one, product branding plays an essential role in the success of your business. But with so many options and elements to consider when it comes to branding, where do you even begin? 

Fortunately, we've got you covered!

In this blog post, we'll explore everything that goes into successful product branding—from creating compelling visuals to choosing key messaging points—so that you can ensure your company's products stand out and drive ROI. Read on to learn how strategic product branding can help take your business to the next level!

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What is Product Branding?

Have you ever seen a logo or packaging design you instantly recognized? That's the power of product branding in action! Product branding is about creating a unique and unified identity for your products to make them more recognizable, memorable, and desirable.

You can build trust and loyalty with your customers by using strategic visuals, colors, messaging points, and other tactics to promote your brand through targeted marketing campaigns and marketing materials. A well-crafted product branding strategy allows you to differentiate yourself from the competition while staying true to your core values and mission.

The process of product branding requires extensive research into the target audience, competitors, market trends, and company values. An effective product branding strategy accurately reflects the company's vision and objectives while also resonating with the target market.

The Difference between Corporate Branding VS. Product Branding

Although the corporate brand and product brand requires different strategies, they are both integral parts of any successful business. The corporate brand focuses on creating a unified company identity that extends across all products and services offered by the company. It encompasses the core values, mission, name, logo design, taglines, and other elements that create a first impression on customers.

On the other hand, product branding focuses on creating an individual identity for your products and services. Product branding requires researching customer needs and preferences to create a unique visual look and feels that resonates with customers. Product branding also involves designing packaging, messaging points, marketing materials, and other elements specific to each product or service to drive consumer attention.

The Advantages You Get from Product Branding

If you own a business, knowing the benefits of product branding and how your products can stand out from the competition is important. Now let's discuss why product branding should be at the top of your list when competing against other businesses in your market.

Distinct Product Identity

Imagine a crowded marketplace filled with similar products. With effective product branding efforts, you can create an identity for your product to stand out. This helps customers quickly identify and differentiate your product from all the others on the market.

Plus, with modern technology allowing you to customize almost any product brand with context-aware logos or taglines, creating branded items has never been easier!

Focused Target Audience

Product branding allows you to get specific with your audience and tailor messages to appeal to them. By crafting visuals, messaging points, and other elements that cater to the particular preferences of your target market, an effective branding strategy can build a strong connection between your product and its intended customers.

Better Chances of Product Loyalty

Once customers recognize and trust your product, they are more likely to become loyal customers. Product branding allows you to create an emotional connection with customers so that they view your product as part of their lifestyle or identity. This helps foster loyalty and long-term relationships with customers.

Easier to have a Brand Advocacy

Customers who are passionate about your product tend to spread the word to their friends and family. This helps increase brand awareness and drive more sales for your business. Allowing customers to share their positive experiences with your product or service will help build strong brand advocacy for your business.

Famous Examples of Good Product Branding

Product branding plays a crucial role in attracting the right buyers and generating a loyal customer base. Here are some successful product branding examples that you can learn from.

Apple

Apple is known for its unique and sleek designs, innovative and highly advanced tech features, and high-quality products. Its logo, product packaging, and advertising campaigns are immediately recognizable, making it a top-of-mind brand for many consumers.

Starbucks

Starbucks has built a successful product branding strategy through its high-quality coffee, cozy atmosphere, and exceptional customer service. Focusing on sustainability and community, the company has created a loyal following of coffee lovers.

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola has been around for over a century and has a timeless brand identity that resonates with people worldwide. Its iconic logo and advertising campaigns are conveyed consistently, which is why the passage of time allows its brand to stick with the mind of consumers worldwide, making the successful brand a beverage recognizable at the first glance.

Nike 

Nike's brand strategy is built around motivation, inspiration, and excellence. Its "Just Do It" slogan encapsulates the spirit of the brand, and its culture of innovation has helped it remain ahead of its competitors.

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Levi

Levi's is an iconic brand that has been around since the mid-1800s. Its denim products are known for their durability, comfort, and style, and the product branding has continued to evolve over the years to stay relevant.

Uber

Uber has revolutionized the transportation industry by providing a convenient, affordable, and efficient ride-hailing service. Its product branding focuses on simplicity, accessibility, and reliability, making it a popular choice for many consumers.

How to Design an Effective Product Branding?

When designing a strong product branding, it is essential to follow certain guidelines to ensure that your product stands out in the market, appeals to your audience, and remains consistent across all channels. 

Identify your Target Audience

Understandably, companies would think to cast a wide net and appeal to as many people as possible in building product brands. However, doing so incur larger cost in marketing campaigns and your messaging tends to be vague and typical, which decreases the chance of product loyalty. This is particularly crucial for startup product brands - there must be a particular focus on the audience.

There is a wide range of people who buy Apple, but the product branding and positioning make it clear that their audience's consumer preference is tech-savvy users who prefer a premium experience in their products and services. This ensures that whenever they launch a product, this group of people will most likely be going to purchase them.

Identifying your audience requires gathering data on demographics, psychographics, and the needs and preferences of your potential customers. Moreover, consider in your brand strategy the other customer demographics like age, gender, location, interest, etc. 

You can also narrow down your focus further by having a customer persona - a set of profiles that is most likely to go to purchase your product. They can be named, their age and gender and address identified, and they have a set of pain points that only your product can solve.

Setting up your customer persona further helps you to tailor your brand messaging and positioning accordingly.

Check for Market Trends

Another key part of researching product brands is checking the competition. Getting insights and information from the market allows you to achieve factors in building your product branding strategy like:

1. Knowing the effective ways for brand positioning and marketing strategy.
2. To know which particular group of customers has an unfulfilled need you can provide.
3. The motivations for your customer’s decision to buy alternative products.
4. The current trends in the industry.

Being enlightened about critical data like the preferred target audience and market trends allows you to create a unique selling proposition, which not only gives you a position where you have less competition but also guarantees customers who will be loyal to your product brand as you provide a particular solution to their particular needs.

Define your Product Brand Personality

Effective brand strategy solid understanding of your audience and market trends should give you an idea of how to design the product personality. One way to start is to think of the product as a person: How do they speak to people? What are the things they believe? How do they treat other people? However, it doesn’t have to result in an animated persona, but the following signifiers can at least give an understanding of what is the product personality:

1. Colors - while it doesn’t have to be set in stone, color has been theorized to elicit human emotions, and being guided by color theory gives you a good starting point in choosing the appropriate colors that represent your brand image.

1. Voice - this applies to the content and the messaging of your product branding. As was mentioned, see your product's identity as a person and think about how they sound. Having an appropriate tone, typography and brand voice gives a positive impression to a group of people. For example, Nike’s slogan ‘Just Do It’ emphasizes the assertive call to be active, which reflects on the shoes they sell and the type of lifestyle they promote. Wendy’s recent Twitter engagement is also a branding strategy that they promote to reengage with their customers and a great way for it is through humor and sarcasm - the internet’s unofficial lingua franca.
2. Visuals - Choosing the proper visual elements for the brand assets should be reflected in the desired aesthetics in brand logos, website landing pages, or any channels that need first impressions to attract customers. How you approach your personality depends on how you present your visual identity for your product branding: Cascade the landing page with brand logos. The product image with an immaculate white background? Product placed on a log or dirt? Product branding experts take note of the trends in effective marketing campaigns which key visuals should be present and the techniques needed to do it. 

Share your Product Identity through Multiple Channels

To increase brand awareness and to present to people that your brand is willing to engage with your target closely, being present in multiple channels is important.

Rule of 7, the proverb that the brand must be seen or heard at least seven times to be recognizable, still works, and it is much easier to do it now as social media is one of the key channels in marketing campaigns in modern brand building.

Leverage every aspect of brand communications like emails, content creation, packaging, websites, billboards, etc. to maximize your presence in the market.

Be Consistent

It must be stated again and again that the backbone of building brands, even corporate branding as a whole is to present them consistently.

One of the brand’s key purposes is to build customer loyalty and if your messaging across multiple channels is delivered inconsistently, it would cause alienation and confusion to the value proposition of your product brand.

Moreover, having a singular identifier allows people to remember your product, and ultimately prospects your brand in customers’ purchasing decisions. 

Final Thoughts

Product branding is an incredibly important part of any business, big or small. It can be difficult to get it right, especially if you don't have the resources to invest in branding experts.

As a business owner, you must identify your values, the core of your brand, and the purpose it stands for—all of which will help set you apart from other companies. Crafting a strong brand image gives target customers something to relate to and remember about your company.

At Evolv, we understand how vital product branding is for businesses of all sizes, and we are here to help guide you every step of the way as you create a unique and compelling brand identity.

Our team of experienced specialists will guide you in finding a clear path forward in building a product brand, business brand, or even an employer brand. Learn more from our resources today to start creating an effective brand with Evolv today!

Some products are just as recognizable as the companies that create them. For example, there’s no mistaking a bottle of soda with a red label and white scripted font for anything other than a Coca-Cola. Or if you happen to hear the words “You’re not you when you’re hungry” over the radio, you know instantly they’re talking about a Snickers bar.

These are basic examples of product branding — the face and brand personality given to individual products.

In general terms, branding is the act of identifying a product in the market in a way that separates it from any other product. The stronger the brand strategy, the more that product will stand out.

You don’t have to be on the level of Coca-Cola or Snickers to take advantage of good product branding. Here’s how you can build a solid product branding strategy that gets noticed.

Contents:

What is Product Branding?

What is product branding, exactly? Let’s start with a product branding definition.

Product branding is the development of a distinctive brand for a given product with the intention to reach a brand's target consumers.

Everything from household cleaners to candy to cars can have its own brand positioning and marketing strategy. Regardless of the product, the idea remains the same: to stand out in a sea of similar products and give people a reason to choose yours.

Just like a company builds a corporate brand to earn customer loyalty, products can benefit from brand building to create trust and increase sales. Your product is a brand extension of your company, so when you get product branding right, your company gets a boost too. 

How Does Product Branding Differ from Corporate Branding?

The purest form of brand marketing is a standalone product. It uses the name of the corporation in its branding — the two are one and the same. It’s when companies have more than one product or brand that things get more complicated.

Take Mars, for example. The company makes a range of products, including M&Ms, Skittles, and even Whiskas cat food. The company's brand positioning focuses more on innovation and being a long-standing leader in its field, while its product brands each have their own unique brand identity.

Corporate branding is much broader and encompasses the entire company and all of its products. This is what you use on your corporate website and marketing.

Product brands are more nuanced and tailored to an individual product. The goal is to differentiate a product in its niche.

Some companies choose to create a brand family, where all the products share the name of the company even though they’re different. Campbell’s is a great example of a brand family with its diverse line of soups all under the Campbell’s name. The company has also expanded into a multi-brand company with its line of Campbell’s Chunky, Well Yes!, Slow Kettle Style, and Homestyle soups.

But for companies that sell a diverse product line, such as diapers and cleaning products, using a single brand or a brand family could prove tricky. That’s why companies like Procter & Gamble, for example, opt for individual product brands.

Product brands often tie back to the corporate brand in some way. But the key difference is that product brands have visuals and personality traits that are separate from the company that makes them.

Why Is Product Branding Important?

Brand recognition with a product provides a number of benefits to a company, even if customers don’t immediately associate your product with your corporate brand.

Let's review four of the benefits of distinctive product branding:

Identification

As with any type of branding, branding a product makes it easier to identify among lookalike products. A strong brand stands out. The more recognizable it becomes, the more ROI you can get from your advertising and marketing. Think about the last time you went shopping and you found yourself looking for the distinctive color of the product you were hunting for, like the turquoise on the lid of Skippy's peanut butter, rather than the brand name itself to locate the product.

Expansion

Having a brand people already know and love can make it easier to expand into a new market or product category, or even introduce a new brand from the same company. It builds instant credibility for new products and encourages people to try them.

For example, Dollar Shave Club started with just razors and shave butter. Then in 2015, it expanded its product line to include hair care. Having built its credibility as a reputable personal care brand, the company was able to seamlessly expand its brand.

Product preference

Brand awareness carries a lot of weight when it comes to consumer preference. People buy the brands they know and trust. When you create an intentional brand that’s consistent and appeals to your target audience, you stand a better chance of winning them over. 

Competition

Part of a good brand strategy means paying attention to other brands in your market. Strong brands can discourage other companies from entering your niche. It creates a higher barrier to entry, especially if people show a strong affinity for your brand over others.

Good product branding also means you have to compete less on price. People are willing to pay more for the brands they like, especially if they think that run-of-the-mill products might also be of lesser quality.

How to Build a Better Product Branding Strategy

Product branding is the intersection of many moving parts, including logo, colors, package design, product names and descriptions, brand voice, brand values, brand story, and the general messaging used by the brand. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts — a sum that is calculated strategically.

Ready to develop your product branding strategy?

Here are our top product branding tips for success:

Research your audience

Every new branding strategy starts with market research. You need to decide who you want to buy your product, then work backward to create a brand that resonates with them.

Some questions to ask during this process might include:

• What is the purpose of the product?
• Who would use the product?
• Why would they use this product and not one from a competitor?
• Why do I want to serve this audience?
• What does this audience value?

Getting consumer insights is invaluable to your brand development because it puts you in the shoes of the people to whom you want to market. Conduct surveys or access data to uncover real pain points consumers experience and see how you can solve them with a great product and strong brand.

Learn more about consumer insights in our blogs: How to Do Customer Profiling, What is Customer Intelligence, and Top Customer Insights Tools

Know your competition

Part of good branding hinges on your ability to stand out. To do this, marketers first need to know who else is fighting for visibility. Do some competitor research. Find out how customers feel about those brands and what might make them switch to yours (e.g. better pricing, higher quantities, product quality, etc.). These will serve as some of the building blocks to your product branding strategy.

Related resources: Competitor Monitoring Ultimate Guide, Competitive Intelligence Guide, Creating a Competitive Intelligence Database

Define Your Product’s Personality

If your branded products could speak, what would they say? What would they sound like? Smell like? Feel like?

Branding is a collective of visuals, sounds, smells, textures, and associations. Defining your brand’s personality can help to inform choices like logos, colors, packaging, and other details that consumers will rely on to identify your brand.

Share your brand identity

Once you understand how your product brand should look and function, you can start sharing its story with your audience. Talk about its history, its values, and what makes it unique. Help the audience feel connected to your brand so they can build familiarity. In other words, give people a reason to choose it over others.

Be consistent in your product branding

No matter how you approach a product branding strategy, the single common denominator is always consistency. Make a style guide that details how your brand should be presented.

Common things a brand style guide should include are:

• Size
• Placement
• Color palette
• Core values
• Imagery
• Brand voice

This same style should be consistent throughout your e-commerce presence, your customer service for that product, your business cards, and every marketplace where the product is sold.

Reflect your brand’s identity in all of your marketing and advertising. The more consistent you are, the more eye-catching and memorable your brand becomes. Plus, the less time it takes for people to feel connected to your brand.

Examples of Product Branding Done Right

Need some inspiration for your next product branding exercise? Check out these high-impact product branding examples.

Apple

Apple is the textbook definition of in-depth, consistent branding. Apple's brand and what it represents gives them a key competitive advantage. Not only does Apple bear a sleek, sexy corporate brand, but it also extends that same image into each of its technology products.

We see evidence of this in how products are named (e.g. iPhone, iMac, iPod, etc.), how they’re packaged, and even the simple and user-friendly ways their products function.

SharkNinja

Maker of powerful kitchen and home solutions, SharkNinja has created a premium brand image and leverages multi-branding as part of its brand strategy.

From steam mops to knife blocks to patented air cleaning technologies, products bear either the Shark or the Ninja name and embody durability, power, and longevity in all of its branding. Both names are well-established, well-defined about what they do, and are dedicated to the high-end market with high-quality products.

Hershey

Hershey's lengthy history, reputation for low-cost products, and positioning as a multi-product company has made it a popular brand name in sweets. Because its collection of products can vary greatly from one to the next, it makes sense to invest in individual product branding in addition to a corporate identity.

In Hershey’s case, each of its confections bears its own name, logo, packaging, color scheme, product design, and other details.

Remember, good brand management isn’t just about a logo, tagline, or cool package design. It’s the way that all of your visual elements, values, and personality work together long-term to appeal to your target audience.

Let your product’s identity be your guide. When you let it speak directly to your audience, you’ll have an easier time earning their loyalty and standing out for the right reasons.