Why Branding?

10 great reasons you don't need to be convinced by, but they help in understanding why better branding impacts business success.

There’s a little section if you scroll down my website homepage called “WHY BRANDING?” and in there you’ll see 10 dot points that sum up the best reasons I could honestly give you for why branding matters and why better branding has a positive impact on business success. So here’s the list and I’ll expand on each one with a little bit of detail without getting carried away. That said, if all you do is read the 10 headline points, that’ll be enough to hopefully broaden your thinking to see the potential of better branding for your business.

People will pay more + go further to get you

There’s a video by marketing guru Seth Godin where he said, “The value of a brand is how much extra am I paying above the substitute. And if I’m not paying extra, you don’t have a brand”. Seth’s point is not that you have to charge more to have a brand.  His point is that if a customer isn’t willing to pay a higher price, travel further, wait longer or choose your brand because of someone else’s recommendation over a comparable offer, then you’ve not given them a reason to choose you. And this is what branding (to develop a brand) does if customers are willing to go further to get it.

It might be the promise you distinctly deliver that a customer only wants to experience.

It might be the culture in your team that influences the experience a customer has with someone in your team that makes them want to choose your brand again.

It’s this added value beyond your product or service that makes a customer think of and want.

This substance that goes beyond your logo, tagline or brand colour is the value of your brand, which is called Brand Equity and it is worth billions to businesses all around the world.

It’s more than a $50 logo and it does take time and investment to grow that value but this is your brand’s super power that leads toward profit and growth.

To stand out on the street, shelf or scroll

At the top of the customer acquisition funnel or marketing funnel, is the Awareness level. This top of funnel area is where you need to get attention and build awareness for your product or service offering and we can do that with a brand. So this point is to say that with better branding that helps you stand out on the street, on the shelf, or while a customer is scrolling, it comes from your branding and marketing efforts. Firstly to have a compelling product or service and proposition, followed by the most effective placement for the right people to see it, and lastly it’s the creative that gets the attention and helps awareness progress to consideration and conversion in that funnel.

Which means you create branding that is distinct from competitors.

It has colours that either catch the eye or are aesthetically pleasing.

A logo and name that are easily recognised and easy to remember, this might mean you need a simple name and a simple logo as a result.

As well as an engaging message, sounds and other visual cues that create a positive response to something like an advertisement, piece of content, shopfront signage or on shelf packaging.

All of this is branding playing out at an awareness level to stand out and have your brand come to mind or recognise when needed.

People buy irrationally, give them a reason

I’m going to hit you with some rational facts with this one, which is ironic given 95% of purchasing decisions are made emotionally, while 5% are rationally driven according to this research. And here’s some more to demonstrate this point:

• Fear of missing out (FOMO) accounts for 60% of impulse purchases, particularly in digital commerce and limited-time offers.

• Research indicates that 83% of consumers require emotional validation through reviews, testimonials, or brand reputation before making significant purchases.

• Pride and status enhancement drive luxury purchases and brand preferences, with 72% of premium product buyers citing emotional satisfaction as their primary motivation rather than functional superiority.

• Brands that successfully create tribal identities see 3x higher customer lifetime value compared to those focusing solely on product features.

• Excitement about potential outcomes drives 45% of purchase completions, particularly in experiential and aspirational categories. Visualization techniques that help consumers imagine positive future states significantly increase conversion probability.

• Immediately post-purchase, consumers seek emotional validation for their decision. This vulnerable period determines whether customers experience buyer’s remorse or become brand advocates. Companies providing immediate positive reinforcement see 40% higher satisfaction scores.

• Research indicates that pleasant ambient scenting increases dwell time by 15% and purchase likelihood by 20%, demonstrating the power of subconscious emotional influence.

• Fear of making wrong decisions creates hesitation at the purchase point. Effective strategies address these concerns through guarantees, social proof, and clear return policies, reducing emotional barriers to purchase completion. For example, fear of career impact influences 74% of B2B purchase decisions, making trust and credibility paramount. Decision-makers seek emotional insurance through vendor reputation, peer recommendations, and comprehensive support guarantees.

• If you’re a service provider, emotional connection with service providers significantly outweighs price considerations, with 68% of consumers willing to pay premium rates for providers they trust and feel understood by.

If you take a look at the whole article linked above, it’s a great extension to this article, as it goes beyond research facts to give you some good tactics to optimise your brand efforts. But overarchingly, it’s very evident how irrationally or emotionally charged our purchasing decisions are. Of course many consistent purchases like the staple items we buy over and over again in a supermarket are less so. But for more significant purchases especially, there’s a level of buyer consideration that goes beyond function and cost, which is where this emotional resonance and trust in something like a brand is introduced to give buyers reasons to think your brand is the better choice than a competitor.

To be thought of + available when needed

There’s this growing rationale in branding and marketing that the overall goal of a brand is for it to be thought of and available when needed. 

If your brand doesn’t come to mind at the time of need, another brand is more likely to be chosen. Which is why that level of awareness I mentioned earlier is important to increase that likelihood of being salient in a customer’s mind. 

Additionally, if your brand isn’t present at the times/places that it’s needed, and/or there’s friction in not being able to get at the time of need, there’s likely going to be a substitute available. This is where marketing is crucial as it doesn’t just cover things like advertising, but also covers ‘placement’, as in where your brand is available for customers to buy at the times/places it is needed.

This is the classic customer order of Pepsi when a cafe or restaurant doesn’t have Coca-Cola available when requested. Coca-Cola came to mind, but it wasn’t available and leaves the door wide open for Pepsi to take that share of brand equity away.

So this is why better branding and marketing efforts that increase the chances of stronger ‘mental availability’ and ‘physical availability’ (these are the jargonny terms for these concepts), help create better business success when your brand is the one that is thought of and chosen when available.

People need encouragement to be loyal

Loyalty isn’t quite the same with brands as it is between people or pets for instance. Loyalty with brands plays out in a way that is more like preference rather than undying loyalty to never buy or even consider another alternative. While also being driven in large part by incentive rather than unprompted choice alone. Which means customers need encouragement to be loyal.

The other harsh reality for smaller businesses is that their customers tend to be less loyal than customers who buy bigger brands. Either because of greater availability when needed or cheaper or discounted price because of better purchasing power, better margins and greater ability to discount.

So the point here is that better branding and marketing efforts that encourage people to not only think of your brand but also create a level of association between it and your customers that goes beyond price and features, and leans more into status or self-actualisation, is something a brand can do to create perceived value and loyalty to an extent. As the status of being seen wearing/driving/holding/using your brand could be enough incentive. 

Or at the very least, encourage repeat purchases with something like loyalty programs, referral incentives or other community building initiatives to increase customer lifetime value to the point in which your brand becomes the go-to they rely on and ‘feel’ loyal to because you deliver a consistently valuable product or service that can be relied on. Sometimes they just need a little reminder that you’re there, which is why we use ads and content and other branding and marketing efforts to drive further sales.

It's why you choose the brands you prefer

I often say this in my content that if you were to now think about any brand you know, prefer and buy from, you’d be able to think of a handful quite easily. Now for the naysayers out there that suggest they don’t need anything more than a logo for their business, have a proper think about those brands you just thought of. Do they just have a logo and that’s it? Or do you reckon they’ve put in an inordinate amount of effort into how their brand looks, sounds, communicates and shows up? Probably the latter, right? 

And look, I get it, if you’re a startup or small business and each of those brands you thought of before are all big-ass brands, of course you’re not going to have the same capacity to create a brand at their level. That said, any business, no matter the size, has the opportunity to do far more than just a logo to develop a brand that people can not only recognise but perhaps even perceive as a big brand.

The point is, we create a brand so that customers prefer our brand. It gives them confidence so that they think they’re not going to buy an absolute lemon. Because here’s the thing, subconsciously we perceive businesses, just like people, to be trustworthy based on how they present themselves. How put together they are and we can easily sense that if they’ve put this much effort into how they present themselves then they are surely the premium or better choice when considering others that don’t look/sound/feel as good. This is that emotional buying decision I mentioned in the second point of this article. So we choose the brands we prefer because of one reason or another and it’s usually because the brand appeals to us as the additional layer above functionality and price. Which is done so with inordinate amounts of effort equal to or above and beyond what our competitors are doing to have our brand be the preferred choice.

Your team will know why, how + what to do

This is often the most overlooked or “I did not know this was part of branding” part of why branding is valuable to your business success. Which is the internal part of branding within your team.

You’ve probably heard this term ‘team culture’ and this can be shaped during the branding process and continuously as you manage the brand over time. Because all brand experiences are driven by the team behind it that are either the front line faces and voices of the brand when engaging with customers, or they’re the one calling the shots to ensure the brand is thought of and available when needed.

This effort requires across the board clarity for everyone in your team to get behind, or hire and fire by to ensure the right people that align with the brand are the ones helping drive its growth. Because if there’s not a collective of agreement and belief internally amongst your team in what the brand stands for, why it exists, what it values, an understanding of how it shows up, what it should do next and how it communicates, then neither will customers. A well known branding expert, Debbie Millman said this perfectly that “branding is the belief in the meaning that you construct, that other people believe what you determined that meaning to be.” Which goes both ways for your customers AND your team. If your team doesn’t believe in the brand you’re developing and help create that perceived value in everyday experiences to connect your business with your customers, then how do we expect customers to also have that share belief?

So branding, from the internal side of things is addressing and constantly revisiting your:

• Brand Strategy: Who you’re targeting, how your brand is positioned, what your goals and tactics are to achieve that strategy.

• Purpose/Mission/Vision: whatever central reason for why the brand exists and what it is beyond just what it offers as a product or service to be of value.

• Personality: what shared personality do we want customers to expect that we need to constantly show up with.

• Values: are their guiding principles that act as our guard rails for how our brand acts - and go a little bit deeper than adjectives like ‘professional’, ‘integrity’, ‘excellence’ or ‘customer-focused’ as these are just table stakes for every brand that any customer would expect.

Do this better and it will give you and your team confidence in how to best develop and grow the brand and the business at the same time.

Help people make the easiest + best choice

Who wants friction in a buying decision? It creates indecision, confusion and mistrust, right? Sometimes the easier decision is more valued than just being the best choice because of price, or function/features. 

It’s why we might not pick the best tasting wine on the shelf, because the one with the label that got our attention first, looked most aesthetically pleasing and had a name we could easily pronounce encouraged our purchase. Especially when purchasing for the first time, as consumers, we don’t 100% know what we’re going to get and it takes a level of confidence based on past experience of what is the best decision and what makes the decision easier to make.

This is why we look for social proof, like testimonials, reviews and word of mouth referrals to gain greater confidence in what we think would be the best purchase or know what might be a better alternative choice, not necessarily THE BEST choice, but the easier decision to make as a result of a confident purchase.

Branding does that with the simple things like a simple name that can be pronounced. Hell, I did this with my brand name, G’day Frank, rather than using my actual first and last name that is much harder to pronounce, spell and remember as a result. Or it could be a simple colour palette to be remembered as the purple real estate agency if the brand name doesn’t first come to mind. Or your brand could be the easy choice because you show up at the right time people are searching for your product or service based on keywords that you’ve optimised into your ads, google search terms and website SEO.

More customers, more profit, to do more

It’s no secret that more customers and healthy margins generate more profit so that you can do more to grow your business. That’s business 101. So it’s puzzling that when business slows down and more customers aren’t coming in, the brand tap to any branding and marketing efforts to ‘cost save’ in those slow times is abruptly turned off first.

Instead, if marketing and branding is seen as a passive sales person or even sales team, then you wouldn’t be getting rid of your sales team, right? With a bit of bias in my own view of branding and marketing, they are your sales team that don’t sleep. They work in the short and the long term if you maintain your brand’s presence and don’t turn it off the minute you need to tighten your belt OR when you have too many sales coming in to handle as it goes for both ends of the spectrum.

So if better branding and marketing are being used to drive more customers through your door at a steady or increasing rate, that’s more profit coming in, to then be able to do more and increase that rate of customers. Of course that sounds obvious but this is the purpose of branding and marketing. 

Branding is to help people recognise, remember and understand your offering.

Marketing is there to help manage product, price, placement and promotion of your offering.

They work hand in hand to attract more customers to be aware of your brand. To then encourage further consideration that you’re the easiest/best choice. And then see that turn into a conversion based on your sales process.

There are ways that branding and marketing can be implemented at every stage of that awareness/consideration/conversion funnel and as more customers come through that funnel, it’s branding and marketing that can help manage that increase in customers and manage continued satisfaction when your business does expand to offer more.

Which might be new ranges of products or services and you want to manage a consistent brand experience and expectation is delivered so as not to hinder that expansion. Or expanding into new territories and managing the messaging or opportunities to show up that might require a different approach due to culture, language, society or buyer differences.

So yes, better branding and marketing is there to help drive greater profit to do more, but it’s also there to help manage that expansion when doing more to ensure sustainable growth.

...Yeah, you'll look and sound better too.

My dad always said to me growing up, “presentation is 9/10ths the battle”. It’s never left me, especially when I help businesses present themselves better. So yes, branding is what most of us think is just looking and sounding better. None of that is untrue but having worked in branding now for 15 years with small brands, big brands and my own brands, it does go a little deeper than that as per the 9 other points I’ve made in far greater detail than I thought I’d go when setting out to write this article.

That said, the amount of businesses that don’t get these basics of looking and sounding better, or at least as good as their competitors is leaving tremendous amounts of value on the table. Yes it costs a bit to get better branding to look and sound good, but in many examples I’ve covered in my content over the last 8 years I’ve been making content, the initial outlay on branding to look and sound good is, and I don’t say this lightly, the easiest investment in your business. Because there’s not many business ‘expenses’ (if you’re viewing branding as an expense) that increase in value over time. Short of those who work in your team, your branding (name, colours, logo, sounds, mascots, etc) appreciate in value over time as their effectiveness grows the more they are experienced.

But to come back to my point, so many small businesses have the opportunity for a few thousand dollars to properly stand shoulder to shoulder with bigger brands and head and shoulders above competitors just by the way they look and sound.

A startup real estate agency in Australia for instance is typically up against 1-3 other independent agencies on average in their local area, in addition to another 2-4 established nationally present real estate franchise brands. It’s an uphill battle and yet I see countless real estate agencies pop up with sub-par branding. 

The dead-giveaway is having superfluous words like ‘real estate’ in the brand name, a basic house silhouette shaped logo and dull colours that don’t get your attention. It shows little effort in how they present themselves, and that is subconsciously noticed by people wanting to sell their home or have their property managed by a real estate agent that gives them confidence. 

And yet for $10,000-$30,000 put into their branding and as a starting point to their marketing efforts, that could made back in one $1M house sale on a 2% commission rate. Let alone all the other sales that come from sellers/investors that notice the standout For Sale billboards dotted around town that had a simple brand name they could remember when they got home to then google search and have confidence from a well presented website, professional team photos/videos, engaging social content and testimonials.

That’s the power of looking and sounding good, and yes, that definitely is a benefit of better branding and marketing.

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That was definitely far more than what I thought I’d end up writing to cover each of those points. So if you happened to read through any or all of those points and you found them helpful to encourage further consideration of better branding and better marketing to help grow both your brand and business, I hope that serves you well and if you need a better branding partner to give your brand a shot at achieving better business success, say g’day.