Understanding Brands
Often, people talk about brands as if they’re just a company’s logo or symbol. But the representative symbol is only part of the equation. A business’s brand is the emotional and psychological perception made by each person.
Brands that are built successfully have a coherent and consistent message about the company, and convey it through a variety of avenues. These tools and avenues for branding include:
- Signs, delivery packaging, printed materials
- Content Marketing/Social Media
- Online & Website Advertisement
- Company office or storefront environment
- Sales presence & impression of customer service
As you can tell, building a brand can be a complex process, but building it well will lead to many satisfying and lasting professional relationships with your clients and customers. A brand that is well-received can also result in increases in support for your business’s products and services, projects requiring development, and sales figures.
- Find the Brand’s Target Audience
A basic principle of creating and establishing a brand is figuring out the target audience that you’ll be directing your marketing and promotional efforts towards. Just as you can’t please everyone all the time in politics, the same advice applies in business and in branding. This means that you’ll need to develop and spread a unique mission and convey a custom message that attracts exactly the people you want it to reach.
Determining the target audience requires research into the typical actions and lifestyles of your customers. Depending on your brand’s services and image, your target audience might be:
- Teenage gamers with live-streaming video game accounts
- Fashion-conscious shoppers who follow the latest trends
- University students who frequently travel overseas
- Executives searching for top-of-the-line HRIS software
- Develop Your Brand’s Mission Statement
Another important milestone for building your brand is knowing the essence of what your company is about. What is your company’s purpose and core values?
The mission statement will identify the reason for the existence of your business. It’s essential, and its message should spread to all other aspects of your brand and your business. The company’s tagline, personality, image, and message should all serve as reflections of the same mission statement.
- Discovering Your Industry Niche Market
To make an effective brand, it must be easily noticed and found to be attractive by potential customers. Differentiating your brand from your competitors’ brands requires research into what they are doing incredibly well and what they are failing to do. Once you can properly highlight what your company unique brings to the market, you will gain the loyalty and support of more and more customers, instead of losing them to the brands of your competition.
A very practical means of conducting this research is by making a brand competitor spreadsheet to compare your research efforts. Any number of spreadsheet-generating tools can be used for gathering the desired information, including Excel, Google Sheets, or any number of other spreadsheet programs. While gathering data for your brand competitor spreadsheet, look for answers to these questions:
- Does the competitor have a consistent message and visual presentation across all communication channels?
- How do the competitor’s services and products measure up?
- Are there public customer reviews that you can look at, or any social discussions concerning them?
- What is the competitor’s offline and online marketing strategy?
Select a few competitors for the comparison spreadsheet. Another good idea is to include local businesses, and to compare your brand against the bigger, name brand companies.
- Outline Unique Benefits & Qualities
To get the best value out of your brand, you need to determine what you uniquely offer that none of your other competitors can. This isn’t just a list of your products or services, but rather are the special ways that your brand’s offerings improve the lives of your customers.
Some of these unique benefits might be:
- Genuine and effective customer service
- Exemplary efficiency procedures
- Using less expensive options to decrease operational costs
- Simplifying how services are provided to customers
- Brand Logo & Tagline
A very important part of brand building is the selection of the brand logo and the tagline of the company. This logo/tagline will stand as your company’s identity, will be how people will recall your company, and will be strategically placed on everything that connects with your business.
For this part, hiring a professional logo designer or artist may be a very smart move. Not only can a professional designer ensure that your logo is expertly designed, but the designer can also create brand guidelines to practically guarantee that future logo uses will be consistent with the originally approved design.
A high-quality brand style guide will have specific measurements of features such as:
- Color palette
- Image style/Photography
- Typography and fonts
- Logo placement and size
- Web aspects
- Ecommerce Business and Branding
If your company is an Ecommerce Business or has an ecommerce element to it, then you must look into the best ways to present your company’s image and products to your consumers. Similar to your brand logo design, you may want to enlist the help of experts, such as the Magento extensions offered by MageWorx. These Magento extensions can improve your brand’s image by improving CRM, SEO, redesigning your eStore, and upgrading your site-security.
