Are you investing enough in your Brand design?
Consumer behaviour is changing and it is looking to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Throughout the boom of the last few years, we have seen very small business adequately competing with the bigger brands. Many of these websites have gone local to global in a very short space of time, thanks to their prices. People were willing to buy products and services from a company or website they’d never heard of, if the price was lower. But business are loosing the battle against the recession every day, many of them most likely leaving customer orders unfulfilled, thus consumer confidence is at an all time low. What does this mean? well it means that all of those bargain hunters are returning to the big brands that they recognise, even if that means spending more money, because they don’t want to take the risk.
With the recession causing people to loose their jobs, some have looked to the internet as a portal for their salvation, but starting their own business. But even in the recession, web business is booming, Barclays showed that even in the credit crunch 98,000 new business popped up over only a three month period. It can be a thankless route to success. Around the same number of businesses failed during that period too!
I believe that most new online business fails due to bad branding. You brand and logo are the first things that your future customers see. This is how you are judged by those who keep your business afloat, the people logging in everyday to buy your goods, that see you as a logo and that logo is critical to the process. But it’s so often the case that startup owners put off paying professional logo design in the initial stages. All to often its “Lets see how many customers we can get before we think about branding”.So what they do is, try to knock one together in paint or get a mate down the pub to create one. Many new companies unfortunately opt for cheap Vista Print Logos or free clip art to design their brand.
This isn’t acceptable for a Brand. All web business now more than ever, need to look much bigger and much more capable via good marketing, to retain customers and encourage new ones. In these anxious times the image of stability and reliability is more crucial than ever. Very small businesses need to look like a much bigger business, its possible. As I’ve touched on above, people nowadays are more and more attracted to bigger brands and bigger companies. And finally, a good image will make it more likely for customers you do have to refer you to their friends and family.
The bottom line is this. Bankruptcy will hit around half small business very early on in their life, usually within two to three years. Badly planned marketing strategies are thought to be the main cause of most websites decline. A custom logo design helps you create the right image for this marketing to succeed. So do yourself a favour – start looking at some sample logos in your industry and see what the successful ones have in common. Then get yourself a proper graphic designer to plan and create a great corporate identity that will help you not only stay afloat but truly stand out and succeed.