Is Branding Your Achilles’ Heel?

In this opinion piece, Eleanor Hecks (pictured), editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine gives you everything you need to know about building a strong brand identity and selling it well.

Branding is imperative to your business’s long-term success. It secures worldwide recognition, justifies consumers’ purchase decisions and enhances brand loyalty. While every business works to build a strong brand, the path to achieving this is no easy feat.

In your effort to establish a strong brand, you may still end up with a weak one.

A weak brand can be counterproductive and waste valuable resources for your business. If branding is your Achilles’ heel, here are the essential tips for creating a powerful brand.

1. Determine What Makes You Different

What sets you apart from your competitors? The first step in branding is determining what makes your business unique.

One of the best ways to approach this is to research your competition by learning their strengths and weaknesses. Analyze how they define their brand and how they don’t define themselves. This strategy intends to look for characteristics you can claim as your own.

For instance, some brands will identify an issue within the market and use their solution as part of their brand.

First, you can start with uncovering your reason for having your business. If you sell a product, how does it make a difference in your customers’ lives?

By establishing a basic understanding, you can cultivate a connection with what makes you unique.

2. Have a Clear Brand Vision

Businesses that lack a clear brand vision will find that everyone within their organization doesn’t know the reason behind their work. Perhaps your employees know what to work on, but they aren’t sure why.

If this is the case in your business, your brand must have a clear vision. Companies with strong brands have teams who know their purposes. It motivates them to get out of bed every morning.

For example, maybe your mission is to save the planet with eco-friendlier products. However you define your brand vision, ensure it inspires clarity and commitment.

Once you define a crystal clear vision, take the opportunity to let people know what your brand stands for and embed it from the start. Keep in mind that it’s easier to accomplish this when you have your teams on board through this process.

3. Provide a Personalized Shopping Experience

If you’re a retailer, then you know the competition is high. Therefore, creating impersonal experiences is a surefire to getting left behind.

Your customers expect you to provide them with a personalized shopping experience. Easy assistance and product recommendations are key to branding your service in a physical store.

However, online shopping uses data to create personalized shopping experiences by recommending products based on user behavior and more.

Find out what your customers are looking for by anticipating their wants and needs. For example, maybe your customers walking in your store aren’t sure what clothes look great.

You can serve your customers by offering a complimentary personal styling service so they can receive individualized styling advice. From there, you can promote the most relevant products from your brand.

4. Know Your Target Audience

You might think you know your target audience. However, many business owners are unclear on what it is they want. For example, they could sell shirts to men between the ages of 25 and 40 with a middle-class income.

However, that doesn’t establish a clear idea of what drives or motivates your target audience. Consider Jeep as an example. Their target audience purchases these cars because they want adventure and to test boundaries.

Jeep created a brand that’s all about the experience they can provide for their target customers.

Ensure you go beyond the description of your target audience’s demographics.

While that is useful information, a clear picture of your consumers’ needs doesn’t end there. You’ll also need the psychographic information of your target audience, focusing on their needs and desires.

This information is critical to know because your brand needs to communicate this to attract the attention of your ideal consumer.

5. Keep Your Branding Consistent

Connecting with potential customers is an important opportunity you must take. If your branding isn’t consistent, that’s because you’re lacking clarity. As a result, your audience won’t be able to understand your company’s vision, especially when it differs across various channels.

Consistent messaging is essential for building brand awareness and recognition.

Therefore, you must set forth in keeping your channels in sync by establishing clear branding guidelines through the essential style elements. In essence, you’ll need to figure out your brand’s:

• Tone and voice
• Color palette
• Logo
• Images
• Typography

Once you become clear about the choices that bring your brand to life, you’ll find it much easier to track your visual identity.

Build Your Brand Instead of Making One

Building a strong brand may not be an easy task. It takes a proper brand strategy, which requires time, dedication and patience. But by following these tips above, you’ll gain more clarity and inspire the right actions across your organization.

Additionally, this will allow you to be consistent and provide relevant customer experiences. In turn, your company will receive healthier revenues and profit margins in the long run.