A brand is a perception of other people towards your business. According to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the world’s richest man, “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
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Let’s say if we talk about McDonald’s brand, we say that it is available everywhere. It is yellow. All the McDonald’s cafes have the same interior, and the best thing about McDonald’s is their Burger.
To grow your business, you have to focus on marketing your brand and on brand awareness. But the thing is, branding is not a simple task; it cannot build overnight. Although branding is a continuous process, it never ends. It will take months to develop your brand repo.
It is the age of technology. Therefore the best way of building your brand is by using technology. Today’s users spend most of their time on their mobile devices, and consequently, the best way to target the audience is by developing a mobile app.
No brand can implement its branding strategy without using mobile devices and apps now.
Let’s have a look at the core features of mobile app branding
Core Features of Mobile App Branding
1 Targetability
Although the objective while building a brand targets the whole world, you cannot, and you should not consider targeting the world as a whole. You should have only one goal in mind, and that is to target the right audience. Have you ever seen any Mcdonald’s advertisement that targets older people?
It would help if you always target the audience that will use your product. Once you achieve that, only after this you should target everyone. If you target the right audience, you will get the most out of your investment. Therefore find out the right audience and target your branding strategy towards that audience.
Develop your app design in such a way that it targets the right audience.
2 Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is always the main target of the branding strategy. You have developed a product, or you provide a service, people may need your product/service now, but if they do not know that your product/service is available in the market, they will not buy it. They will probably end up buying an alternative or some other product/service that only partially satisfies their need, but as per them, there is no perfect product in the market that can fully meet their demand. They have to go with that.
People must know about your brand, or else if no one knows about you, who’s going to buy from you? As people are on their mobiles most of the time, your mobile app will work as a medium of brand awareness.
3 Brand Loyalty
Branding doesn’t end when people know you. As people know your brand, they start buying from you, and if they like your product/service, they become loyal customers. Now, if someone is always buying from you, you should show gratitude. It can be done by keeping in touch with them and keeping them updated about everything. You can congratulate them on big days like their Birthday, etc.
Through the mobile app, you can send them personalized mobile notifications so that your message can easily reach them. If you wish to build a successful brand using your mobile app, its design plays a significant role in achieving the above target.
Here are some points on how your app design can help you in building a successful brand:
How app design can help you build a successful brand
1 Opt for user-centric app design
Provide an experience using the mobile app that you would provide when the users would visit your store. Keep the design-focused on the user’s needs and wants. The app design should help and support the user. The designer has to understand that the end-user will use the app, and they are the ones that will judge the app. The app represents the brand, and therefore it should be nothing but perfect and should help the user in all the use-cases and scenarios.
2 Personalize App’s User Experience
The app represents the brand, and therefore all the precautions and testing should compete before launching the app. The app’s experience will be stuck to the brand’s user experience, and consequently, no bugs or problems can be tolerated. If the brand wants the users to praise their brand and say positive about their brand, they have to provide an app worthy of that compliment.
Moreover, the app can be personalized to provide an even more personalized experience. Technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Near Field Communication (NFC), can be used to understand the choices and preferences of the users, and therefore a more personalized experience can be provided to the user in the app design.
3 Choose the best name for the mobile app
If the app is for your core business/service, then your app’s name should be similar to your brand, or if your app is for a specific purpose only, for example, your app is for our outlet, but it can be used for home deliveries only, then you should name it so, like XYZ Delivery, so that the name can suggest what the function of the app is.
Moreover, if your app is for something new that is different from your core business/service, think through the name as this would be the name that the user will remember as your identity.
4 Choose the best icon for your app
The icon is your app’s image, and therefore it should be as perfect and relevant as possible. The icon holds a firm place in connecting the user to your app. A unique icon can quickly help your app in standing out and proud in the competition. The color of the icon also matters as different colors are used to indicate other emotions and thoughts. The best practice is to ask the designer to create multiple icons and then to choose the one that feels just perfect in one look.
5 Maintain Consistency
The central aspect of designing that the app designer should understand is that the app represents the brand, and therefore it should first represent the brand. They May be capable of developing an app that is fancier and appealing, but as it is a brand’s app, it must define and implement the brand guidelines like logo, color, typography, images, etc. The ap should be following the originality of the brand.
Conclusion
The app is a digital medium that can provide your service to all the users anywhere and anytime. The app represents the brand, and therefore you should make sure that your app’s design is in sync with the user experience that you wish to provide the users when they visit your brand in person. Moreover, branding is a continuous process, and therefore the app design should be such that it can adapt to all the changes and the emerging user expectations and preferences.
Author Bio
Karan Vora is an online marketer and avid tech-savvy blogger. He is associated with Capermint Technologies, a creative app & game development company based in Canada. He loves to write about web design, app & game development, AR/VR, Artificial Intelligence, UI/UX, digital marketing, and much more. Apart from writing, he loves traveling & gaming. Follow him on Twitter.