Branding: 4 Piece Pie
Developing a strong brand that resonates with your existing customers and attracts new ones is no mean feat. But with dedication and a clear understanding of your target audience’s interests, needs and how you can fulfill them, creating your branding will be a breeze. To make things easier, we’ve got four steps that are the key to building a successful brand.
1. Understand Your Brand Perception
The foundation of a strong brand all comes down to a shared understanding of the product or service’s purpose: what it does, how it does it and a myriad of other features unique to your business.
One of the best ways to begin the ‘perception’ step of your branding journey is to speak with your employees, customers and stakeholders about how they perceive what you do. You could run surveys or speak to them directly and see if their ideas line up. From there, you can tweak and adjust your branding to align how others view your brand.
2. Create A Vision
Your brand’s vision comes down to how you fit into the lives of the people who use your product or service. And a successful brand will have a vision that is strongly in line with its purpose. The aim of a brand vision is to help customers and potential audiences understand what the brand does, what its future goals are, and how those goals fit into the customer’s life and needs.
3. Define Your Values
Your brand values don’t have to be unique. What sets the strong brands apart from the weak is how well they really embody those values, how well they’re communicated to the brand’s audience and how well that audience responds to them.
So for example, if one of your brand values is openness, you should focus on your branding, marketing materials and all external communications—including internal and external emails, social posts and packaging— should aim to be as transparent as possible.
4. Build Your Personality
Your brand’s personality should be designed to appeal to your target audience. Casual lifestyle brands can embody a persona that their customer might want to be friends with, while B2B brands may do better with a professional personality that comes across as a knowledgeable and trusted person to do business with.
Whatever your brand’s persona is, it should be clear through the design, communications, tone and language you use both internally and externally. Make sure that your brand’s persona is present in everything you do.
Now you’ve got your four steps of branding in check, you’ll have a better chance of successfully communicating what your brand is about. When your company runs in line with your values, vision and persona, it becomes an effortless part of your business and is more believable for your audience.