What is Branding?

I was just creative and liked to do everything artistic and then I kinda fine tuned that in high school with a couple of classes and then went to college and said, “yup this is it, this is my passion”.

– Welcome back to the Banowetz Marketing podcast. We’re glad you’re here. Today I have Melody. Hi, Melody.

– Hello.

– So Melody is Banowetz Marketing’s in house graphic artist. So you’ve been with Banowetz Marketing since October of 2018.

– Yup.

– So that’s been really awesome.

– So tell us a little about it yourself Melody.

– I went to school for graphic design. I went to Kirkwood, got my degree from there. My mom actually owns a small business with my stepdad. They own Hidden Valley Campground so I help them with a lot of their design throughout high school and college and currently still. My fiance Matt works for a company called Wabtec so he’s a software engineer. So kind of similar, he just does the more technical side of what I do. So that works out. And design has just kind of always been my passion. I guess when I was younger it was more art based and I didn’t know exactly what I wanted. I was just creative and liked to do everything artistic and then I kind of fine tuned that in high school with a couple of classes. And then went to college and said “yup, this is it, this is my passion”.

– So what do you love about graphic design?

– I love being able to be creative but with guidelines, with standards. So there’s rules in design so you kind of, you have that creative ability to do what you want but there are rules and standards that make it work in business. So that’s appealing to me. Organization, guidelines.

– I’ve seen that in your work too. And just in like your desk is very organized. ‘Cause I’m a creative also, ’cause I come from the photography background as you know. And I’m more of like the free-spirit creative and you’re–

– Yes.

– like very structured and it’s been a huge blessing for Banowetz Marketing. And I can see that in your work so.

– Yeah, it’s definitely been a good time.

– We were gonna talk about branding today.

– Yes.

– So tell us what branding is for a company.

– So branding is your company’s visual voice. It’s what you use to project your voice to the consumers before they know even who you are. So I mean, you can think of big companies like Apple and Nike who have very strong visual brand standards. You recognize it, you see it and that’s the company. And you kind of know what they do and what they’re about. So branding for any other company is just taking what you know your company to be simplifying that down to just a few points and turning that into a visual representation that you can then show to the public.

– And what that does is it gives people, the consumer, that the business’ target audience like a picture of who that company is. Like in a split second. Just by visually looking at it right?

– Yup so say your scrolling on social media, there’s an ad and your branding is in that ad and that split second a potential consumer sees your brand. And if it catches their attention then you’ve already won to some extent.

– And one thing that I love about working with you, Melody is just the fact that my strengths in marketing are– so I’m a marketing director as you know and my strengths are I love cohesive branding. Like I am committed to cohesive branding. Like if we’re gonna come into a company that’s one of the first things I talk about is let’s have everything across platforms, across your folders to your notepads to your website. Like everything needs to be

– [Both] Cohesive.

– And you and I share a similar passion in that obviously. That that’s where we want. So you’ve created brand standard information for our clients. So like just today we were talking about Warehouse Auto Company, my parents car dealership and just that we need to be creating a brand standard sheet for them. Because you have skills that I don’t have, you’re able to take what I’ve already done with creating a brand for them and then just really systemizing it so that it can be duplicated across different people. And so it’s really easy for people if they have a brand standard sheet or multiple sheets, they can see right away they can tell that this is the way, this is the font we use, this is the style we use, these are the color numbers that we use. This is how we represent the brand. These are the sayings, these are– you know. And it’s systemized so that when you’re training new people or when you’re sharing that information with say different media companies, they know at a quick glance like this is what– these are the rules of the brand. So that the customers don’t get confused and you don’t have a billboard looking one way and your Facebook post looking a different way.

– Yeah. Guidelines like that are especially important in bigger companies keeping brands consistent. You know, you don’t wanna have a color that looks similar to this one–

– Yes.

– but it’s just a little bit off. And you know, definitely consistency is number one in branding. You can’t have a solid recognizable brand without consistency. You have to be consistent over every platform. And that is what big brands do so if you wanna get up to that level and you wanna scale your company, you really wanna head in that direction. And that’s something that Banowetz Marketing can help with.

– For sure.

– So yeah, is there anything else that you wanna mention?

– Knowing that branding is the first voice of your company and keeping consistency in mind with that and determining from the start what you want that to be and keeping it going throughout.

– Awesome, well thanks for being on the podcast today Melody.

– And thank you.

– We will see you next time and follow us on all of our channels. Reach out to us if you have any questions. And we’ll see you later, thanks. Bye.