How customers view a specific company, organization or product can affect purchasing trends and customer loyalty.
Today, we are going to share with you a few tips to help build a strong brand identity, but before we get into that let's talk about what a brand identity is before trying to build a strong one.
What is brand identity?
Brand identity is all the stylistic elements of a brand, including the
design, colour, logo, personality and font that distinguish it in consumers' minds. A company's brand identity appeals to the senses and aims to create instant brand recognition through visual, auditory, oral or tactile associations. Brand identity is crucial to creating and maintaining a brand's relevancy in consumers' minds.
The difference between a generic (or unbranded) product or service and a branded one is that the former is purchased strictly for rational reasons (e.g., acceptable quality, reasonable price) and the latter is purchased for emotional reasons
(e.g., makes me feel good, shows that I’m savvy). And because of the additional emotional reasons underlying brand purchases, brands can command a higher price than identical but unbranded products and services. As a result, most entrepreneurs and organizations seek to build brands.
So, how do you build a strong brand? What are the steps involved? If these are the questions on your mind, don't break a sweat we got you covered.
Here are seven tips to help you build a strong brand;
Step 1: Discover/Develop Your Brand Purpose
Remember that brands are purchased for emotional reasons. There are many different options to choose from for any given product or service, and people want to buy brands that align with their beliefs, perceptions, and motivations because it feels right to them. Simon Sinek describes it this way: “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”
Step 2: Know Your Competitors
Gaining an understanding of what your competitors are doing and saying in the marketplace is important as you are building your brand, and will continue to stay important over the life of your brand. In order to differentiate yourself effectively from those competitors, you need to know what perceptions they own in the minds of your target audience(s).
An easy and effective way to organize the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors is to evaluate their messaging, reviews/social media comments made by customers, this will provide you with a “received view” and indication of what brand strategy each of your competitors is pursuing.
Step 3: Determine Your Primary and Secondary Target Audiences
Branding is inherently about focus and having a differentiated point of view and purpose. Generic or unbranded products and services are, by definition, undifferentiated and compete largely on functional variables like price and availability. Therefore, you must identify your ideal target audience (and the next tier or two out from the ideal). Mindset plays an important role here because you are looking for people who like and share in the “why” of your brand.
Step 4: Build Out Your Brand Strategy
To give guidance and structure to your brand, it helps to have a strategic brand platform that articulates your brand’s vision and mission, how you want to differentiate your brand from competitors, and the perceptions you want to own in your target audience’s minds. Putting these in writing and having everyone understand and agree is critical to building and maintaining a strong brand.
Step 5: Develop A Compelling Brand Narrative/Story
Storytelling is powerful because it has been the primary method of connecting people with ideas and knowledge since time immemorial. Stories do more than communicate, they build familiarity and trust. They elicit emotion. And, they are surprisingly efficient at conveying complex and abstract ideas. People understand stories easily and remember them better than general or abstracted information. People retell stories more readily and easily than reciting other learned information. Accordingly, the strongest and most successful brands are good at telling compelling and interesting stories that bestow meaning and relevance upon those brands.
Step 6: Create a Brand Identity
Once the brand story has been crafted, it’s time to build an identity for your new brand or refresh the identity of your existing brand. This includes name, logo, and brand voice. Make sure to share the brand strategy with whoever is designing your new brand identity and develop a creative brief that provides further guidance to the creative development process. Developing your brand identity should be an iterative process, but it is important not to get hung up on details. It is unrealistic to expect an “ah-ha, that’s the one” moment when you see brand identity concepts, consider how people may have felt about names and identities like Starbucks and Nike before they were household names.
Step 7: Live The Brand
Finally, it’s not enough to develop a new brand identity and expect that it will become great without a whole lot of effort. A brand is akin to reputation: It takes a long time to
build up … and it can be damaged in an instant. Accordingly, you are always working on brand equity. The image someone has of your brand is the mental average of their last brand experience or impression and their most extreme one (good or bad).
To be successful, you must “live” the brand. That means you must authentically embody the brand strategy in everything you do. New employees must be trained on the brand. Partners must understand and contribute to the brand image. Interactions with customers must be consistent with the brand’s
values, promise and pillars over the short term as well as the long term. Brand building is a life-long activity, because once you stop, you are essentially “milking” the equity from the brand.
Love,
Made for More.
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