Why is a strong sense of brand important?

Your brand is essentially made up of attributes that reflect your business’s products, values and unique selling-points, so it’s vital that you convey this to customers in your venue in order for them to understand and connect with your brand. After all, an emotional connection is what drives customer loyalty and, subsequently, their spend.

How technology can help

With technology becoming an integral part of retail and hospitality venues for communication and entertainment, customers are adapting to these improved platforms, and it’s now an expectation that these will be part of the venue experience. Because of this, these technology platforms can be very effective in enforcing a sense of brand in a venue.

Digital Signage

Digital signage is proving to be much more effective than print in catching the attention of customers in venues, largely down to the design capabilities, capacity to schedule a variety of content for different times, and the natural attraction of moving image. These factors make digital signage a perfect platform for spreading brand awareness, as its flexibility provides opportunities to display information in a way that can be tailored completely to your brand.

With the ability to display images and messages that channel your brand’s values, you can enforce an identity that people will recognise and can relate to. By using a consistent logo, colour scheme and format, you are subtly building a stronger sense of brand that will subconsciously tell your customers who are you and what you are about.

Consistency

With the implementation of any technology platforms that allow customer interaction in a venue, the importance of keeping your brand messages consistent should never be forgotten. As put by eCommerce branding expert SureFire, “Ensuring that both your messaging and visual branding is clearly and consistently applied across all communication channels makes sense, as strong consistent branding reinforces your identity and drives positive sentiment and trust.”

Background Music

Background music, too, is a technology platform to which this applies. With its primary benefits of entertaining customers and motivating staff, a great background music solution can hugely enhance businesses and provides another way to communicate your brand messages to consumers.

Just like other atmospheric features that are carefully considered - such as the interior design and lighting - background music influences how people perceive your venue and should therefore be a priority.

A music solution that successfully represents a brand’s demographics, industry and requirements can be what sets your business apart from competitors. When the music played is thought-through, the whole atmosphere is enhanced. By passing this opportunity by, however, you’ll be missing a trick - and are likely to be compared to any other venue in your industry that relies on mainstream or poorly-chosen music.

Mobile Marketing

With communication playing a vital role in customer perception of a brand, mobile marketing can provide great opportunities for you to interact with consumers outside of your venue, in order to enhance the consumer/brand relationship.

Whether this is used to personalise your retail customer's experience with information gained from your e-commerce platform, spread awareness of your pub's news, or advertise a special offer, thoughtful mobile marketing could be a way to show that you take your brand seriously and invest time in encouraging your customers to do the same.

What’s more, with 98% of SMS messages being opened and little effort required to create a short text as opposed to a longer, more detailed email, mobile communication is not something to ignore.