In a growing business environment, it’s important to find uniqueness for your brand, so that your customers always consider you as their first choice.
Here are seven things to consider when developing your branding style.
Identity
The first step in setting your brand apart from your competitors is finding your identity. Often confused for a solely visual concept, a business’ identity is so much more than what it looks like. It’s an individualised idea with a number of components.
Identity is about your brand’s purpose. In other words, it’s about what you offer to your consumers. This can be in the form of a product or a service, and also consider how you will deliver it.
Identity is about what your brand values, including its mission and vision statements. To assess its likeability, it is useful to ask ‘if my brand was a person, what would he/she be like?’
Lastly, a brand’s identity considers its passion and inspiration for delivering the product or service to its consumer.
Once you’ve acknowledged these components of identity, it’s time to consider a customised business uniform.
Colour
Whether you’re a new business, or undergoing a rebrand, the colours chosen to represent your business are significant. This is important considering colours are the easiest things for a customer to remember about a brand.
In order to decide what colours best represents you, it helps to understand what certain colours communicate. Cool tones, such as blue and purple, create a calming effect and are generally easier on the eyes. You’ll notice that many social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, use blue tones to encourage customer usage. Cool tones are also said to communicate intelligence and merit. There is a colour called corporate blue, after all.
However, warm tones have their advantages as well. Colours such as red, orange and yellow tend to stand out more, grabbing a consumer’s attention. Bolder colours communicate power and cheerfulness.
In conclusion, a brand’s colours should represent what it stands for.
Consistency
Consistency is important in creating familiarity for your customers, which, in turn, sets you a part from your competitors. A businesses visual appearance should remain consistent, so it is easily identified. This is relevant to a brand’s colours, logo, uniform and online presence.
However, it’s important to have consistency in your message – which communicates to your customers what your brand is all about. A unified brand proves to be a lot stronger and unique than a fragmented one.
Quality
There’s no doubt that high quality business shirts communicate professionalism. In an age of fast fashion, sometimes it’s best to recycle a trend that’s endured quality time and time again.
The use of embroidery on business shirts is finding it’s way back into fashion, and it proves to be ideal when you’re after the best presentation. Embroidery is truly unique and stands out against printed uniforms.
The fine detail and effort in an embroidered uniform, highlights a brand’s diligence, making a brand appear more favourable than its competitors.
Your employees
A visual representation of your brand isn’t just about the uniform you wear, but the people wearing it. Customers associate a uniform with the behaviour of the employees. So, it’s important to consider your employees wellbeing.
Essentially, your brand should give a good impression. Your employees should communicate the idea that they enjoy their work and are proud to represent your company.
Effective training, support from management, rewards, and a work-life balance are four simple steps to boost morale in the workplace.
Flexibility
In order for an employee to represent a company well, they need to feel comfortable in their uniform. The reality is, we come in all different shapes and sizes. So, it’s important to offer a range of uniform options to your staff, to allow them to look and feel their best. This includes offering short sleeve, long sleeve, loose fitted and slim fitted options for business shirts.
Uniforms should be consistent, but that doesn’t mean they have to be identical. Giving employees this flexibility lets them know that they’re not just puppets to your business or numbers on your pay roll. It gives them the opportunity to know that they’re trusted, and most importantly, valued. Encouraging your staff to feel comfortable as an individual, while still maintaining a sense of belonging, is essential in boosting morale.
In order to achieve true uniqueness in branding, the overall nature of your business should be unlike any other. Branding gives a business a sense of position in the marketplace, and should take into consideration its purpose, consumers and staff.