Essentials in making a BRAND
The key five elements in building a strong brand and sustaining them are:
– Discovery – Research & Analysis
– Brand Positioning
– Ideation
– Brand Activation
– Brand Management
Why brand is so important?
As competition creates infinite choices, companies look at creative ways to connect emotionally with customers, become unique, and create lifelong rapports.
A strong brand should stand out in a densely-crowded marketplace. People fall in love with brands, trust them, and believe in their superiority. How a brand is observed affects its triumph, regardless of whether it’s a start-up, a nonprofit, or just a product.
Positioning your brand
Positioning is where your opportunity lies to build a brand of success.
This is about thinking big, defining and expressing your brand’s focus, so that your brand is unique in its space. The foundation that you lay in the development stage of the following phases, providing the focus necessary to build visuals, messaging, and other brand elements that are created with vision and purpose.
This is where you will work developing your brand’s purpose and vision, messaging base, brand platform and brand architecture among other key components.
• Brand Platform – A brand platform is a set program with a commercial image, which works as a link between customers who build with your company. Some of these connections may be quite obvious and strong, like the brand Bugatti is associated with speed.
• Brand Architecture – Brand architecture is an arrangement of brands within a business entity. It is the way in which the brands within a company’s portfolio are interrelated to, and separated from, one another. An example has been shown below how it works.
Discover your Brand!
This requires defining your business, first step in any branding process is gathering the information necessary for optimal brand positioning.
Evaluation involves outlining your current situation of your brand whether it is a start up or an established business.
This can be done by analyzing your brand along the five components of branding.
• Drive – Here we focus on evaluating the success of a business in terms of immediate and commercial reasons — i.e. the purpose of the business is to make money.
• Consistency – The essential elements of the brand should remain the same for all your client’s online content, whether it’s print adverts or their website, their blog, e-mail, social media, or some other platform, so that their audience can have the same experience no matter where they go.
• Emotion – Best way to connect to your customers on a deeper, more emotional level. Do you give them peace of mind? Make them feel like part of the family? Do you make life easier? Use emotional triggers like these to strengthen your relationship and foster loyalty.
• Flexibility – While consistency intents to set a standard for your brand, flexibility enables you to make the necessary adjustments that build significance and distinguish your approach from that of your competition.
• Loyalty – They will be the brand promoters who will actively promote your brand for you. Loyal customers want to win new customers for you, they’ve found something great and want to share it with the world. A common phrase for promotion “Word of mouth” which will help grow it at little cost.
