Forbes editor-in-chief Steve Forbes once tweeted that “Your brand is the single most important investment you can make in your business.” Whether your business is an upcoming start-up or a titan in the industry, branding is the key to maintaining and forging success. People associate everything about your business to your brand. Product quality, customer service, advocacies, philosophies—your brand becomes your business identity. There are plenty of ways to build and spread your brand. Large corporations would spend millions every year to develop and maintain theirs. There is one way that all forms of enterprises that range from NGOs to politicians use, and that is custom stickers.
Boundless Uses
Stickers are an inexpensive, simple, but highly effective branding and marketing tool. An attractive feature of stickers is their broad applications. Because you can have custom stickers with varying shapes, designs, and colours, you can have stickers as labels for products, ornaments on vehicles, leaflets, seals, and many more. Only your creativity can put a limit to the uses and effectiveness of stickers.
For example, you may have a start-up that produces artisan beverages like healthy craft sodas. Because you are still a start-up, you opt for generic 330-mL long neck soda bottle for your beverages. What will make your product stand out will be the label you put on that bottle. Thus, you may not want to put a bland rectangular sticker with the beverage name written using Arial or Helvetica. You want it to demand attention. Perhaps your beverage may be a mixture of blue and red ingredients like acai and strawberries. That would give it a magenta colour. If so, not only will you want your bottle to be transparent, but will your sticker so it can accentuate the colour.
Next is the design you put on the sticker. If your beverage is magenta, you will not want to put magenta images and text on your sticker; otherwise, they will be invisible. Choose other colours that will go well with that magenta background. This situation is when having a colour palette comes in handy. Once you have that down, all that is left is to fill in the spaces. Should you put flowers, fruits, a mascot? If your beverage has carbonation, then you may want to put cartoon bubbles or fizz. Besides the creative aspects, you also must consider function. If it is best to drink your beverage cold, chances are it will get wet from condensation or from being in an ice cooler. You will, therefore, want our stickers to be waterproof.
Get a Wide Reach
One way that big corporations reach a broad audience is through TV, internet, and radio advertisements. These may not be financially sound decisions for small and medium enterprises. You still want a form of advertisement that can travel across the land. Well, since your custom stickers are as light as paper, you can take them with you wherever you go. Slap those things on your cars, phones, laptops even on consenting people in music festivals, trade shows, and more. Your custom stickers can also act as your business card if it has your business information. Get market-y by putting vouchers and discount codes on your stickers. You can even emulate what Willy Wonka did and release rare stickers that your customers can collect for a prize.
Who would have thought that something as humble as stickers can have an impactful purpose in business? The next time you are thinking of ways to revamp your branding give stickers a try, and its appeal may even stick on you.