Want to discover how to establish a strong brand?
A generic (or unbranded) good or service differs from branded one in that the former bought exclusively for rational reasons (e.g., acceptable quality. Affordable price) and the later bought additionally for emotional reasons (e.g., makes me feel good, indicates that I’m wise). Furthermore, brands can demand more than identical but unbranded goods and services because of the extra emotional reasons behind brand purchases. Most businesses and entrepreneurs so try to create brands.
How therefore should one create a strong brand? How the steps done?
The seven main steps required in developing a successful brand discussed in what follows.
First step: find and develop your brand purpose.
Recall that buying brands is done for emotional purposes. For every given good or service, there are several choices available; individuals want to purchase brands that fit their values, impressions, and goals since it seems appropriate to them. “People buy what you do; they buy why you do it,” Simon Sinek says.
Strong, successful brands have a clear goal; a set of values, a philosophy, a guiding principle and/or mantra appealing to individuals who share them. In the framework of developing your new brand, basic concerns for you should be things like:
Why am (are we) here?
In what ways is my brand unique?
Why would/should consumers give my brand any thought?
These are vision/mission type questions that go beyond specific characteristics and advantages of your good or service; they are also vital in providing cause for purchase for your target market(s).
Second step: be aware of your rivals.
As you are developing your brand, knowing what your rivals. What are doing and saying in the market will help you to keep relevant during the lifetime of your brand. You must understand what impressions your target audience(s) have in their heads if you want to properly set yourself apart from those rivals.
This kind of model of perceptions helps you to arrange the strengths and shortcomings of the impressions of your rivals in an easy and efficient manner:
Examining their messaging, consumer reviews and social media comments as well as primary opinion research among their customers will help you to develop a “received view” and guide on the brand strategy each of your rivals is following.
Third step: ascertain your main and secondary target audiences.
Branding is really about concentration and having a unique point of view and goal. By definition undifferentiated, generic or unbranded goods and services compete mostly on functional factors like price and availability. Based on stages 1 and 2 above, you must then determine your ideal target audience (as well as the next tier or two out of ideal). Here, mindset is crucial since you want individuals who share in and like the “why” of your business.
Creating consumer profiles—or personas—that reflect who you are aiming for helps you to bring to life someone else. Layer in psycho-social variables like interests, motivators, preferred brands, personality traits, life philosophy, etc. after first identifying demographic variables like age, sex, education and career. Here is one such a profile.
Guide your brand messaging and marketing initiatives moving ahead using your customer personas.
Fourth: Strengthen your brand strategy.
Having a strategic brand platform that expresses your brand’s vision and goal enables you to provide direction and structure to your brand as well as the impressions you wish to own in the minds of your target audience and help you to differentiate your brand from competitors. Establishing and preserving a great brand depends on having everyone understand and accept after these are documented. A brand platform is shown here:
Step Five: Create a gripping brand narrative or story.
Since time immemorial, storytelling has been the main means of linking people with ideas and knowledge, so it is rather effective. Stories foster familiarity and trust, therefore transcending mere communication. They spark feeling. They also remarkably effectively express abstract and sophisticated concepts. Stories are easier for people to grasp and recall than either general or abstract knowledge. People tell stories more readily and naturally than they could recite from other acquired knowledge. Therefore, the best and most successful companies are adept in presenting gripping and intriguing narratives that put relevance and meaning on those brands.
Greater brand success depends, in our experience, on employing one or more stories to describe the value, purpose, and/or distinctiveness of your brand.
Regarding our brand, prospects might or might not recall the description of Six Degrees as a psycho-sensory brand-building agency that applies findings from psychology, neuroscience and behavioral economics about how people process information/make decisions and then applies proven sensory techniques to trigger the desired perceptions and emotions in the minds of each particular target audience across all marketing materials.
Step 6: Develop a brand identity.
Once the brand narrative has been developed, it’s time to either update the identity of your current brand or create an identity for your new one. This covers brand voice, logo, and name as well. Share the brand strategy with whoever is developing your new brand identity; also, create a creative brief that offers additional direction to the creative development process including both creative directions you would find counterproductive if not objectionable as well as examples you admire. At least three distinct directions should be expected; first in black and white. Decide on extra elements like color and typeface once you have limited down your whole design options.
Though it should be an iterative process, developing your brand identity is not about obsessing over specifics. Expecting a “ah-ha, that’s the one” moment upon witnessing ideas of brand identification is impractical. A brand identity is a beginning point, an empty vessel, and depending on what impressions and connections you give it over time, the strength and value of the brand will follow. Think about how individuals would have felt about names and identities like Starbucks and Nike BEFORE they were household brands loaded with tons of meaning from products, experiences, and marketing.
The seventh step is live the brand.
At last, it is insufficient to create a fresh brand identity and hope that it would grow outstanding without any effort. A brand is like reputation: it takes time to develop and may be ruined right away. You are therefore continually working on brand equity. Someone’s mental average of their latest brand experience or impression plus their most extreme one—good or bad—defines their view of your brand.
One must “live” the brand if one is to succeed. That implies you have to really live up to the brand strategy in whatever you do. New hires have to be brand-savvy taught. Partners have to know and help to define the brand. Customer interactions have to be consistent with the values, promise, and pillars of the brand both now and going forward. Building a brand is a lifetime endeavor as, if you stop, you are basically “milking” the equity from the brand.
Building a brand is a specialist activity. More importantly though, it’s a way of thinking. Consider working with a branding agency if you are unsure of where to start or how to proceed or if you would want some help along the way to guarantee you are doing everything you can to strengthen your brand. They will provide extra ideas, methods and approaches to strengthen the image and value of your brand in the market.