Teilor
Iulia Novac
Marketing Director
What is the branding process for a marketing director?
The branding process is ultimately very fun and it’s fun because you discover a lot of things. You’re like a child exploring the world, and besides the world, you discover many possibilities that you could have, which you didn’t know before but can now use from now on. Branding is not rigidity, it’s not something to fear, on the contrary, I think it’s, as I said, an extremely, extremely useful thing, it’s a must-have for absolutely any brand that wants to succeed regardless of the industry or competition nearby. Competition is good, but the story always wins, and besides the story, what matters a lot is the clarity with which you can tell that story.
Why is a brand manual needed?
When we are born, we don’t know what to do in this world and suddenly someone enlightens you and guides you and helps you and takes you by the hand and lifts you and guides you. I think it’s exactly the same thing. It’s education for the brand, it’s coherence, it’s a clarification of the things you have to do, and more than that, it’s unity. Because every entrepreneur probably has a lot of ideas, a lot of vision, a lot of things they would like to do, but often when they put them into practice, the result may not necessarily be understood by the consumer or the message doesn’t reach the consumer as clearly as it should. And a brand manual leaves a very strong mark here, it helps you and gives you direction in absolutely anything related to communication. Moreover, we always talk about business strategies, and the branding part seems like something fancy or seems like something nice to have, on the contrary, probably in addition to the business strategy, a branding strategy is a must-have after all if you want to excel in an industry. And from a certain point on, you can’t play with branding anymore because either you have it and you do it right and you adapt it and try to make it better every day, or you do things by feel, but here you draw some consequences
How does the brand manual help?
In addition to the fact that we in marketing use it every day, I say every day on any task related to the communication part, art direction, it’s much easier to write a message when you look at the brand book and you know very clearly what you have to convey and especially on the visual side, where we are quite strong in the indoor and outdoor areas. First of all, it shortens and helps the team a lot. Maybe an entrepreneur is not in execution every day or maybe it’s not handy to write a text or have a press release or have a campaign, but when you know you have to do a task, a more complicated one or a simpler one, and you open a brand book that you can look at and extract ideas from, the working time is shortened first and foremost and everything is much, much more efficient. Secondly, if we talk about our business, we are in five countries. Besides Romania, where the core of the business is and where we have over 60 stores, it’s very important to understand the consumer in each country. But, more than that, besides understanding, it’s extremely important to take the essence of the brand to the other countries. And here there’s no turning back. You have a brand that you respect and you deploy it regardless of the country the brand reaches.
How did branding help with international expansion?
It certainly, certainly helped a lot because we realized what we want when we talk, many insights come to the surface, but sometimes you don’t have time to talk or sometimes you don’t talk in an organized framework. But it was a great exercise that aligned us from many points of view, and we realized where we want to go. And yes, I think the branding process gave us a lot of strength for internationalization.
