After watching the Super Bowl and the ever-engaging commercials that giant companies like Coca-Cola, Budweiser, and Volkswagen shell out big bucks for, I’m reminded of the importance of branding and how vital it is to designers. Whether these commercials made you laugh or cry, they were effective in making consumers remember their brand by providing them with a set of emotions or distinct gut feeling without direct verbal communication.

Building off of these emotions, the aforementioned companies strove to get their brand messaging across as creatively as possible without force-feeding their mission statements to viewers.  So while these billion dollar companies may have the budgets to buy expensive commercials, most designers and entrepreneurs do not. However, finding the formula to beefing up your brand isn’t as farfetched as you may think.

One of the basic fundamentals of branding is the idea of brand endurance and focusing on the long-term effect of your brand.  Brand endurance is the creation a strong, clear and lasting brand message, which can be applied to any marketing or branding model. For example, Amazon.com was able to change and reinvent the way consumers shopped online. They made goods easily available at a reasonable price with fast delivery. Amazon capitalized on a shifting marketplace, with shoppers moving from a physical store to shopping online, by offering a robust selection of products with the convenience of shopping on the go.

Successful brand endurance isn’t survival of the fittest; it’s survival of the cleverest. So when designing your branding model, remember to plan, preempt, and extend your key messaging to gain a further reach and have your branding resonate longer with your consumer.  Continuing to adjust your branding model to keep it consistent with market changes and taking a hands-on approach with the addition of new media outlets will help provide a strategy to avoid the pitfall of passivity.

Adapting to shifting marketing trends, whether it’s the latest form of social media or a more grassroots marketing campaign, is the key to staying proactive in your branding effort. Following this format will extend your efforts and ensure your brands endures – even if you don’t have talking frogs, Darth Vader or a soda drinking polar bear.