How Brands Are Built: 11 Principles Of Successful Marketing
Source: Pixabay
What does the name ‘Mercedes-Benz’ imply to you? Undoubtedly, the name suggests a durable, expensive brand. The brand personality also attributes high performance, prestige, luxury, power, and precision.
The brand may also suggest the types of consumers who use the product. Mercedes owners are often perceived to be of high class. All these aspects describe brand uniqueness.
Building a creative brand involves essential aspects such as:
- Identifying your business strategy
- Target customers and their needs
- Your competition
- Your brand positioning and messaging.
Below, we’ll look at the 11 principles of successful marketing for building your brand. But, first, how do you enhance brand value?
How to Enhance Your Brand Value?
Source: Pixabay
A brand carries all the features that differentiate your goods and services from another. Such include name, style, design, and symbols. These brand elements work as a stimulus or psychological trigger when combined. They create an association with all other ideas you have concerning the brand.
You need to know how brands are built to enhance your trademark in the market. It helps to combine both tangible and intangible elements. Examples include the following:
- Visual elements of design such as color, logo, images, typography, packaging, tagline
- Unique product features including quality, personality, and design sensibility
- Intangible factors – customer interaction with your product, service, or company, such as reputation and customer experience.
The act of building a brand could occur at multiple levels, such as:
- Company brands
- Individual product brands
- Branded product lines.
How Are Brands Built? Find Out the 11 Principles Of Successful Marketing.
1. Discover What Makes Your Brand Unique
It helps to discover why customers choose to buy from your company and not that of competitors. What is it that you have, which competitors don’t? Try reviewing the intangible attributes of your product or services.
2. Know Your Competitors
Knowing your competitors is critical to the success of your brand. It can help you differentiate yourself and set your strategies differently. Knowing your competitors’ actions can help you in enhancing your brand.
Since you’re all looking for the same customers, find out what they do to win them. Note down which of their brand strategies succeed and which ones fail. Now, use what you’ve learned from your competitors to strengthen your tactics and improve your brand.
Know Your Target Customer
Even if you already have some demographic data on your potential customers, it’s necessary to go deeper in knowledge. Consider the entire target groups of those walking in your store or interacting with your website.
Source: Unsplash
Find out what exactly the target groups want from your product or service by answering these questions:
- What problems are you helping customers solve?
- What is it that they need from you?
3. Develop Your Brand Around Emotional Benefits
Establishing your brand around your products’ emotional benefits can be very effective. Ensure you list down your product’s features and benefits. Features include attributes like color or material. Benefits are the values customers attain from the feature.
With the list of benefits, establish which ones appear emotional. Assess all the emotional benefits and spot the particular thing customers should imagine when they think of your brand. The one thing you will pinpoint is what your brand should represent to the consumer overall.
4. Perfect Your Brand Personality
Imagine your brand as a person with an unquestionable personality. Write down every description about this person, and then bring those traits to everything revolving around your company.
Brand personality is not only about making promises in your mission and vision statements. Instead, it’s more about your actions to meet those promises.
5. Establish Your Brand Identity
Source: Unsplash
After crafting your brand story, you need to build your new brand’s identity. You can also choose to refresh your existing brand’s identity. The elements here include your business name, logo, and brand voice.
Try creating a model of your consumers, and then learn how to establish a brand identity with which the clients can understand and identify. Ensure you share your brand strategy with the one designing your new identity. Look into developing a creative brief that guides the creative development process.
6. Live Your Brand
Developing a new brand identity is not enough. Don’t expect it to become great without putting in the extra effort. Remember that a brand is similar to reputation, which you must enhance.
It takes some time to build up your brand’s reputation. You can instantly destroy the brand’s influence if you’re not careful. That’s why you should always work on brand equity.
Your brand’s public image often comes from consumers’ prior brand experience. It can also result from their first impression, which can either be good or bad.
So, to succeed, you must live your brand.
Remember that your trademark is built on your core values. So, when your employees live it, it implies that your brand infiltrates your organization’s culture.
When your staff lives your brand, they are passionate about your product or service. They’ll also take pride in your company. Ultimately, you’ll find that many will desire to do business with you.
7. Build a Good Brand Buyer Persona
Building your brand depends entirely on understanding the buyer persona. Buyer personas will help you know your customers better and empathize with them. That way, you get to handle them better.
The important things to document when describing your actual customer include:
- Age
- Gender
- Physical location
- Income level
- Educational status
8. Establish a Clear Brand Mission and Vision
Have you ever thought about how important your brand mission and vision are? To start right, you need to clearly express what your brand is more zealous about.
Remember that your mission and vision are the reasons you wake up daily. Your brand vision describes the future you aspire to achieve someday. So, before you establish a brand that your target audience will rely on, you must know what long-term value your business will offer.
9. Focus on Brand Features that Add Consumer Value
Once you know your target audience, ensure you offer them reasons for choosing your brand over others.
This is not just about the product or services you offer your clients. Instead, think about it more in regards to how you provide value that improves consumers’ lives. Such value is evident through the outcome clients experience after using the product.
Examples include:
- Genuine and transparent customer service offers
- Improved ways of supporting productivity
- Reducing product or service costs by offering more affordable alternatives
11. Stay True to Your Brand Building
Maintaining consistency with your brand is vital. Your brand building will prove worthless if there’s no consistency.
So, avoid changing your trademark, not unless you want to change your brand into something better and more effective based on the analyzed consumer response.
Presenting a brand uniformly across every platform can boost revenue by 23%. Inconsistent patterns confuse your consumers, making long-term brand building difficult.
Key Takeaways
Brand building is essential. It helps to create awareness about your business using various strategies. To succeed, you must always target the goal of creating a unique and long-lasting image in the marketplace.
It is no secret that building a solid brand requires effort. Remember that your brand is more than just a catchy logo and a creative slogan. It represents who you are, what you believe, and what your customers can always anticipate when interacting with your brand.
The kind of messages you deliver and how your employees interact with your clients matter most. Building brand power and establishing brand identity will all depend on the little steps you take in your brand strategy.