Building a brand can be a critical step, and you can jumpstart your progress by understanding how to network through E-traffic and create a compelling and memorable presence.
From connecting to your target audience to product designing, learn how to navigate your progress in this easy guide to attain accessibility and how to build a big brand.
What Defines a Brand?
A brand is a company’s market identity. It can depict an idea, concept, product, business, or even a person in the market. It differentiates your business from others in the same domain or industry.
The process that shapes this identity is called branding. It is designed through strategy, creativity, resonance, and a deep understanding of the target audience. From its visuals and written appeal, these techniques amount to a cohesive brand identity.
LEARN ABOUT THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF A BRAND
Here is the framework to design a business identity:
1) Helps to understand your Target Audience
2) Helps Craft your Brand Story
3) Do Market Research
4) Select the Right Business Name
5) A Catchy Slogan can never go wrong
6) Design a Professional Logo
7) Define your Visual Language
8) Choose Your Brand Voice
9) Apply your Branding across your Business
Here’s a step-by-step, easy guide to learn how to build a strong brand:
Navigate Your Audience
Recent studies on consumers’ brand preferences indicate that:
- 46% of the youth resonate with a brand that is both sustainable and ethical
- 21% lean towards transparency
- 17% prefer a brand with clarity.
The foundation of every big brand is its audience! It’s important to understand your customer’s pain points. A well-researched market study helps you easily find the ideal audience and potential competitors in the game.
Every powerful brand strategy and business plan is built on this question: “ Who is your ideal customer? “ Also, during your research, note the biggest brands in the market.
For example, if you plan to start an edible oil business, research possible competitors such as Fortune, Saffola, Dhara, Emami, etc. Break down their Branding Strategies. What are they doing right? What do you offer that they don’t? This is called your unique selling proposition (USP).
To develop your perfect idea of a unique brand personality, think about their mindset, motivations, and what really matters to them.
Helps Craft your Brand Story
Your brand narrative tells a lot about your values and acts as a communication tool. Do this through a compelling, transparent, and authentic story that builds connection. Your story should clarify:
- Why was the brand created?
- What does it stand for?
- How does it solve a real problem?
Storytelling goes beyond origin narratives. It is your story that will appear on product descriptions, onboarding emails, and so much more. You can share your unique origin story and what might have led you to create your first product. You can also explain a belief, value, or cause linked to your origin.
Do Market Research
Do you know what was one of the most consistent strategies that has worked for budding and established brands? It was market research. Can you understand what your audience wants? What are your competitors doing? Where does your brand fit in?
The next step is analysing your potential market competitors. Effective research shows that circle audience recognition can be achieved through the following techniques:
- Google your product or service category
- Analyse your competitor’s social media accounts and websites
- Research your target audience’s social media accounts or pages, using Google Trends.
The Right Business Name that Sells
The name draws eyes before the logo is drawn, before packaging touches a shelf. Businesses look for something that sounds right, that sums up their entire story and vision.
Approaches to choosing a brand name include:
1) Innovative Names: Come up with a coined word that is memorable and easy to pronounce. Example: Pepsi
2) Unrelated Names: Reframe a completely unrelated word from your business and make it your identity in the field. Example: Apple
3) Suggestive Names: Brainstorm your identity with related words, adjectives, or synonyms, or metaphors. Example: Buffer
4) Descriptive Names: Literally frame the description of your brand in the name. Example: The Shoe Company, Home Depot, etc
5) Altered Names: Change the word’s spelling, removing letters, adding letters, or using Latin or other languages’ endings. Example: Tumblr
6) Combined Names: Mix-match two or more related words from your domain and combine them. Example: Instagram (Instant + Telegram)
7) Acronyms: Short abbreviations from a longer name. Example: HBO (Home Box Office).
8) Founder Names: You can also use your own name to establish branding. Example: Chanel.
A Catchy Slogan can never go wrong
Taglines make or break your branding. It showcases your idea, so make it unforgettable, keep it short, memorable, and understandable to build brand trust, making a commendable impression.
A few tactics to make a slogan that sells are:
- Action: For example, Nike’s “Just Do It!”
- Descriptive: For Example, M&M’s “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.”
- Aspirational: For example, Apple’s “Think different.”
- Question: For example, California Milk Processor Board “Got milk?”
- Centric: For example, BMW’s “The ultimate driving machine.”
- Wordplay: For example, Motorola’s “Hello Moto.”
- Situational: For example, Allstate’s “Get Allstate, and be better protected from mayhem.”
The gyst to a perfect catch phrase is to keep it short, simple, catchy, and approachable. Simplicity wins here.
Design Logo and Brand Assets
While your brand can have many strategies that largely cement your initial brand perception, your logo is often the first and most prominent presentation of your business to the world.
Consider all the places where your brand’s logo will show up: be it the website, social media avatar, product packaging, or video ads. From the YouTube channel banner, Browser favicon (the tiny icon that identifies your open browser tabs), Email marketing, to Press mentions and Partnerships, digitally navigating your brand through visual appeal is first done by your logo.
Some logo types include the following:
1) Abstract logos are a combination of shapes and colours best used as a secondary logo, paired with a wordmark.
2) Mascot logos are represented by the face of a character or a real person you use as an ambassador for your brand. They can humanise your business by creating a relatable personality.
3) Emblem logos are often circular and combine text with an emblem for a luxurious brand design. Avoid making them too fussy, or they won’t scale (e.g., Polo Ralph Lauren).
4) Icon logos represent your brand as a visual metaphor. Unlike an abstract logo, an icon logo suggests something about the product (e.g., YouTube’s Play button logo).
5) Wordmarks or lettermarks are type-based logos that are either your full business name, a combination of letters, or an initial.
Define Your Visual Language
A catchy brand personality is your look-and-feel, or visual identity. While this encompasses your logo design, it extends to so much more.
Your brand’s visual identity can include:
- Brand colours
- Typography
- Logo
- Graphics, illustrations, and icons
To create a brand style, it takes a lot of effort, and you would need to first design an outline of your identity in one definitive place to help maintain consistency. This style guide serves as a foundation for anyone who interacts with your brand, like your employees, customers, etc.
Choose Your Brand Voice
Now, your brand has its own name, its visual language, and its appeal. Consider it your personality: It should extend from your website’s written content to your hashtags, and even the words you use when talking face-to-face with clients.
Create a Positioning Statement
A positioning statement is one or two lines that stake your brand’s claim in the market.
Start with this framework:
- Competitors: How do they present their product? Who do they target?
- Customers: What do they want?
- Company: What makes you different?
How to write a positioning statement?
Here are a few tips and methods for writing a good positioning statement.
1) Look to other companies as a starting point
2) Gain a clear understanding of who your customers are
3) Keep it concise
4) Look to your brand values
5) Be transparent
Apply Your Branding Across Your Business
Your brand has its visual and spoken/written ideas. But your work doesn’t end here. No matter where customers encounter your brand, be it a Meta ad, in a retail store, or in their inbox, the experience should be the talk of the town. You have to start applying your branding across your business to make it recognisable. The single most important thing is to stay consistent.
Effective Brand Building Strategies repeatedly focus on using the same name, profile photo, and bio on all platforms. You can try creating templates for different types of your content. Also, try to store brand guidelines and assets in a shared folder. This helps you establish a workflow approval that matches all your content and brand identity.
FINAL THOUGHTS
An unforgettable business name cannot be created into a powerful marketing magnet overnight. It’s a consistent process of cementing your brand identity in the minds of your customers and involves being consistent in your messaging and deliberate with your brand marketing.
Now that you understand how to build a brand from scratch, you’ll continue brand building for the entire life of your business. If you strategize to rebrand in the future, your loyal customers should still be able to recognise your brand.
When you use narration and set a signature experience, the crowd will recognise you in the vast marketplace. This is how you can build a brand that sticks around and stamps its presence.