Branding means promoting your business in the market with the help of some element that creates your position, mission, values, personality, the tone of voice, core message, brand identity, and expression.
It’s also the marketing practice of creating a name, symbol, or design that identifies and differentiates a product from other products. A successful brand strategy gives you an increasingly competitive market.
- Purpose
Your brand purpose is the reason why your brand exists. To pull out your purpose, you need to look at who you serve. Your business solves a problem for each customer. You should provide a solution to a problem your ideal customer needs or wants, to solve. Once your solution fills that bridge, there is a sense of satisfaction from your audience that evokes emotion.
Even an accountant filing tax returns to provide satisfaction. They make their clients relieve from the stress of tax responsibility for a year. Recognize the emotion that your client will feel on the back of your solution, this is a meaningful purpose. The impact that may have on their lives and your brand purpose becomes not about how much profit your business can turn but how many people it can impact.
- Values
Brand values are the rules and the moral compass for the way you do business. If your mission sets in overarching commitment in achieving your vision for the future, then your values are the behavioral commitments in your day-to-day activities.
Like all elements of branding, your values should be aligned with your purpose, vision, and mission, but communication is key. Communicating is the main core value that often internally ensures that everyone is singing from the same hymn tones and that there is a collective underlying message in every interaction.
People should come to know what brand’s core values are, not because you tell them but because of your actions and behaviors over time. The same is true with brands. It is an ordinary practice today to list your core values on your website page, it will work as marketing.
- Vision
Your vision is where you plan and see your business to be in the future. Thinking about where you want your company to be is an important part of brand creation. It is about projecting your brand into the future and creating a picture of your future brand.
When you see the brand purpose and realize that your brand is about impacting other people’s lives, you can be a little more aspiring about the future. How large is your expansion plan? Will you be expanding your product offerings? These are all important questions to ask yourself when building your brand.
Dell computer vision was to put “A computer on every desktop in every home”. This vision was huge enough to inspire a movement without being too big for the leadership team to buy into it.
- Aim
Your mission is a statement of aim that encloses both your company’s purpose and vision. It is a commitment to impact the lives of your customer you serve and deliver on what you promise while you are on the path to your future brand. Brands on a committed mission line up with their purpose and vision set the tone for a strong working culture.
Those who come to work every day and feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves have meaning in the work that they do, which gives happiness.
Starbucks ‘ mission was to optimize a commitment that is filtered through purpose with a dash of vision: to inspire and nurture the human spirit one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.
- Brand personality
Brand personality reflection of who is your target audience and what appeals to them. Your audience wants to see the best version of themselves, in your brand so when a brand portrays the personality of their audiences’ aspirations, they feel on a powerful level.
Red Bull has up line themselves with extreme sports and projects an energetic, youthful, and adventurous personality that appeals to their audience’s aspirations.
- Position of the brand
The position your brand takes in the market comes down to your customers, competition, and differentiators. Your business must differentiate itself from competitors. It depends on how you fulfill your customer needs and demands and provide the best solution for their problem.
It’s an effective way that businesses can work to set themselves apart from others in the industry and show provide can mean the difference between a customer choosing your brand over a competitor’s.
- The tone of voice and languages
Tone and language choices are reflections of your personality and should also reflect your audience. Both have always been important but in today’s content era, its importance has been striking. Some people use a different tone of voice and language set with different people.
Your mother vs your best friend. If you reversed your communication and spoke to your mother as you would your best friend, chances are, your tone wouldn’t be the same with her. If, as a brand, you want to appeal to 18-24-year-old male crickets, the formality, and energy of the language that you use will be different in tone than with your audience of 35-50-year-old female foodies.
- Core message.
Now that you know your potential customer, position, and personality of your brand, you have the information needed for creating an effective core message which should be differentiated from the competitor present in the market. And which builds a good image in your customer’s mind.
A tagline should be short with information it is but it can be applied and adapted throughout all communication with the underlying message: “we save your time and money when it comes to your health insurance policy”.
- Brand identity system
A collection of visual elements and some content that work together to form the look and feel of your brand. A unique design logo on its own has very little impact as it is a single visual representation and cannot provide a look and feel for the brand on its own.
A brand identity system includes:
- Primary Logo
- Secondary Logo
- Colour Palette
- Typography
- Image Style
- Graphics
- Brand Style Guide
- Brand expression
The key to brand expression is alignment. Every pillar mentioned above needs to be upline with the one consistent message across every touchpoint. (Apple) Since Steve Jobs came back into the fold in 1997, Apple changed its route. Everything was clarified.
The purpose, vision, mission, values, personality, the tone of voice, core message, brand identity, and expression. Today people know who they are, and know what they stand for and whether you are part of the cult following or not, you can’t help be in awe of their brand.
