Branding in the Digital Age

What happens when branding meets digital? Well like most great ideas, they all start on paper. If your brand guidelines are print led, you may find it challenging converting them to fit your digital strategy due to the restrictions. So what is a possible solution? Developing digital brand guidelines.

What is important to remember is that each digital touch point where your branding will feature may have its own technical limitations. A few things you’ll need to consider are:

• Dimensions
• Screen resolution
• Image file sizes
• Colour palette
• Compatibility

Talking of touchpoints, it is said there are around 7-13 touch points that are taken online before a person actually becomes your customer, so our brand needs to permeate everywhere. The touch points are all moments which contribute to the individual figuring out whether they share the same values and beliefs as your brand. This is why your branding has to be consistent otherwise our potential audience will fail to remember it. A few things to consider are:

• Logo
• Slogan
• Language used
• Messaging used
• Graphics

Through branding, we show the personality of our company which leads to how we’d like to be perceived. How about we also consider the perspective that brands are consumer-led? As brands, we can steer a conversation on Twitter for example, but how the consumer interprets it could be different from what we as brands expect. Brands have more control over mediums as such as print; physical products such as brochures, leaflets and magazines, but we’ve had to adjust to taking that online.

The way in which people consume information has become digitalised, but the key still remains to use and merge both online and offline activities, so there is no need to throw away all of your branded leaflets out the window yet.

A recent example of this is when popular soft drink brand ‘Mountain Dew’ released a white, blank unbranded can, that when cooled revealed Game of Thrones favourite - Arya Stark’s ‘kill list’. The only way to get your hand on one of these limited edition cans was to enter a social media conversation whereby the following hashtags had to be used: #FortheThrone, #ACanHasNoName and #MTNDEWSweepstakes. The winners were chosen based on who gave the best answer to “What would you do #ForTheThrone?”

If we dissect this example, the ‘offline’ gains are that the consumer receives an exclusive item relevant to an extremely popular tv series. The online gains are that there will be heaps on engagement which will, in turn, increase your brand awareness. Remember, the incentive doesn’t always have to be digital, instead, the communication does.

Check out the new edition of my book for more strategic digital marketing tips.