Branding has emerged as an important and essential need for brands as well as individuals these days. These might be because, in this era, consumers are more stuck to brand image and status. Even if you’re a better service or product provider than rest of your competitors available in the market and you lack branding, you’re surely missing out on an opportunity.    

What is branding? Here’s the answer, Branding is basically building an image of your product or company. The process involved is creating a unique image and name of your business in the market, indirectly in your consumer’s mind. Branding is done through advertising, regular campaigns with using a consistent theme that promotes a particular product or service. Branding aims to establish a unique presence in the market to lure customers to buy the product and remain loyal to the company.

Is it worth investing time and money? There are numerous example that proves branding is an important aspect of marketing and can save a huge amount of money if done well. Let’s take a very common example to help understand the effect of branding, let’s say you plan to buy clothes for yourself. Now, you will have two options: go for the regular local shop or buy clothes from the shop that is a buzzword amongst people. And it’s not hard to guess that you or anyone else will go for the popular one. Now, this is where the image building comes into play, the popular shop in the example did image building through various methods. 

How will it help? Out of all, this is the most important question of all and you need to know the answer before you think of image building.   

1. Recognition and loyalty: The first and the foremost, the consumer will remember your brand name every time they plan to buy any product or services similar to your business. A strong brand image helps you to retain yourself in the minds of your consumer. If your customer trusts you, they are going to trust you with your unfamiliar products as well.  
2. Lesser marketing cost: when you have a strong brand image, you’ll need to undertake very less marketing efforts. Your brand is already a recognized brand, thanks to strong image building. A few marketing efforts will get you back working in the market again, as you’re already on top of priority list of your consumer.    
3. Greater company equity: Let’s say you decide to sell your company one day, out of the blue, you’ll obviously want a good price for your company. Now, if you’ve invested your time and other resources in branding, this branding of the company will get you a higher price for your company.
4. Reliability: As a brand your customers rely on you even if you go wrong sometimes. The power of personal branding of a company is such which brings your customers to buy the products from you only even when you offer the highest prices for the same.