How to Make a Brand of Your Own

When you are trying to start a business, you aim to create your own identity that is compelling and unique from your competition. You might be even tempted to copy — copy another companys brochures, logo, font choices, and the way they run their business marketing agenda.

After all, if its working for the other company, it should work for you too, right? Wrong.

If you cant come up with ideas for your brand on your own, you can look to other companies to get ideas. Theres nothing wrong with that. And with so many businesses around, its hard not to look like someone and you cant research all the companies in the world. But you can research your competition and get ideas from them. You dont want to be known as the #2 company, doing everything after the #1 company does it. That never works!

If one company is doing an activity, like newsletter printing and you think itd be beneficial youre your customers if you had a newsletter, thats fine. You cant really copy an activity like that. But there are other areas where you might be tempted to copy (and it can only be labeled as copying) your competition, but you should resist the temptation:

Stay away from design and layout of marketing materials. The whole point of creating a brand is to differentiate yourself from your competition. If you copy a competitors marketing materials, more likely than not, consumers will mistake your materials for the other companies. Its fine to take ideas that are really design principles, like using white space, or using a primary photo for the front of your brochures. But dont copy the exact design and layout.

Stay away from the style of writing. Again, youre just going to sound like the competition if you do this and thats not the goal of branding. Your copy should reflect the personality of your company and product, not someone elses personality.

Stay away from the primary colors of your competition. Every brand should have one primary color that is used on all marketing materials. Target uses red. UPS uses brown. Pick one color that none of your competition uses as their primary and adopt it as your own. Make sure that the color accurately reflects your brand. For example, if you have a relaxing product, use a light blue, not a bright pink.

Dont rhyme your name with your competitor or even go anywhere close to sounding like their name. Also, try to avoid using the same first letter as your competition. Using AAA Clothing might put you ahead of ABC Clothing in the phone book, but it sounds too similar and people might get you mixed up.

Remember, its okay to get ideas from competitors, but its not okay to copy them because your company is different and you need to show that. Besides, you dont know the reasoning for their choices, and you shouldnt make major branding decisions based on what your competitor does.

Know more about the newsletter printing technologies used by businesses for their marketing and advertising campaigns.

Katie Marcus writes information about the printing company and their printing services.

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