THE ROLE OF BRANDING IN SMALL BUSINESS GROWTH

Abstrakti

This article examines how effective branding contributes to the growth of small businesses and its importance in a growing competitive market these days. In addition, there are examples of small businesses that in a short period of time were able to attract the attention of the audience, increase their brand awareness, gain trust, strengthen customer loyalty and distinguish themselves from competitors, clearly emphasizing the advantages of the product/service they offer. This study highlights the role of branding in ensuring the sustainable growth of small businesses, using tools such as storytelling to strengthen emotional bonds with customers and increase sales, as well as social media platforms for communication, promotion and transmission of the company's values and goals to the target audience. This approach to branding allows small businesses with limited financial resources to create a strong brand with high user recognition. Unfortunately, in most cases, branding is often mistakenly understood only as creating a beautiful logo with a suitable color palette, but branding, in addition to visual design, includes many other key elements too. Therefore, the article also demonstrates the main components of branding, in addition, it reveals what obstacles a small business may face in the branding process, as well as recommendations on how to overcome them.