A well-branded product is bought not just for rational reasons but also for emotional reasons. A good brand will always appeal to the emotional side of a consumer. 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 does one build a strong brand? What are the steps involved?
We will now go through the 7 primary steps in which a strong brand is built.
As mentioned earlier great brands leverage emotions. 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.
Strong successful brands have a defined purpose that gets people emotionally involved.
a set of defined values, a philosophy, a guiding principle and/or a mantra that appeals to those who share these.
A few fundamental questions you can ask yourself to find the purpose of your brand are:
This kind of question helps bring out the benefits and features of your products or services which are critical in giving your target audience a reason to buy your brand over other similar products or services.
Understanding 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’ perceptions uses a model of perceptions like this one:
Understanding their messaging, reviews/social media comments made by customers as well as primary opinion research among their customers will provide you with the perspective that the consumer sees and an indication of what brand strategy each of your competitors is pursuing.
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. Hence, you must identify your ideal target audience (and the next tier or two out from ideal) based on steps 1 and 2 above. Mindset plays an important role here because you are looking for people who like and share in the “why” of your brand.
It is helpful to go through the exercise of developing customer profiles, or personas, that bring to life whom you are targeting. Start by identifying demographic variables like age, sex, education and profession and then layer in psycho-social variables like hobbies, motivators, favorite brands, personality traits, life philosophy, etc.
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.
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 bring out emotions. And, they are surprisingly efficient at conveying complex and abstract ideas. People understand stories easily and remember them better than general or abstract information. People retell stories more readily and easily than recite 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.
In our experience, using one or more stories to explain the value, purpose and/or exceptionalism of your brand is essential to greater brand success.
In the case of our brand, prospects may or may not remember StudioLore brand-building agency that applies findings from psychology and behavioral economics about how people process information/make decisions and then applies proven visual techniques to trigger the desired perceptions and emotions in the minds of each specific target audience across all marketing materials.
But what we hear from people are the stories we’ve helped build and communicate.
Once the brand story has been crafted, it’s time to build an identity for your brand or refresh the identity of your existing brand. This includes name, logo and brand voice/tonality. Make sure to share the brand strategy with the designers who are designing your new brand identity and develop a creative brief that provides further guidance to the creative development process, including examples you admire as well as creative directions you would find counterproductive if not objectionable. You should expect at least three different directions, first in black and white. Once you have narrowed down your overall design choice, decide on further details like color and font.
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. A brand identity is a starting point, an empty vessel, and the strength and value of the brand will depend on what perceptions and associations you imbue it with over time. Consider how people may have felt about names and identities like Starbucks and Nike BEFORE they were household names imbued with loads of meaning through products, experiences and marketing.
To be a successful brand everyone associated with it needs to be trained/briefed on the vision and goal that the brand is trying to achieve. We need to ensure the employees and the partners associated with the brand completely embody it and know exactly what the brand stands for.
Brand-building is a specialized activity. But more than that, it is a mindset. If you are uncertain of where to get started or how to carry on, or you would just like some support along the way to ensure you are doing everything you can to improve your brand, consider engaging with our company. We will bring additional thinking, tools and techniques to further enrich your brand’s image and value in the marketplace.
To know more about our work and how we handle branding check out our latest works.
