Jeffrey Preston Bezos defines branding as “A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn the reputation by trying to do hard things well.” So, what did you understand? Let us explain this in a much simpler way. Imagine there is an invisible force that separates the ordinary from the extraordinary & the average from the exceptional. This force is called branding, and it might as well be your most valuable asset.
In today’s marketplace, where (many) businesses offer similar products and services, a unique brand differentiates your organization from others and articulate’s why’ your brand does things differently. Your “why” is the real reason why people buy from you, and communicating it to the world is the process of branding.
Now that we have understood the impact of branding let us delve into this blog for a comprehensive guide, exploring each stage of branding to transform your business from the ordinary to the extraordinary.
Before we jump into the points directly, let me put it here that successful brands don’t happen by chance. It takes a lot of planning and strategy. At the core of any brand’s success is a brand strategy that defines how a brand should be perceived in the market.
Brand strategy is the first stage involved in the branding process. Marty Neumeier, an author who writes about branding and marketing, defines branding strategy as “A plan for the systematic development of a brand in order to meet business objectives”.
Marketers conceptualize a brand strategy to shape the perceptions of a brand’s audience so that they can ultimately influence them. Thus, we can say that brand strategy sets out a plan to show these perceptions through two forms of expression: visual and verbal. How do we make an exceptional strategy for your brand? By knowing how to position your brand.
Brand positioning is nothing but placing your brands in the minds of the customers in a recallable way that sets your brand apart from others. It isn’t just a tagline or a fancy logo; it is the plan with a set of action points that positions your brand in the market.
Brand messaging is the message you will communicate your business’s unique value proposition and personality through verbal or nonverbal communication. This message can motivate and encourage your target audience to make a purchase.
To start creating your unique brand messaging, try answering the following questions:
To understand better, let’s see the below example: Dove’s mission statement and value proposition encourage women to shatter their notion of beauty and embrace themselves by using Dove.
Dove’s focus on enhancing natural beauty can encourage women (target audience) to use Dove products at some point in their lives. And this is why brand messaging is important.
The brand tone is the brand personality that your brand will use for all its communication. Setting the brand tone gives one guideline on how to set the personality of the brand across all communications. Creating a brand tone is using your buyer persona ( the target audience defined earlier) and crafting a message that will connect or resonate with the target audience.
To understand better, look at the screenshots of tweets posted by Spotify. Spotify uses a very casual tone in its tweets. Now, we imagine Spotify as a person; that person would be witty and funny and have up-to-date knowledge of pop culture and trending music. It has used this identity to write its messages across media to connect with its audiences (music lovers) all over the world. Here, casual, sassy, and fun is the tone being used to develop a brand personality.
Brand identity is the other important part of the branding process. It involves guidelines to set the style of the brand. This brand style guide encompasses all the aforementioned points and, in addition, variations of logo design, typography and colours that define the brand. While creating a logo, the use of colour and other factors should be as per the personality of your brand. At times, people recognize a brand with either its logo or typography.
For example, it doesn’t take much time for people to recognize that it is the image of the Mercedes Benz logo.
The next important point in brand processing is Brand touchpoints. By now, we have learned the importance of the brand message, brand style and brand persona. However, a brand touchpoint is nothing but the connection that your brand makes with its audience. It is the individual contact point between the customer and the brand.
To understand this better, let us see what are some of the common brand touchpoints:
The information fed into these platforms can be entertaining, educational, motivational or for sales purposes.
Another lesser-known brand touchpoint is the conversations that audiences have with your business representatives. It isn’t important for your audiences to always make a purchase, but whenever they approach any representative, it is important they have a remarkable experience. This pools back the potential customers or buyers to your brand. Hence, setting up customer feedback platforms and support channels is also included in brand touchpoints.
The branding process does not end with conceptualizing a foolproof branding guideline (as mentioned above). Branding is not a one-time job; it is an ongoing process and requires consistent effort and attention.
A good example of this is the Surf Excel ad campaigns. Its entire marketing is conceptualized on the premises that ‘Dirt is good ( daag ache hothe hai)’. To achieve its goal, they have used various themes using kids, focusing on religious sentiments, festivals and even youngsters to attract its audience over and over again. Every new ad released by Surf Excel hits an emotional note among the audience, and it gains new customers or is strategically able to retarget its existing customer base.
The benefits of effective brand management are:
But this isn’t a one-man’s job. Modern-day marketing strategy often requires help from digital marketing agency (external) that will help you curate the brand image you want to portray online. The reason why such agencies are helpful is because they are trained and skilled to study the market and propose a unique strategy. Additionally, they also assist in measuring the progress of your branding. Brand managers at these agencies use various tools and other additional Google-approved tools to help you achieve your goal.
The process of branding is hard work, and what is tougher is to be consistent in your efforts to always stay at the top. One of the crucial ways to stand out easily in this cutthroat is to understand the uniqueness of your brand and create a compelling story around it. The most important point to remember here is that by communicating uniqueness to your customers, you are strengthening your selling and brand value. The rest of the responsibility of creating strategic branding can be collaboratively done with the help of Branding Agency which is specialized in the same.
© Digital Tokri (Ira Digital Services). All rights reserved.
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