The Business of Branding in a Digital Age
In today’s rapidly shifting digital landscape, brand building requires strategic thinking and a deep understanding of consumer behavior.
Marketers and business leaders sometimes underestimate the complexity and importance of brand strategy.
While it can be challenging to create a brand that resonates deeply with consumers, the digital world offers countless opportunities to stand out—if you have the right approach.
Let's jump straight in!
Creating a Cohesive Brand Story
Every strong brand starts with a compelling story. To make yours memorable, identify the unique qualities that set your brand apart and develop a narrative that speaks to your audience’s needs and desires.
To trigger an element's transition, toggle a class name on that element that triggers it.
To pause an element's transition, use getComputedStyle and getPropertyValue at the point in the transition you want to pause it. Then set those CSS properties of that element equal to those values you just got.
Engaging Your Audience
In today’s world, engagement goes beyond advertising. Brands need to foster meaningful connections with their audience through content and authentic interactions.
These events need to be vendor prefixed at this time, so in this demo, we use a function developed by Craig Buckler called PrefixedEvent, which has the parameters element, type, and callback to help make these events cross-browser. Here is his useful article on capturing CSS animations with JavaScript. And here is another one determining which animation (name) the event is firing for.
Leveraging Digital Tools for Brand Growth
Like we just learned, we can watch elements and react to animation-related events: animationStart, animationIteration, and animationEnd. But what happens if you want to change the CSS animation mid-animation? This requires a bit of trickery!
The animation-play-state Property
The animation-play-state property of CSS is incredibly helpful when you simply need to pause an animation and potentially continue it later. You can change that CSS through JavaScript like this (mind your prefixes):
element.style.webkitAnimationPlayState = "paused";
element.style.webkitAnimationPlayState = "running";
Obtaining the Current Keyvalue Percentage
Unfortunately, at this time, there is no way to get the exact current “percentage completed” of a CSS keyframe animation. The best method to approximate it is using a setInterval function that iterates 100 times during the animation, which is essentially: the animation duration in ms / 100. For example, if the animation is 4 seconds long, then the setInterval needs to run every 40 milliseconds (4000/100).
var showPercent = window.setInterval(function() {
if (currentPercent < 100) {
currentPercent += 1;
} else {
currentPercent = 0;
}
// Updates a div that displays the current percent
result.innerHTML = currentPercent;
}, 40);
Leveraging Digital Tools for Brand Growth
Digital platforms and tools can help amplify your brand message and streamline customer interactions.
Here's a little example of where getting clever with HTML and CSS alone can solve a problem where you might have thought to go to JavaScript.
In Conclusion
- Effective brand building requires both strategy and adaptability.
- By telling a compelling story, engaging with your audience authentically, and leveraging digital tools, your brand can thrive in the online world.
- The techniques discussed here can help any brand create a lasting impact in today’s competitive landscape.