Product branding

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What is product branding?

Product branding, put simply, is the process of branding a product. It’s the identity you give your product so it stands out in a sea of competitors and connects with the people it meshes with best. That unique identity is your product’s brand, and each of the tangible aspects of that brand is your product’s brand identity.

Confused? This should help:

  • Your product’s brand is how the world perceives your product
  • Your product’s brand identity is the collection of things that comprise its brand, like the font and colors in its logo and the way it’s packaged
  • Branding is the action of creating a brand identity and from it, a distinct brand

For some products, the branding is loud and clear.

Because let’s be real here: when you’re building a shed, you probably don’t care much about the brand of nails you use. You might care a little bit more about the brand of hammer you use, and you probably care more than that about the brand of paint or shingles you go with.

Branding takes on greater significance for certain products than it does for others because things like perceived quality, sourcing, perceived value and functionality simply matter more with certain products.

Define your product’s unique brand

Defining your brand accurately requires some self-reflection. Take some time to dig into who your product is for, where it fits into its unique market and which characteristics make it unique. Explore these factors to find concrete answers about:

  • Your values. Are you an employee-owned company that prioritizes responsible labor practices? Maybe environmental sustainability or making high quality products accessible to lower-income buyers is a goal for you and your company
  • Your buyers’ values. What do your customers care about? What are they looking for from a product like yours?
  • Where your product fits into its market. Is it priced higher, lower or about the same as competing products—and why? Is it available on every store’s shelf, in select boutiques or from your online shop exclusively? Is it meant for a specific demographic among your buyers?
  • The characteristics that makes your product unique among its competitors. Is your product the only option in its category that comes with customer support for life? Or is it the only one they can get without having to leave the house? What differentiates your product?

You can demonstrate all those points through thoughtful product branding design. Effective product design (and by extension, product packaging design) starts with visual choices like:

  • A color palette. Take a look at our guide to choosing brand colors to learn more about how the colors you use in your product design impact how buyers perceive your product (and by extension, your company).
  • Fonts. Just like your color choices, your font choices determine how your brand is perceived. Read more about different fonts’ effects in our fonts guide.
  • The shapes you use in your logo and product branding design. Shapes, too, convey brand personality traits and steer viewers’ perception of your brand. Rounded shapes tend to feel softer and more inviting, whereas squares evoke a sense of security and triangles can create feelings of movement, urgency and drive.
  • The design styles and imagery you use in your product branding. For some brands, simple line illustrations say it all. For others, photos are a must-have. And for others, abstract 3D graphics capture who they are perfectly.

But that’s not all; branding goes beyond visual design. Branding touches every interaction the customer has with your product, like the packaging your product arrives in and the way they interact with your customer support team. You can take branding in a ton of different directions to build a stronger relationship with your audience, like collaborating with another product or service that’s on your buyers’ shopping lists or creating a totally unique buying experience through omnichannel shopping.

Create your product’s brand identity

As we mentioned above, your product’s brand identity is the collection of tangible “pieces” that make up its brand. These include:

  • Logo
  • Website
  • Social media presence
  • Product packaging
  • Product labeling
  • Taglines
  • Copy voice
  • Product names
  • Email/messaging design templates

Take the visual design elements you identified for your brand and use them to design the components that make up your brand identity.

Chances are, you’re probably not going to find some super designer who can create all of the above for your brand. So to avoid having your logo designer create something that says “we’re as transparent as taut cling wrap!” create a comprehensive brand identity guide. A brand identity guide is an in-depth guide that lays out everything your team needs to know about your brand, like its color palette, fonts, logo variations and overall voice.

Map out your brand plan

Once your product has a clear, consistent brand, it’s time to get that brand out everywhere. Everywhere it makes sense for your brand to be, that is. Nowadays, everybody must have an online presence. That means a website and social media. But which social media platforms you promote your product on depends on what your product is and which demographics it’s meant for. If your product is a line of ergonomic office furniture priced for Gen X and Boomer c-suite executives, don’t promote it on TikTok because Gen X and Boomers aren’t on TikTok. But Facebook and LinkedIn? Yes.

The same goes when you’re choosing where else to maintain a brand presence. For some products, print ads make sense. For others, they aren’t very effective. Similarly, some products have audiences that connect really well with influencers, so getting your product into those influencers’ hands and onto their platforms is key to reaching your ideal audience. If you go the influencer route, make sure you take the time to find influencers who have the same values as your brand and your target audience. Otherwise, you can end up with an ineffective campaign at best, and an embarrassing nightmare at worst.

Then there’s the way the venues selling your product fit into its branding. Does limiting availability to your website give it the exclusivity it deserves, or should the product be available on every big box store shelf across the country? There’s a lot of room to fit in between these extremes, like making it available only through select retailers, either online or in brick and mortar shops.

Maintain your product’s brand

Product branding doesn’t end when your product hits the market. It continues through your interactions with buyers, any new products you release and business pivots you decide to take.

A few examples of actions you can take after your product launches to build and maintain your brand include:

  • Supporting specific causes and charities
  • Running promotions, giveaways and contests
  • Collaborating with other brands to create new products

Just like you carefully vetted the social media platforms on which you maintain a presence and which influencers you work with, think carefully about the promotions that are most on-brand for you. For a pet food brand, donating products or a percentage of every sale to animal rescue organizations is a good fit. For a fashion brand, it makes sense to collaborate with another brand that your audience buys regularly—maybe a beauty or footwear brand.

Brand your product, be successful

Your product may be the best in its category, but if you don’t put the work into branding it effectively, it will get lost in the sea of options your buyers must consistently wade through. And if it isn’t branded appropriately, the right buyers can miss it—and other buyers may initially be interested, but turn away when they realize it isn’t what they need.

Even if your product is in its earliest developmental stages, now is the time to start creating your branding strategy. Read our guide to the process of branding to get an in-depth look at every step of the branding process. It’s never too early to set your product up for success!

How To Create A Brand Visual Identity: 4 Key Elements + 5 Best Examples – Best Graphic Design Companies:https://www.bestdesigns.co/email-design-inspiration

Author: Lindsay Kramer

LW Advertising Postcards

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These People Really Care About Fonts

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A regular mixer brings together designers and typography nerds who get consumed by spacing and serifs.

At TypeThursday, a monthly meet-up in cities including Los Angeles; London; and Bucharest, Romania, font designers critique each other’s letterforms over wine. They hold forth about negative space, consistent strokes and serif experimentation. The group’s website bills the gathering as “three hours of fontastic fun.”

But when dozens of professionals congregate to talk about their craft, things can get heated.

“Are those C’s exactly the same?” asked Evan Sult, an art director in Brooklyn, during a TypeThursday event in December in New York. He was examining a designer’s sketches for a Cuban restaurant’s logo. “They don’t look exactly the same.”

“And why should they be?” said Paul Shaw, a type historian who lives in Manhattan.

“Hey, hey, hey! Don’t make me ask the volunteers to get physical,” said Mirko Velimirovic, 28, the event’s organizer, jokingly.

Typefaces are everywhere. The New York City subway communicates mostly in Helvetica. The lifestyle companies advertising in its cars may use another modern sans-serif font or, increasingly, something more retro. Many large tech companies have designed or commissioned their own house styles, including Netflix Sans, Airbnb Cereal, PayPal Sans, Uber Move and Google’s Product Sans.

Matthew Rechs, a business coach for type designers, whose arms are covered in ampersand tattoos, argued that a font can be a brand’s most potent signifier. For example, “if you try to imagine a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, or really any bottle, without the type on it, you’re left with very little to differentiate it,” he said.

And it’s not just products. Political campaigns may be remembered or forgotten by their choices of fonts. Many of the 2020 Democratic candidates have picked Gotham-like typefaces, which could be a nod to the geometric font used by Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Some were more daring. Before she dropped out of the race, Senator Kamala Harris had run her campaign in Bureau Grotesque or a font very close to it, according to Matthew Butterick, a type designer.

“It’s a little strange and funky looking, and it was used well by the campaign to set her apart,” Mr. Butterick said in a phone interview.

Though their fonts may be widely recognizable, the designers themselves tend not to be. TypeThursday, which began in 2015 at a Brooklyn bar and has expanded to eight cities around the world, is a place to put a face to a typeface. And to vent. Because even in the digital age, making fonts is time-consuming, human labor.

“Typography passes for being invisible,” said Jonathan Hoefler, 49, a star designer who has created typefaces for Apple and the 2012 Obama campaign, in a phone interview. “People really don’t think about the fact that typefaces are indeed made by people.”

Juan Villanueva, 31, a designer at Monotype, one of the world’s largest type foundries — as they became known when typefaces were forged out of metal — said that it takes him anywhere from a month to a couple of years to complete a full digital alphabet, beginning with sketching letters in his notebook.

“It’s our job to find subtle differences between each design and see what works specifically for one client or brand,” he said. One of his first tasks at Monotype was to create the Bitcoin symbol for Noto, a Google initiative to create a font family that supports every language.

A lot of Mr. Villanueva’s work involves drawing the same letters over and over at his desk, obsessing about kerning, the squeezing of space between characters.

“It only feels isolating afterward, when you realize you haven’t talked to people for five hours,” he said.

TypeThursday, Mr. Velimirovic said, is both a needed social reprieve and an opportunity for designers to get positive feedback from their peers. That second part is crucial, he said, because typography tends to be an individualist and hypercritical field in which peers regularly try to outwit one another. At TypeThursday, he has made a point to discourage such behavior and foster, instead, a culture of constructive criticism.

“It’s a place where you can go and know that people aren’t going to walk all over you,” said Mr. Velimirovic, who got his first big contracts through friends he had met at the event, eventually taking the reins of the New York monthly meet-up. It now takes place in the offices of the Type Directors Club, a nonprofit that promotes education in type.

Harrison Jude, a graphic designer who attended the event in Manhattan in December, said TypeThursday helped him connect with fellow type lovers whom he would not have otherwise met. At his first meeting, in 2018, a presenter got called out by someone in the audience for a minor typo in his PowerPoint presentation.

“There was just glorious cheering,” Mr. Jude said. “I was like, ‘Oh, yep, these are my people.’”

Author: Fabrice Robinet
LW Advertising Postcards

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How to use Real Estate Postcards to market your business

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Why Real Estate Postcards?

 
 
Targeted unlike with billboards, you can target your postcards to a specific demographic. Whether you use a mailing list you’ve personally curated, or one that you’ve purchased from a reputable service, you can target only the people who will most likely respond to your call-to-action.
 
 
Postcards are the epitome of a brief, punch message. Instead of sending a letter that your potential clients must open to read, your postcard is already open. You lessen the clutter in the mailbox and the possibility that your letter will be thrown away with the junk mail. Break Through the Clutter. Do it in Small Batches: The average price to do small batches of Real Estate Postcards is less than $1 USD ($20.00 Mexican Pesos -MXP-) per card.
 
 
This price includes printing and mailing with associated postage costs. Of course, the number skews much lower as you order a higher amount of postcards. Relatively inexpensive…
 
 
Helps You Get Leads: Real Estate Postcards plant a seed. Realistically, do not expect to receive a huge amount of traffic after your initial round of postcard mailing. Instead, consider it as an investment. Postcards help you get a few leads in the short term, but where they really shine is in the long- term.
 
 
Marketing chops when you send Real Estate Postcards with current listings, it communicates something even stronger. It shows potential sellers that you spend money on marketing. Why is this important? It conveys the message that all of your clients are treated to an aggressive marketing campaign, so the seller may feel more confident in choosing to work with you.
 
 
How much do Real Estate Postcards cost? Now that you’re convinced about the effectiveness of Real Estate Postcards, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty of price.
 
 
Cost of Mailing for the traditional postcard (4” x 6”), the average cost of mailing ranges between .55¢ and .75¢ USD ($9.90 and $13.50 MXP) per postcard with a mailing service.
 
 
If you’ve ever done an internet search for postcard mailing companies, it’s important to go with an established company that may seem more expensive, but won’t hit you with hidden fees; you know there’s a lot to choose from and the prices vary a lot.
 
 

What about EDDM?

 
 
Besides postcards, another option includes EDDM, or Every Door Direct Mail. This is targeted to a general, blanket area.
 
 
It means that you don’t need to provide or buy a targeted mailing list. Instead, you select an area and the post office delivers to everyone in that area. Be aware that the minimum dimensions for EDDM are 8” x 6.5”

 

 

Who should you be sending to?

 
 
Depending on your specialty, you can send real estate postcards to potential buyers or sellers, or both. Of course, that covers the entire market, but you can definitely whittle it down into your specific niche.
 
 
If you specialize in selling ranch homes, send postcards to customers with ranch style homes in your target area. If you want to cater to a minority community, send your postcards to that demographic. It’s okay to specialize, but be careful not to exclude anyone from using your services.
 
 
Focus on long-term relationship building with your postcard marketing. It won’t happen overnight, but as you continue to communicate your brand through postcard marketing, you will see a return on your investment.
 
 
What are the Types of Postcards? There are 4 main types of Real Estate Postcards you should focus on in your marketing campaign. They are:
 
 
1. Just Listed: They display newly listed homes that may appeal to your buyer set. It can also positively affect sellers, who are curious about comparable homes in the area. Use the Just Listed postcard to advertise your best homes, and as a way to introduce yourself to your target audience.
 
 
2. Just Sold: Provide the much-valued social proof. If you’ve sold a property and share it with your target audience, they’ll see that someone else trusted you to sell their home–and that you were successful. It’s a huge selling point for you.
 
 
3. Expired Listing: Expired Listings are much more personal in approach because, instead of dealing with a wide audience, you’re only targeting homeowners whose homes have failed to sell. Search the MLS for properties soon to expire, and create your mailing list.
 
 

 

How to Design a Real Estate Postcard?

 
 
At LW Postcards do this job for you… But we need from you:
 
 
1. Professional photo of yourself: print it in color and make it large enough to see your smile. (Be sure to smile.)
 
 
2. Call-to-action: Calls-to-action are extremely important. It engages the reader and inspires action. Effective calls-to-action include: • Call me today! • Let’s discuss your new home! • Check out the open house this Saturday September 24th at 4pm. • Contact me for a free home evaluation!
 
 
3. Demographic-specific message: Customize your message to your target audience.
 
 
4. Photos of your homes: Whether you’re targeting sellers or buyers, use photos that highlight your current or previous exchanges.
 
 
5. Prices of your homes: It’s infuriating to see a home, but not knowing the price. Don’t try to trick your potential leads into contacting you for prices, because it will probably backfire.
 
 
6. Your contact information: Include your physical address, but be sure to list your online web address, too. It’s important to have a domain.com name, not a domain.freefreefree.com address. Having your own domain name shows professionalism.
 
 
Keep the design consistent: Your postcard marketing isn’t limited to one mailing campaign. You should at least have 5 rounds of mailings. So, with subsequent postcards, be careful to keep a similar design to your previous efforts. All of your different postcards should look like they belong in the same family.
 
 
 

How Often Should You Send Postcards?

 

“Effective postcard frequency is nine to 12 times annually to your highest-value market, and four to 12 times annually to other targeted markets. The goal of any marketing campaign is to create top-of- mind awareness. That means when the targeted market thinks of real estate, your name should come to mind.” Rich Levin.
 
 
Another interesting statistic states that 81% of sales closes after the 5th contact.
 
 
Here’s the breakdown: •2% closes on the 1st call. •3% closes on the 2nd call. •4% closes on the 3rd call. •10% closes on the 4th call. •81% closes on the 5th call.
 
 

How do you measure results?

 
How can you determine the effectiveness of your postcard marketing campaign? There are two ways to do this:
 
 
1. Ask for the source: Whenever a lead contacts you, ask them how they found out about you. However, don’t stop there. Be sure to mark the source in your CRM (customer relationship management) system. Also, mark when they respond and what business results from the interaction.
 
 
2. Ask for the card back: On your postcard, indicate a value for the client if they return to your office with the card. Unique offers include special discounts on your services or a free coffee. Whatever you think would entice the lead to contact you.
 
 
Final: Words Creating an effective Real Estate Postcard campaign are not time consuming or difficult. It just requires consistency and time. Include postcards in your marketing campaign, and you won’t regret it. It’s an oldie, but a goodie.
 
LW Advertising Postcards

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