I understand how branding can be vague and quite a challenge when starting. It just touches too many moving parts of a company’s overall look and feel. In here, I will show you a simple guide I use to show the 8 elements when building your own brand.
Let’s start with the 2 EXTERNAL ELEMENTS (External branding referring to the parts you want to show to the entire world or your target market):
1. Tonality of your brand’s voice – Choose the right tone to show emotions and create a brand personality. Your customers won’t always remember your message, but they will remember how you made them feel. After doing so, align your tone from advertising to your social media to your labels to your website to everything else, DELIVER A SINGLE MESSAGE.
2. Visual Identity Experience – Create a one of a kind experience with a bold visual identity. This will make you more recognizable to your target market to complete their overall shopping experience. Reflect your visual style with your logo and labels, including typography, brand core colors, packaging, uniforms, printed materials and other visual aspects of the brand. It shows you have a story to tell and represents the values of your brand.
Let’s move on to the 6 INTERNAL ELEMENTS (The aspects that need to be defined within your company):
1. What’s your story? – Divided into two 1. Real person stories that show the history and backstory of a real person such as the brand’s founder will create an emotional connection with the customers and the brand, which will create a loyal customer base. 2. Why did you start this brand? Tell the story of what drew you to start up your brand or your mission that you’re trying to achieve. This will help build credibility in the long run.
2. Brand Value – Create clear and specific core values that will help your brand develop in the right direction and build a clear image in your customer’s mind. You should always revisit your core values to make sure you’re close to it. As you grow your company, you’ll need to update your brand’s core values to remain relevant in the market.
3. UNIQUE SELLING POINT (USP) – This is my favorite and for good reason. This is where you get to differentiate your brand from the competition. This is where most brands become reactive to you when you come in. This is why your companies come to you for a particular product or service that only can provide. It could be fabrics, a community you built, services or designs for a niche market. You’ll need to keep yourself on track to clarify what you should be focused on when developing new products.
4. Brand POV – Sharing an attitude or a particular set of points of views on current culture or incidents that relate to your business can make your brand even more relatable to your target market. A clear standpoint delivered carefully as a message and ensuring the points of views of your team is aligned with yours.
5. Brand Market Position – Like a map, you create a perception map where you want to be placed in the market and where does the customer place you in as perception. Draw a cross, on top put HIGH PRICE and below it put LOW price. On the left put LOW QUALITY and on the right put HIGH QUALITY. Now put your brand exactly where you want to be. There are no ideas places to be in here, so choose where you want to be seen. How you position your brand affects the pricing structure, stockists, endorsers/influencers and your marketing strategies.
6. Target Customers – Decide who you want to sell your products to. It’s the foundation to your business. Then study your customers. Research your customer’s spending habits, lifestyles, what they like, who they follow, who they don’t like and their particular needs. By doing so, these will make it easier to make meaningful products that your customers will love to purchase from your brand.
Question of the day: Where do you want to position your brand in the market?
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