If you want to separate your business from the competition you, need to concentrate on building your brand.
That was the core message from a recent branding workshop sponsored by the Gainesville chapter of the Florida Public Relations Association. The workshop, which drew more than 80 businesspeople to Pugh Hall at the University of Florida, offered dozens of ideas to help improve brands, including these seven:

1. It starts with understanding your brand. A brand and a logo are not the same thing. While a logo is simply a visual emblem, a brand reflects the emotional and psychological relationship people have with your business—your company’s entire personality, says Holly Clark of Candour, a multidisciplinary boutique design firm.
This can include the atmosphere of your business, even the lighting and background music you may play.

2. Research is essential. To successfully position your brand, you have to have a good handle on who your customers are and your market in general. Otherwise, you’ll end up wasting money on strategies that don’t work and then backtracking. “It’s the old carpentry method,” says Reese Riggle, director of marketing and communication at Dalton Agency. “Measure twice and cut once.”
Undertaking this research isn’t difficult and can be done through the Internet, interviews on the street, interacting with your customers, focus groups and surveys and polls, Clark says.
Before you start your research, make sure you have a good handle on what you’re trying to achieve with your branding. For example, is it more important to drive sales or boost your recognition among customers? The answer will lead you to the type of research you need to be conducting. 

3. Positioning, the often overlooked step. Positioning is critical because it differentiates your brand from competitors and establishes your business in your customers’ minds, Clark says. For example, Satchel Raye from Satchel’s Pizza says he positions his brand as handmade and home-grown brand to differentiate it from the franchise pizza businesses in town.
Clark recommends asking yourself these questions to clarify what your positioning should be:

• What do we do best?
• Who is our target customer?
• What needs do we fulfill for them?
• Who is our competition?
• What makes us different from our competition?

4. Strive for a name that’s unique. You may have already named your product or have something in mind, but either way, you should ask yourself these questions before investing any more time:

• Is it unique enough to stand out?
• Is it easy to pronounce?
• Is it a name you can trademark?

If your customers can’t pronounce your name then they most likely can’t remember it, says Clark—and we all know that word-of-mouth is one of the best ways to get your product to the masses.
Not sure about the name you’ve picked? Clark says that successful names usually fall in one of these categories:

• The name is a pronoun and uses the name of the place of manufacturing or founder, like McDonald’s.
• It’s metaphorical, borrowing the meaning from an item that shares its characteristics, like Apple or Target.
• It’s descriptive and lets the customer know upfront what it offers, like Home Depot and United Airlines.
• It’s composite and mixes parts of words to make a new one, like Nestea and Walmart.
• It’s completely invented, like Kleenex.
• It’s an acronym, making it shorter but recognizable, like HSN (Home Shopping Network).

5. Make your brand recognizable. Society is becoming more visually stimulated, which means your brand has to appeal to the eye as well. To make your brand visually recognizable involves choosing the right logo, color, typography and graphic elements.
Your logo should be easy to identify, unique, easy for consumers to understand and be able to be used in different mediums (T-shirts, vehicle graphics, etc.).
There’s psychology behind colors, and mastering it can help you choose one that will evoke the right psychological response from your customers, Clark says. For example, people identify red with love, passion and energy, while yellow is associated with happiness and lightheartedness.
When the Sebastian Ferrero Foundation was putting together their logo, they started without a plan but ended up wanting to choose a little boy who could represent any child. This became their graphic element and then they added the color blue, not because of strategy, but because Sebastian’s favorite color was blue. In the end, Lesley Cox, the director of administration at the foundation, realized that blue was a very strategic color because it’s a bright and happy color and represented “the sky is the limit” kind of ideal.
Typographically, you should use no more than three fonts in your advertising, public relations, marketing and everyday business. Make sure you pick fonts that represent the mood you’re trying to evoke from your customers, Clark says.

6. Broadcast your brand. Once you’ve developed your brand, you have to get it in front of potential customers. That requires several steps.
“There is a common misconception that branding, marketing, advertising and public relations are all essentially the same thing,” Clark says. “And this couldn’t be farther from the truth.”
Each of these plays its own role in getting out your message, and you can’t have one without the other, she says. Advertising delivers your brand though print ads, billboards and radio/TV commercials. Marketing uses brochures, newsletters, guerilla marketing, giveaways and partnerships to reach people. And public relations relies on press releases, announcements, social media and event planning to communicate.

7. Be consistent. Once you’ve developed your brand, it’s important to present it consistently. A business can make the mistake of changing its brand, because it gets bored with it, but “it’s not about you—it’s about the consumer,” Clark says.
Customers go through four steps in becoming familiar with a brand. First, they see or hear about it. Then, they learn a little about it. Then, they form an opinion of the product, service or company behind the brand. And finally, they decide whether they want to invest in it. If you change your brand’s image, you risk confusing or upsetting your customers and losing their loyalty.
To ensure your logo and brand are being used in the right manner, it’s helpful to create a brand manual or style guide that your staff can follow.