Product Branding 101: Examples, Advantages, and Strategy

We’re exposed to product branding every day. From the coffee cup we’re handed at Starbucks to the toothpaste we choose from the shelves of grocery stores and the ads we see on our smartphones. Companies like Coca-Cola, Apple, and Starbucks have product branding that is so recognizable we take it as a normal part of our environment.

When you hone and execute your product branding strategy to this level, you get some serious advantages. One of them is that people recognize your product and buy it without having to qualify whether or not your product is good enough. Let’s take a closer look at the definition of product branding, learn about some of the advantages of getting it right, and take a look at some of the most successful product branding examples.

What is product branding?

Product branding is a strategic combination of design, messaging, and experience that uniquely identifies a product and sets it apart from other products in its category. It’s everything from the name of the product, to the visual design of the product, the materials it’s made from, the way it’s delivered, and the look and feel of the product packaging.

Let’s take Apple for example. Their products are immediately recognizable thanks to their iconic logo, the design of the products themselves, and their sleek product packaging. They started developing this formula with home computers, nailed it down with the iPod, and perfected it with the iPhone. When you create a truly unique product brand and communicate it consistently, you get to enjoy a number of advantages.

Advantages of product branding

The many advantages that come from successful product branding start with people recognizing your product in a sea of other products. And at the highest level, your product becomes the symbolic representation for a whole category of products — e.g. iPhone and smartphones, Hershey’s and chocolate, Coca-Cola and soda. Here are some of the biggest advantages to getting your product branding right. 

• Makes your product immediately recognizable. Customers can see your product anywhere and have buying confidence from the start. Think of Kraft Mac & Cheese or Campbell's Soup and how quickly you

  recognize those boxes on the shelves and know what you’re in for

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• Develops overall brand awareness. Your product might create so much awareness in a category that it elevates your company’s brand to a new level. The Apple iPod is a great example of a brilliant product branding strategy that evolved a computer company into the tech leader we know today.

  
   

• Sets your products apart from countless others. If your product is on store shelves or sold at many online retailers, you need a product brand that stands out. Think Hershey Chocolate, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, or M&M’s. On a shelf or website full of candies, you can immediately pick these out from the competition.

  
   

• Create an emotional connection with customers. Coca-Cola in a glass bottle can easily trigger nostalgia and a strong emotional response in customers. This took generations to establish, but you can use today’s omnichannel customer experiences to create new kinds of emotional connections with your market.

  
   

• Become known as the go-to product in a category. This is the ultimate goal for any product branding strategy. You want your product to be the one people think of when they think of a whole category — e.g. smartphones, electric cars, coffee.

These are advantages that every brand wants while only a few companies in the world have figured out how to accomplish them. 

Specific product branding examples

No two companies approach product branding the exact same way, but there are similarities to notice across successful brands. Simplicity, appeal to the senses, and a consistent product experience are all themes that show up again and again. Here are specific examples of how Coca-Cola, Apple, and Starbucks each focus on product branding.

Coca-Cola

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Coca-Cola has been around for over 125 years and their focus on product branding is a key part to standing the test of time. A Coke product is made up of a few crucial brand elements — mainly the logo that uses a script font that hasn’t changed much in over a century, a color palette that revolves around shades of red, and a recognizable can or bottle.

Even though Coca-Cola has gone through a number of brand relaunches over the last century, they’ve kept the central brand formula the same. Their glass bottles are particularly recognizable because they’ve been around across generations of people. When you see that white script backed with red in the store or on a menu, you know you’ve found Coca-Cola.

Apple

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The Apple iPhone, iPad, and Macbook are all products that own their category. Besides the high performance of the products themselves, their product branding helped each of them get to the top and stay there. From the visual design of each machine to the sleek product packaging, every detail of Apple’s product branding creates a unique experience for customers. 

The product branding strategy of the iPhone was so effective that almost every competitor has followed suit in product packaging design. You could write a master’s thesis on Apple branding but some of the main takeaways are to lean on simplicity, sensory experience, and letting the product speak for itself.  

Starbucks

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You could be traveling through an airport in any country in the world and recognize the green Starbucks logo on a simple white cup. The experience at each store will be recognizable and you’ll know just how to order the right amount to keep you energized (tall, grande, or venti).

Starbucks combines a recognizable logo, reliable quality of coffee, and a familiar ordering experience anywhere in the world as the main elements of their product branding. You can be in Seoul, see someone walking by with a Starbucks cup, and know just where you’ll get your next cup of coffee to fuel a day of travel and meetings.

Create your product branding strategy today

Now that you know what product branding is, the advantages you can get from doing it right, and have some examples from the world’s leading brands, you can start to create your own strategy. In order to put your product branding strategy into action, you’ll need a powerful tool to manage all your brand’s digital assets. 

Creating and maintaining your product branding takes coordination, consistency, and lots of content. A digital asset management (DAM) solution helps support and scale your brand management efforts. Request, watch, or click through a demo to see our DAM platform, Acquia DAM (Widen), in action. 

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Note: This article was originally published on Widen.com.

What makes the world’s most recognizable products so compelling?

The product itself has to be something of quality, of course. But quality alone doesn’t guarantee success. 

The world’s best products have something else on their side: world-class product branding.

Product branding is an essential element to consider as part of a broader branding strategy because it gives your products a life and personality all their own.

Great product branding draws in customers and keeps them coming back. 

Poor product branding, on the other hand, is confusing at best and can even be off-putting, actively hurting sales and recognition.

Let’s look together at product branding: what it is, and how it can benefit your business.

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What Is Product Branding?

Product branding is the application of branding strategy principles to a specific item or product.

It’s the associating of a symbol, name, and design with a product to create a recognizable identity for that item.

Product branding can be deeply complex, with focus groups, multiple rounds of designs, and so forth. 

But it doesn’t have to be. It can be as simple as designing a logo and choosing a name and packaging color.

Corporate Branding vs. Product Branding

Product branding is a type of branding, but it differs in several key ways from overall company branding.

Company branding remains static across the brand and should capture the entire scope of a company’s identity. 

It can even hint at a company’s values.

But product branding is much more specific. It distinguishes a single product (or a family of products, like Lay’s potato chips) from competitor products and other offerings from the same company. 

Sometimes, product branding even distances the product from the brand that makes it.

Let’s stick with our previous example. Who makes Lay’s potato chips? 

Ultimately, it’s PepsiCo. But in what universe would you want to buy (much less eat) Pepsi Chips? 

Pepsi is already so strongly identified as a product brand that it pollutes the brand itself, in a way. 

Yet PepsiCo remains a popular and recognizable brand to the degree that changing to something more generic (like Funtime Snacks and Drinks) would be a perilous move.

The solution? Product branding. 

PepsiCo can make chips, hummus, granola bars and breakfast cereals all day long. However, they should do so under distinct product branding identities, and that’s exactly what they do.

This graphic illustrates the scope to which the world’s biggest brands do this. 

And yes, in some cases this came about by acquisition, not by organic product branding. But the principle remains.

Is Product Branding Worth the Investment?

Yes, absolutely: some level of product branding is worth the investment. 

Why? Because you want to sell more product!

The purpose of product branding is to distinguish your product from the competition. 

You’re also creating or narrowing the market to exactly the people you want to reach.

If you don’t invest anything at all into product branding, you’ll end up with a sea of bland, poorly defined products. 

And your sales will show it.

The real question isn’t whether product branding is worth the investment. It’s how much you should invest into product branding. 

And that will depend greatly on the size of your company and the margins of your brand.

This part isn’t rocket science: global megacompanies spend quite a bit on product branding. Startups spend a lot less. 

But we’ve all seen examples of brands that should’ve spent more, right? We’re talking confusing, vague product names with logos that look amateurish.

What Makes a Strong Product Brand?

Creating a product brand isn’t difficult or complicated. 

Creating a fantastic one? That’s another story.

There are plenty of intangibles in play in the area of product branding, just as with branding strategies as a whole.

There’s no strong reason, for example, that Amazon or Google works particularly well. 

Those terms don’t tell you anything about what those companies do, and they barely even hint at anything tangible.

But we’d be fools to say that Amazon and Google aren’t effective brands. They most certainly are.

So there are certainly some intangibles in play here. Still, we’ve identified several principles of strong product branding. 

Implementing these will get you well on your way to creating a successful, memorable product brand.

1. A Strong Product Brand Differentiates Itself from Competitors (Even Internally)

First, strong product branding creates differentiation. 

When you see any Pepsi product (the soda product brand family, not the parent company), you know instantly that it’s a Pepsi product.

Even if it’s that weird new Zero Sugar Mango or the failed Crystal Pepsi — you know they’re Pepsi drinks in a matter of moments. 

You’re not confused for a second that Pepsi is a Sprite or a Coke or a beer.

This differentiation is essential with competitors. If you’re creating a hot new cola, you wouldn’t dream of a solid red can with a cursive font, right?

But it’s important even within a single brand, too.

Take OtterBox, for example. The company’s main product area is phone cases. 

Its first two popular product brands were the OtterBox Defender and the OtterBox Commuter.

We think these are both very strong product brands. The Defender is the bulky, ultra-rugged case that protects phones from nearly anything.

The Commuter is a slimmer but still protective case designed mainly for (can you guess?) commuters. 

Consumers aren’t typically confused about the differences.

But from there, things fell off a bit. Later series include Symmetry, Aneu, Figura, and Lumen. You can kind of guess what some of those are, but none of them speak with the clarity of the original two. 

The differentiation just isn’t as strong.

2. A Strong Product Brand (or Sub-brand) Narrows Itself to a Submarket

Let’s go deeper down the rabbit hole of Pepsi products. 

When you see Pepsi Zero Sugar, you know pretty quickly what’s going on there, too (spoiler alert: there’s no sugar).

At first glance, people might think this is bad. 

It will certainly limit sales. Kids don’t want it, and neither do people who don’t like artificial sweeteners.

Actually, this is exactly what we want product branding to do for us. The branding itself shrinks the target audience down to a specific submarket.

So Pepsi Zero Sugar is actually a great product brand. 

It instantly shrinks its market down to only those people who want sugar-free soft drinks that taste (sorta) like Pepsi.

3. A Strong Product Brand Illustrates the Product

Lastly, the best product branding gives consumers an instant idea of what’s in the packaging. 

The name, the logo, and the packaging imagery all work together here.

Take Ruffles potato chips. Ruffles could be a clothing or fabric brand, but the packaging shape and the imagery on it make it clear that we’re dealing with potato chips.

And once those elements put the consumer mindset into chip territory, it’s pretty clear what Ruffles means about the chips themselves. 

The catchphrase “Ruffles Have Ridges” drives out any chance of misunderstanding, too.

What Are Some Examples of Successful Product Branding?

We’ve already shown you a few examples of successful product branding in the previous section. 

Here are a few more to get your creative juices flowing.

Apple: MacBook Air/Pro

Any post or article anywhere talking about great brands is going to include Apple for all the obvious reasons: they make tons of money and everyone wants their gear.

But what about product branding? 

The company has had plenty of successes, but some duds along the way as well.

MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are both fantastic. Let’s look at why:

• The “book” portion (along with product design and packaging) make it crystal clear you’re getting a laptop.
• “Air” suggests thin and lightweight (and the rest of the branding matches).
• “Pro” suggests a professional-grade device, likely with a higher price.
• Last, “Mac” tells us it’s a Mac, not a PC.

And that’s just the words. 

Product imagery, advertising slogans, and so on reinforce all the points above and create additional interest, too.

Equate: Anything and Everything

This one’s counterintuitive, but hear us out. 

Equate is Walmart’s generic brand for pharmacy and health and beauty goods. 

The packaging isn’t interesting. The logo design isn’t, either. At first glance, you might expect it to be on a “bad product branding” list.

But take a step back and think about the goals of this product branding. 

It exists to tell consumers “This is a cheaper but reliable alternative.” 

And by using a consistent product branding approach, Walmart has certainly succeeded here.

Consumers instantly recognize Equate products, even if they don’t exactly spark joy. 

The branding differentiates the products and narrows to a submarket.

Starbucks: Packaged Coffees

Starbucks is another successful, instantly recognizable brand. 

Its packaged coffees, sold in grocery stores, certainly succeed in product branding.

Primarily, they differentiate themselves from other grocery store coffee through the association with the Starbucks brand. 

Consumers know what they’re getting: strong (arguably burnt?) coffee with a consistent reputation.

Wrap Up: Achieving Good Results with Product Branding

We hope this article puts you well on the path to creating your own product branding — one that succeeds in its particular market or submarket. 

Of course, there’s always more to learn.

For a deeper dive on branding strategies, including brand positioning and content experience as a category, you should check our recorded webinar with Mark Organ, CEO of billion-dollar company Categorynauts. 

Mark will join Diego Gomes, CEO at Rock Content, to discuss a range of topics that include and expand on product branding.

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