Brands today are increasingly influenced more to ensure that each and every aspect of their brand – from their logo and name to their employees and customer touch points – fit within a well-defined ethos, putting more value on these brand values and increasing their influence on the brand’s development and post-launch actions. But how can brands ensure that they have the necessary ingredients to bring their values to life every day?

We’re excited to introduce a new Brand Salsa series, “Brains Behind the Brands,” In each edition of the series, we will be shining the spotlight on one of our brand experts and getting their thoughts on a range of topics, from new trends in the branding industry to advice they’d give someone working on building their brand.

Creating and growing any business is a process that can take large amounts of time and energy to achieve – that’s a given. So why not spend some of that time and energy to create something that will work for you even after it is launched? It’s a question we hear all of the time – “why do I need to create a brand? Why branding?” To me, the best way to answer this question is with a new question “What is branding?”

Miss any of our great brand salsa blogs lately? Not to worry - welcome to our "spring is here" edition of the AW in Review, our roundup of our latest brand salsa and Addison Whitney news and posts!

There's one branded element that may hold the title as the most watched and most overlooked branding of the entire event – the actual floors on which the games are played. Yes, March Madness branding is so all-encompassing that even the very playing surfaces are incorporated into the overall brand profile and given a high level of attention to ensure they are both brand compliant but also provide their own unique addition to the visual branding.

By understanding the general buckets of naming strategies and the scenarios in which these types of names thrive, pharmaceutical companies can hone their naming strategy. At the same time, these teams can hedge their risk by including options from different strategies, specifically blank canvas, to avoid the need to start over. When looking into a naming strategy for your product here are a few questions to consider.

Developing a brand is not a knee-jerk process; moving too quickly and looking to take shortcuts will produce a brand that is incomplete and behind the game even before its launch. However, the amount of time spent on the brand development is not alone enough to ensure whether it will find success. No, it doesn’t matter as much HOW much time you spend, but WHAT you do in that time. The old business adage, “action always trumps activity” can also be applied to branding. Monitoring and making sure that your brand development is heavy on the action and light on activity, you can point the brand in the direction of efficiency from the very beginning. Here are a few ways to ensure this happens:

As with most aspects of business, a successful branding effort starts at the top. The brand must be developed in such a way and with an end product that provides for easy and full buy-in from leadership across the organization. But what is often overlooked is how the characteristics of the brand are not the only factors involved in leadership’s role with the brand. Leaders who wish to preside over successful brands must also possess certain characteristics in order to utilize their role in the organization to the fullest extent when dealing with the brand.

When it comes to brand building, this constant starting over and relying on chance-based efforts take up time and money, two crucial components to successfully build and create a brand. On the contrary, a focused, targeted and well-strategized brand building campaign will yield results at a much higher rate, and will provide the necessary data of what works and what doesn’t works to help build the road map moving forward.

There are few things worse for a company’s image than to be seen as one that believes they can connect with today’s consumers, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. So how do you ensure that your brand takes the right path to stay relevant and modern? Here are five ways that established brands can prove that age is just a number...