The basics of creating a brand mystique for your business

by Marie Guay

Even if you are a one-woman craft business making knitted hats in your living room, you need a business identity. The art of creating that identity is called branding. Don't be scared. You may think you don't know anything about creating a brand for your new business. But you have seen branding in action all around you and can take what you already know and use it to add oomph to your business.

Don't beleive me? Think Nike. When you see that little swoosh you immediately know it's Nike. Think Coca Cola. When you see that red and white can, you know it's a Coke. That's branding — using your logo, your advertising, your Web site, your product packaging and all of the interactions the public has with you to build a memorable identity. And no, you don't need to have a lot of money or be a corporate giant to pull it off.

Small and independent businesses can do a lot with very little. You will, however, need a few basic things. First, you'll need a logo, which is a symbol that represents your business. You should take your logo very seriously, because it needs to clearly communicate who you are and what your business does. It needs to look good large and small, and in color or black and white.

Once you have a logo, use it. Everywhere. Your Web site — in this day and age, you better have a Web site. No excuses. Put it on stickers, letterhead and business cards. Get a return address label with your logo on it. Put your company name on everything from the signature lines in emails to T-shirts.

Colors are also an important part of brand identity. Think Howard Johnson : their bold teal and orange is memorable. Choose colors you love and make sure all of your marketing materials consistently use these colors.

From here on out, everyone you deal with needs to identify your logo and your colors with your company. It's the key to getting your enterprise out of obscurity and developing it into coveted brand name.  

Next, carefully choosing the words and phrases you use to describe what you do, make or sell are key. It creates a mystique for your product and your business. And if you have looked at the advertisements in a copy of Vogue recently, you understand that what people buy isn't just the product, it's the image of the product and company. They want a little bit of that mystique to rub off on them when they make the purchase.

Here is what Krissy Harris, the gal behind biggerKrissy.com and a former journalist and marketing manager, has to say about verbiage. " I understand things like audience, demographics and grass-roots marketing from all of my former "real" jobs. It helped early on that I knew how to make biggerKrissy seem like a thing, even when it wasn’t. Without the marketing, they were just crappy, screwed up lumps of fabric. I’ve tried to create something larger than that and that’s part of what people are buying into."

Coordinating the message on your Web site, in your written correspondence, even in the packages you send to customers reinforces the image you want your company to project, so consider it carefully.

But creating a mystique for your product is only one reason to choose words and images carefully. Harris recommends keeping some things on the down low. "I’m very politically active, but there is only a little of it on my site.  But if I weren’t aware of my audience, it would be all blue — both language and politics," she says. "As a former journalist, I’m very aware of decisions like that . "

And never alienate a potential customer with words and images on your marketing material — that is not to say that you need to be bland, boring and mass appeal, but do be realistic. You may not like it, but you may need to tune yourself down some if your product appeals to children or to a demographic of conservative Midwestern moms. "For instance, I swear like a sailor in real life, but keep it off my site," Harris says. "Why alienate a whole demographic?"

Once your logo and marketing materials are in place, you may want to take it to the next level by obtaining a trademark and copyright. That way, no one can waltz by and steal the brilliant slogan and artwork that you have diligently developed.

"The best advice I was given (and to this day, I think the only advice I’ve taken) was to protect my brand," says Krissy Harris of biggerKrissy.com. " I put together a document and sent it to the copyright office, so I have a clear line of how, when, why and what biggerKrissy is."

Good luck ladies. Remember, branding takes some thought, but it's not hard to do when you understand the basics.