There are so many brands available in the market whether Nike, Adidas, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Starbucks, Michael Korrs, Gucci and the chain keeps on rolling. Apparel to electronics, consumer goods to grocery, from food to emergency items, everywhere we find people embracing brands.
Brands are the face of a product or services that makes them viable in the market and ready to accept. Are these brand built overnight? No, it is not possible to build a brand in fortnight. You have to give a face-lift to your business through a number of possible ways. Have you ever thought the name we have just takes above have one thing in common – and that is, they all are killer brands who have taken the hard hassles to make their story successful.
So what does brand building implies? How does it help a business to take off?
Well, brand building is one of the integral parts of the business development. It only helps to raise the voice of the consumer awareness for a brand, but also adds identity and worth to them. A number of platforms and phases have come down the ages to develop the business chances and generate potential leads. It increases the brand awareness and brand equity as well. Therefore, if you are thinking to improve the brand of your business or start branding if you have just started a venture then go ahead and start brand building today.
Before we begin, it is better to explain the novice startups or new entrepreneurs the science of brand building.
What is brand building?
You have no strong definition or reason that can actually capture the essence of brand building. It is something different and keeps on varying as per your business needs. Therefore, a brand building of an apparel line is different from a courier service.
Many people even think that brand building is about communicating and exposing the brand. This is just one side of the entire thing. The best way we can define is that it has the process of creating value to consumers. It is able to encompass all the things that consumers are aware of. Knows the feel, experience and about the business entity as well.
After having defined what is brand building, we will now tell you what are the popular types of brand and what make they stand for –
Service Brands
This brand is depended on the knowledge, culture and experience that one has with the service, delivering, agency, company and people. Such as AT & T, Telnet, Netflix etc.
Retail Brands
This brand is built based on the mixture of products and service experience. Whole Foods, Target, etc.
Product Brands
This one is built on the experience that one has gained about a particular product. Such as Nike, Ford, Sony, etc.
To build a brand you need to follow certain steps. Let us lay down those steps in this article for a clear view of the concept called brand building.
#1. You Need To Define Your Brand in the Beginning of All Other Phases
You can consider this as the first stage of your brand building. This is one of the most critical steps and it helps to determine the brands and truly say what it stands for. When you define business brand, you should be able to create a checklist of the core strengths.
At the same time if you are defining your personal brand you should keep a check on the skills and expertise that you possess and especially those, which helps to stand out. On the same note you need to know what your brand is able to stand for and what is most important for your brand. Your values should in one or another way show that you are contributing to the environment, social, economic and well-being of consumers.
You might not realize some of the important aspects of the brand just in the beginning. However, as soon as you start building it one by one and look at them objectively, you will slowly start mastering the art.
#2. Try to Position Your Brand
Before you embark on the brand building, you have to take pain and differentiate it so that you can attract the attention and stand out from the competitors. In order to differentiate your brand, you have to create a unique advantage just in the mind of your buyers.
It is not just about gaining attention from your buyers against your colors, logos or other superficial elements. It is more about talking the whole brand, which makes in itself. As soon as you come up with the value proposition, you should employ a good branding strategy and position your brand in a way that will help customers see and appreciate the great value of your brand over the competing ones available in the market.
#3. Give a Face to Your Brand
As we said earlier, that brand building is not single step and it cannot happen overnight. Building as powerful brand takes time and patience. In order to build your personal brand takes time and efficiency. In order to build the personal brand you have to start reinforcing the values and skillet that you possess. This will help you to take up new roles and assignments that will give you more exposure.
At the other hand, you can also employ some of the promotional channels such as blogs, forums, and social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest. This will enable you to create a voice for your personal brand.
When you start building a brand, you should take all endeavors to develop a brand personality. Brand personality means what people or your target customer knows about it, think about it and say about you as well. This is what is able to drive and motivate the people to identify with and engage with your brand. The truth is that if you execute your brand strategies consistently, you can easily establish a format that will be associated with your brand name as a whole.
#4. Time to Personalize Your Brand
If you want to enable a brand campaign or want the brand to be successful, then you need to personalize it. It is very important to give your brand anew face and an identity. Let the consumers see and experience the personality of your brand and their entity as well.
What you need to? Well, you simply need to look at your growing brand as something that your consumer wants. You need to step into the shoe of your consumer and helps to identify with their favorite things as whole; it might be your favorite cars, smartphones, or laptops.
As soon as you start engaging with your brand, you should invite all potential customers to turn out as the co-creators of your brand. So that it helps, you to generate a greater value than you have imagined. Top brands are able to encourage consumer brand interaction simply personalizing the products to meet the particular needs and preferences of needs. When you are able to personalize the brand, you can give your consumer a reason to participate and engage with the brand that will turn as a partner of lifetime.
#5. It Is Time to Review Your Brand before the Launch
You do not have a static brand. It is going to move through a phase of motions in the market throughout the time and ages. Depending on the brand strategies, which you lay down, your brand will either grow in strength or remain dormant or even it may recede with time. In the brand cycle, you will come across a number of new events, changes and situations that brings up challenges as well as opportunities to boost your brand.
This all happening helps to reestablish the brand. All possibilities that open up give you the impetus to take a charge of your brand building activities that you endorse.
As your brand name starts to grow so do the responsibilities couple. You will find that the expectations also continue to roll out and grow. The best way to make sure that the brand is growing at an ensuing scale is the activities you encompass and it helps to evaluate the success through metrics and various levels of brand awareness and levels of engagements.
Regular reviews of the helps that you seize and exploit new opportunities, while upholding the commitment to remain true to your vision and brand strategy that you take up. It will also help to steer the brand you endorse in the right direction and keeps it relevant in every stage of the movement into the future.
Now let us get into the phase of discussion to make your brand sustain the competition in the market. We will lay down some of the steps that you have to take up while building your brand. This will help you to evaluate where your brand makes a stand. If you want to affix its influence, you have to take a few steps to confirm their security and identity.
Steps To Build a Great Brand
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Take your brand before the target audience
The very foundation of building a brand is to take to the target audience in the beginning that you will like to focus. You cannot become everything to everyone.
When you start to build a brand, you need to keep in mind the reach of the brand and tailor your mission and message accordingly. You need to figure out the detailed lifestyle of your consumers. Such as get holds of the single moms who work from home, tech-savvy early birds, college or university students studying abroad, executive recruitment people, these are indeed some of the typical examples.
You need to create a storing impression on the mind of the brand consumers, something, which they can, related and understand.
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It is important to define the brand mission and its statement
Before you start building your brand, you need to target the audience and have to win their trust as well. You need to know the value the business provides. The mission statement is able to define the purpose for existing. It is able to draw lines for every aspect of brand building.
What is your mission? You need to construct a clear expression and show what your company is passionate. Starting from the logo to the taglines, voice, message, and personality should reflect the mission of your brand.
Take for example, the tagline of Nike – “Just Do It” but are you aware of the mission statement that they have taken oath – it says “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world“. They focus mainly on the athletes using the Nike products and let them to be in their best self. Nike has even went further with their mission and have added a footnote to the statement, “If you have a body, you are an athlete“. So you need to think about your target audience and has to make a disclaimer like that.
So start small with your branding and not something big like the bigger fishes. With time let your brand loyalty grow enough to expand your reach.
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You need to research about the brand within your reach
You should never try to imitate the big brand in any possible ways. Rather you should be aware of the industry and has to set the goals to keep your brand ahead of the competition. You need to convince your customers to purchase from you. You have to give them the reason to choose you over others.
And to do that you need to research on the main competitors of the niche you belong to and set down their benchmarks at one place. Study the competitors and show how effective they are in building brands.
- Are they consistent enough with the message they send out and maintains their visual identity across different channels.
- What is the quality of their products and services?
- Are they having enough customer reviews to entice the new customers?
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You need to outline and key benefits of the brand offers
There will be brands with big budgets and more resources and to command over their industry. The product and services that you offer should solely belong to you and your brand.
You have to delve down deep and figure out what you have been left to offer and no one else is able to offer his or her customers. It would appear more authentic and transparent if the customer service that you provide is the best way to support your productivity and helps to save money with some of the affordable and cost-saving options.
Take the example of Apple who are just not another computer building company but one of their key qualities is clean design, something new and used right out of the box. From announcing events to new packaging them always thinks differently and that is what their tagline also says “Think Different”.
Well, a solid brand building is all about changing your business from a small player to a successful one and discovers the things that your customer at once wants from you and your services. You need to develop a consistency and reinforce your brands identity taking the steps discussed above.
