What is Product Branding?
Product branding is the process of creating a single brand for a standalone, individual product. This type of branding strategy gives a product its own unique identity, personality, and message.
Unless you introduce unprecedented new products and create a new category, people know what to expect when purchasing a product, even if they haven’t had a relationship with it yet.
In a field of similar products, shoppers buy into a product’s brand—including the feelings it gives them—and consider that when searching for new items. Research shows that most purchasing decisions are emotional, and the specific products that excel in that arena win. Product branding helps to create emotional connections that direct potential customers toward a sale. Transcending the functional benefits of a product to communicate the brand’s emotional and social benefits is vital.
Parent / Corporate Branding vs. Product Branding
A robust retail brand identity makes a strong impression on consumers. Your brand identity defines not only your brand’s position in the market but also shapes every interaction a customer has with it, both online and in-store.
A company’s brand image—including values, brand story, visual identity, and tagline—significantly impacts consumers. But products can have their own identities, too.
Product branding is when companies introduce a product to the public with its own unique identity. This can be seen in the product brand name, logo design, packaging, or any aspect of the product that differentiates it from all others.
In these cases, the parent company branding (corporate branding) becomes secondary, while the product identity becomes more significant. It exists outside of the ecosystem of other products and services that might live within the parent brand. In a sense, these branded products can be considered mini-brands or extensions of the parent company.
Product branding emphasizes the item rather than the umbrella of the brand under which it exists. It’s a strategic tactic you can take if you have a product that fits the bill: it’s noteworthy and significant or one of a few unique products in a line. If your business has a portfolio of commodity products, it’s likely not worth the investment to develop individual product brands.
Features of Product Branding
Product branding is not about any one aspect of the brand system. Expertly crafted, it’s an elegant combination of verbal and visual elements that creates something more significant than the sum of the parts. A product’s identity is built with numerous elements, each combining to create an emotional connection for a customer. That includes:
Product Names & Taglines
Logo & Typography
Color & Patterning
Packaging Structure & Design
Social Media Assets & Style Guide
Product Marketing Campaigns
Unsurprisingly, color palette is ranked as one of the most critical elements of product branding. The science behind it represents an entire industry of color theory, a field of design that examines how colors interact and how they can be combined to create certain feelings, moods, and reactions. A color scheme is more than a look and feel—it distinctly impacts our behavior, mindset, and even stress levels. Color theory should be a key consideration in your branding efforts.
Successful product branding is heavily influenced by the expectations you set in consumers through design and messaging—and whether or not your product meets them.
Process of Product Branding
Branding a product is a creative exercise built on a foundation of discovery and strategy. Here are steps for developing bulletproof product branding strategies and the assets to bring them to life.
Research
In branding a product, there is no such thing as too much information. Consumer and competitive market research can take several forms and follow various processes. On the lighter side, desk research involves online exploration of industry articles, category growth reports, sales trends, and other data. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have commissioned research: custom-facilitated exercises that range from surveys and focus groups to ethnographies and audience development. We can also purchase previous studies relevant to your brand and business. Regardless of the criteria, the goal is to enter product branding strategy development as fully informed and knowledgeable as possible.
Defining Your Audience
Effective product branding strategies start with a comprehensive understanding of your audience. This means going beyond demographics and tapping into psychographics, behaviors, motivations, and needs. You need to know what drives your audience, what problems they’re trying to solve, and how your product or service fits into their lives. Here are a few factors to consider when harnessing research and insight to define your audience.
Segmentation: Smart segmentation divides your audience into distinct groups, allowing you to create highly personalized messages. The more specific your targeting, the better the response. This isn’t limited only to demographics. Identifying and tapping into an audience mindset is even more critical.
Niche & Submarkets: Instead of defining your target market based on mass audience, consider going granular. Smaller, more specific groups with unique needs are most likely to buy individualized products. Often, a more significant piece of a smaller pie can be more profitable than a small share of a bigger market.
Brand Positioning & Value Proposition
Once you understand your audience, it’s vital to craft a product brand strategy to position your brand to them. In a noisy marketplace, a brand must claim a distinct position that differentiates it from competitors.
Trout and Reis take an awesome stance on positioning in their book “The Battle for Your Mind.” In a nutshell, if you are not eagerly sending potential business to your competitors, then you don’t actually have a position. Basically, you’re saying, “We’re for everyone, and you’re everyone.” You can see how that message is less than compelling.
Strong positioning says, “If you want an expertly designed $300 cooler that can keep ice cold for days and withstand a bear attack, that’s what we make. If you want a low-grade, inexpensive solution that lasts only a year, call brand X. Here’s their website. We don’t compete with them.
What is the biggest aspect or feature that differentiates your brand or product from the other guys? Clearly define your product’s value proposition and build positioning and a marketing strategy to communicate it clearly to your tribe.
Brand Identity & Verbal Identity
In product branding, branding is not just about communicating value—it’s about creating value. The end product is not the logos and packaging you make; the end product is what you make possible.
The best product branding does not describe an experience—it is an experience. It is an immersive story about the value and opportunity you provide to customers and community. Your visual and verbal identity should connect people to the core purpose of your brand, and authentically communicate with clarity, sincerity, and heart.
As a product branding agency, we create emotional connections by linking stories to experiences. Our designers weave the visual and verbal into immersive adventures that inform, entice, surprise, and delight. We use our expertise and insight to infuse these moments into brand messaging, identity design, packaging, product displays, digital branding, and more. With a memorable brand personality, we aim to make your product impactful, commanding, curious, and memorable.
The strongest product brands have a visual identity and brand voice that spark brand awareness and clearly differentiate them in the marketplace. Those differentiators tie to the foundation of the business and the functional, emotional, and social value it delivers to consumers. That value is most potent when it is a result of an honest and unflinching display of authenticity.
Designing a product brand identity is an opportunity to personify a brand’s essence, bring it to life, and establish genuine emotional connections with people. Brands with strong identities are confident—they know who they are and how to convey it to connect with their target audience. In short, a clearly defined brand identity gives companies an edge and an increased chance of near-term impact and long-term success.
Product Packaging
Product branding is often expressed primarily or most immediately through package design.
Your packaging is more than a container. It is one of the most intimate ways a person will experience your brand. They take it in with their eyes, hold it in their hands, and bring it into their home. Packaging represents more consumer daily impressions than any other communications medium.
Your packaging represents a tremendous opportunity. Of all the brand touchpoints experienced by consumers, none offer a more potent chance to connect emotionally with your audience. It is reported that 72% of Americans state that a product’s packaging design influences their purchase decisions.
Understanding the psychology and emotional landscape of packaging is a game changer that can profoundly influence consumer perception and behavior. It can give your brand a strategic edge and an unfair advantage in a competitive marketplace.
Tapping into emotional triggers like nostalgia, joy, or belonging can summon robust responses that drive purchase decisions. Understanding your audience’s emotional mindset empowers packaging design that fosters authentic connection and cultivates brand loyalty.
The best packaging design creates an opportunity to entice your audience, pique curiosity, tell a story, inform, surprise, and delight. It is a powerful asset that fights for your brand in stores and online, seizing shoppers’ attention with shelf presence and scroll-stopping impact. Strong packaging creates brand recognition, customer loyalty, trust, and affinity.
Strong Product Branding Examples
Our process for product branding drives results for our client partners, and their success shines through in increased sales, business growth and market share, media recognition, and consumer love. A scroll through our work pages highlights a host of stellar brands making a mark in the world.
Tecovas
In contrast to their revolutionary approach to business, Tecovas are heirloom-quality cowboy boots hand-crafted through a time-honored tradition in León, Mexico. The arrival of something that special merits a moment of pause and thoughtful ritual. We worked with the Tecovas team to take the strong product brand and optimize it for scaling and growth. Guided by a new product branding strategy, we refined the brand’s visual identity, crafting a packaging system and unboxing experience that reinforces the value and quality of their goods.
Everlywell
Offering over 30 at-home tests ranging from Food Sensitivity to Thyroid, Heart, and Metabolism, Everlywell empowers people to take control of their health by making lab testing easy to access, understand and afford. Since its founding, more than one million people have used Everlywell’s tests to harness science for self-discovery, gaining vital insights and better health.
With expansion on the horizon, adding traditional retail stores to their direct-to-consumer online sales model, Everlywell tapped our team to develop a versatile packaging system that would succeed in both markets. We worked closely with company leadership to identify opportunities to improve packaging architecture, structure, and design performance across the entire product portfolio. The resulting brand redesign achieves a clearer and more compelling presentation for shoppers, whether standing at the shelf or shopping on their phones.
Clayton & Crume
Kentucky bourbon and full-grain leather. A historic boxing gym home to Muhammad Ali. Two entrepreneurs whose passion weaved from a college dorm room through the Smoky Mountains into a busy warehouse off I-64. All of this and more combine to make the story of Clayton & Crume.
These are just a few elements of the Clayton & Crume brand stitched together by our team and theirs in Louisville, Kentucky. Clayton & Crume makes handmade leather goods and everyday accessories the old way—the two-hands-at-a-time way. Founders Clay Simpson and Tyler Jury have established a new culture of heirloom-quality craftsmanship that folks can appreciate for a lifetime.
VoChill
A remarkably simple idea, a revolutionary product, and an industry that took notice. VoChill is an elegant solution to a common problem: keeping a glass of wine at the perfect temperature in the summer heat. We worked with VoChill’s founders on every aspect of the brand, from product branding strategy to positioning and packaging to how the brand appears on the product and online. Beyond robust sales and media attention right out of the gate, VoChill is named as one of Oprah’s Favorite Things and has graced the set with Mark Cuban and the Sharks on Shark Tank.
Shiner Beers X Academy Sports Collaboration
Beer and gear—there are few things we love more as an agency. So when Academy Sports + Outdoors reached out to us to collaborate on an apparel and product collaboration for Magellan Outdoors and Shiner Beers, we cracked a cold one and got to work.
Inspired by these two iconic Texas brands and all the places we’d been out in the wild with a Shiner in hand, we developed a collection that was equal parts nostalgic and natural—and crossing the line between branding and product design. Adventurous but familiar. Rugged, yet still with a snap of wit. The result is a refreshing take on custom outdoor merchandise that combines history, a thirst for adventure, Texan culture, and the spirit of fun from both brands—and blends them across a product line that can cover you from head to hoof.
