Is branding an investment or a cost?

As a company that does a great deal of work in the area of #branding, we often have conversations around it being a cost vs an investment. Many feel that branding is a hard cost and don’t see it as something you invest in or nourish. They don’t recognize that the power of brand spreads across a wide variety of areas internally and externally, and is an investment that pays off in both the short and the long-term. As we’ve often stated, it goes way beyond a logo, colour palette or brand book. A brand is a living, breathing element of every business that needs to be invested in just like product development, staff training, warehousing space, or a new website.
 
In our view, there are 8 reasons why ‘brand’ should be seen as an investment:

1. It helps your company differentiate, and standout out from the crowded market place
2. It ensures you attract the right customers, and ignores the rest (and that’s ok)
3. It sees those customers re-engage, return and re-invest
4. It could, if appropriate, allow you to place a premium price on your product or service
5. It helps reduce dependency on promotional efforts you need to pay for
6. It ensures alignment and focus across an organization and reduces/removes silos
7. It will help you attract and retain good talent
8. It is always reinventing and reworking, and therefore relevant to all those that are connected

 
As you can see in the above, these points have a strong fiscal impact on any organization. The wrong customer can chew up time and unnecessary costs, returning customers are much easy to sell to, advertising budgets are significant budget line items, keeping good talent increases operational performance, and irrelevancy is a company killer.
 
For another perspective on why to invest in branding, check out this feature from Interbrand. As a leading organizing in the branding space, they know what they’re talking about. We often speak to their brand rankings and how organizations need to always keep an eye on the bouncing brand ball.
 
In our many branding presentations and workshops, we feature the quote below from Seth Godin. His statement is so very relevant, and in such a simple and powerful way speaks to the ‘squishy’ yet fiscally important aspect of branding. You may think relations, stories and magic have little to do with the financial success of a company. However, we think IKEA, Virgin, and Disney may say different. 

​We’d welcome any other comments or thoughts around why branding is an investment, not a cost. We’d also welcome a chance to discuss this if you need help. Thank you for reading.