Branding: tell your story to sell

We cannot talk about Mozart, Beethoven, or Pink Floyd without first explaining what music is. In the same way, branding is only one part, however fundamental, of the complex, irrational, and sometimes contradictory world that is marketing.

Before branding: marketing

How could we define marketing concisely without leaving out anything essential? We will try it this way. Marketing is the set of all activities a business carries out to connect with the market, build profitable relationships, and sell its products or services. It is a fairly generic definition, but in substance it describes this activity with reasonable accuracy.

A company, to exist and survive, must create a relationship with the market. It needs to analyze the market to understand who its customers are or could be, develop its offer in a receptive environment, not in a vacuum or an ivory tower far from reality. Deciding, beyond product characteristics, what the price will be, which distribution channels to use, and how to shape communication. In extreme summary, this is the job of marketing: understanding how to create profitable relationships.

What is branding

In the context of communication, branding means creating the brand, that is, the identity of the company or product so that it can take hold in people's minds. If the brand is the image a person perceives, the set of sensations, emotions, and concepts associated with the company and product, branding is the strategy put in place to develop that image.

According to Philip Kotler, probably the best-known authority on marketing, doing branding means giving your products and services the power of a brand: what does that mean in concrete terms?

• Having a good product (a necessary condition, even if it comes before the process);
• defining the purpose for which the company exists, the values it stands for, the promises it makes to customers and commits to keeping;
• positioning in the market and differentiating from competitors;
• developing a clear and, ideally, always recognizable identity, both visually and verbally: name, logo, colors, tone of voice, slogan;
• defining partnerships with other brands to strengthen respective identities (very common in motors and fashion, for example);
• defining communication channels and their respective strategies: internet, TV, radio, print...

Why branding matters

The answer to this question may seem obvious, and perhaps it is at an abstract, conceptual level: a brand must do everything it can to be remembered by people, to become the first choice (or maybe the second, as rental car agency Avis candidly admitted); so that everything else fades into the background, like price or comparison with competitors, because the consumer identifies with its values, with everything it represents. How many of us prefer one shoe brand over another by objectively comparing a series of parameters (comfort, durability, waterproofing...) and how many instead choose an idea, a style, a status?

Along the way to that goal, the brand must appear credible, consistent with the story it tells about itself. If the job of branding is to keep the audience interested, the (even more important) job of the company itself is to behave well. A practical example: if I sell made in Italy clothing and position myself at the opposite pole from any aggressive multinational apparel company on pricing, I want my narrative to be consistent. Higher prices for my products should correspond, for example, to an entirely made in Italy supply chain, respect for workers' rights...

The main tools a brand has at its disposal, such as words and images, must therefore be used to tell stories and create emotions, but not only. We said above that a company and a product must connect with the market: especially today, when channels to reach the public and engage on equal terms have multiplied, brands can build social relationships with people. To go beyond the newspaper page, the audiovisual spot, or the billboard on the provincial road.

Branding, social, and Sebach

For at least a decade, social networks have no longer been the equivalent of a town square or a bar: we might compare them to a huge Panopticon or shopping mall, where people still meet but under the watchful eyes of brands.

Sebach is not exactly a product we would expect to find in a shopping mall, among shop windows or promotional stands. Even B2B products, however, especially when end users are part of the general public, need to be told well. Putting some substance behind the theory we have discussed, here is how we developed Sebach's story.

The starting point was relatively simple: Sebach is the market leader in portable toilet rental, and product quality is not in question.

The purpose of the products is to offer a practical, efficient solution to the absence of fixed sanitary facilities, regardless of environment. The target is therefore relatively broad and heterogeneous (from construction companies to event organizers, with more informal situations and more elegant contexts), but the need to satisfy is one, very specific.

Positioning against competitors makes the brand more memorable than others. Broad, thoughtful use of irony and attention to news and social themes does not take space away from the product. On the contrary: it places the product within a precise value system. Values that start from Sebach's core business, the management and proper disposal of waste, and travel on the tracks of sustainability, more responsible behavior between people and the environment, and between people and people, all the way to curiosity about the (social and physiological) needs of human beings.

Visual identity is equally iconic: an upside-down heart is still a heart, but it represents the main point of contact between the consumer and the product. With this spirit, witty but sincere, the brand's social communication is also developed with the goal, to close the circle, of creating a profitable relationship with the customer. A secondary target, certainly, but the primary one (companies) is made of people too.