Many a time, budding entrepreneurs assume that designing a logo, creating a website and posting on social media handles is enough to communicate with their target group about their offerings. And in case they need more traction, they can always hire someone to make a print ad or run digital marketing for them. But often, the stories that are told or the creatives that communicate the brand is merely a novel written by an amateur author. It’s success will depend on how well the reader associates with the 90,000 odd words of the book. In the company’s case, the brand.
Branding, in simple terms, is shaping the personality of your business; setting the customers’ expectations from your company’s products or services. Seth Godin, the renowned author and former dotcom business executive, has gone on to say that a branding dictates ‘a customer’s decision to choose your product or service over another.’ People either buy a product for its rational benefits or choose to buy a brand for its rational and emotional benefits.
To understand how this works, let’s look at the leading tech giant of today – Apple. Say, Apple Inc. announces that they are launching an electric car in the coming year. Instantaneously, a rough image of what it may look like starts paining in your mind.
You would imagine it to have a sleek white design with rounding edges, and matte metallic button controls. If you really challenge yourself, it could even have a touch sensitive infotainment screen by the dashboard – with Siri responding to your commands. You can visualize a completely fictitious product offering with such ease due to a big reason – Apple’s formidable branding.
Apple prides itself as an innovator in technology; engaged in providing customers with user friendly devices assembled in minimalistic design. They dedicate themselves to creating an identity synonymous to lifestyle, innovation, aspirational society, and work towards signifying power through information-technology.
The company consistently represents these core ideas through the product packaging, content tone, sales channels, visual layout and store architecture. By churning multiple products with similar designs and accessibility – they have created a large stake in the tech business, dividing the market into two sects – those who own Apple and those who do not.
From this example, it can be inferred that branding takes dedicated time and efforts. Branding is causal to the company’s growth, and dictates several nuances of an enterprise’s existence.
Branding is not about one great superbowl ad that leads to millions in short term sales. It is a set of values and goals one must decide on during the introductory stages of the product as it will act as the steering wheel for the company’s communication activities in the years to come. More importantly, to help it thrive in the current environment and adapt, brands must continuously assess the market and conduct research to stay relevant to the target group.
While branding is a specialised process based on scientific frameworks, here are the essential steps for successful brand building that you can keep in mind in case you wish to give it your best shot as an entrepreneur:
- ENVIRONMENTAL ANALYSIS: Before launching your product/service, it is crucial to understand what kind of business environment you will be dealing with. Always conduct extensive research into various aspects like the political space, economic factors, geographical location and so on. We know you have already done it from the operational aspect, now do it keeping consumer understanding as the key objective of the exercise.
- CATEGORY ANALYSIS: Next, you must ask the market one crucial question – what categories does your product fall in and why is one product being picked over another? For instance, single malt whisky falls in the whisky category. What makes a particular consumer choose single malt over blended whisky or bourbon at the store?
- COMPETITOR ANALYSIS: It helps you assess what players are already in the market and what kind of communication is prevailing. With that information, you can create a USP and mould a strategy to differentiate your communication from the others.
- TARGET MARKET RESEARCH: Conducting a target market research allows you to understand the consumers’ thoughts and how it impacts the business through detailed customer profiling.
- VALUE PROPOSITIONS: Once you know the arena in and out, you can start assessing what problems exist in the present scenario and what opportunities you can create – all from the consumer’s perspective. By identifying existing loopholes, you can frame a brand strategy around it and work towards solving that with the product’s messaging.
- KEY MESSAGE: This is the pillar on which your brand rests. With the in-depth analysis done in the previous steps, you now know the key value propositions you can fruitfully address as a brand. In this step, you choose the one value proposition that you know (from the research done above) is most unique to you and represents the biggest pain point/aspiration of your audience. With this knowledge,you will now create a message that will stay consistent across your company. Despite many seasonal changes and variants, this message must stay the same. Note, this may or may not be your tagline.
- BRAND BUILDING: With the plethora of information collected and the key message decided upon, you have the tools you need to build a strategy. Think of it as sketching out a movie character. Like you pick out a wardrobe, facial characteristics and personal journey for them, it helps in doing the same for a brand. It humanises the entity and sets precedent for what statements you will make.
Harley Davidson did this remarkably. It gained foothold in the market as a rebellious biker brand. They have never deterred from their core values, focussing their messaging around freedom (from mainstream values as well as personal restrictions). To further embed this in the consumer’s psyche, they designed their logo to be an eagle and introduced merchandise like biker clothing and saddlebags, complete with their own bikers’ community. Everything about the brand embodies a sense of rugged confidence and a strong brand personality, something that would resonate with their target group – biking enthusiasts and travellers.
Think of every nuance of the brand with the branding exercise you just did – the company’s marketing materials, packaging insights, social media strategy, advertising campaigns, PR activities, digital or influencer marketing and so on. Over time, society will change but the key values that hold it together will remain the same. So, while your marketing will keep up with the world, a strong brand will provide you a strong backbone and help you stay relevant through time.
If you could build an entire house for yourself, branding would be the blueprint you map out the entire plan on, while the process of builders putting it together would be marketing execution. If you would start laying the bricks without any tested plan, you’re setting yourself up for a very unstable (and possibly, crushable) house. In a similar way, without proper branding, marketing efforts tend to lose direction.
Branding serves as the foundation on which consumer loyalty is built. It is the reason consumer’s identify with your company and therefore, essential for a successful business. Marketer, Marc Gobe in a gist, explains it by saying, “Without the brand, Apple would be dead. Absolutely. Completely. The brand is all they’ve got. The power of their branding is all that keeps them alive. It’s got nothing to do with products.”