One of the most valuable companies in the world is Apple Computers, with its current market value well in excess of US$2.5trillion. Strikingly, one asset in particular makes up nearly US$1trillion of the company’s value – and that is its brand.
All distinct and preeminent products and services work very hard at their brands and ensure to understand pain points, competitor’s strength and weaknesses; and these allow them to devise plans that enable them to favourably compete in all the pertinent facets of their business including their target audiences – their customers in the market place.
Creating a strong brand is an imperative for any business that is desirous of creating loyal repeat customers in a manner that assures their sustained growth and profitability.
What brand builders seek to do is to apply strategy, some deliberateness and intentionality in trying to connect a business to its audience. While a business without a branding strategy may succeed by serendipity and happenstance, having a branding strategy can radically increase the odds of success.
I discuss below four (4) strategies that are guaranteed to result in the creation of solid brands in a variety of contexts, including B2B, B2C and not-for-profit organisations.
The first is to develop your internal brand. This forms the core of your brand and comprises your brand purpose, mission, vision and values. They usually flow from leadership of the entity and trickle down to all nooks and crannies of the business – to the point where they become deeply ingrained in every aspect of the business and its range of activities. Brand purpose is the ‘why’ and the fundamental reason for your existence as a business, beyond the obvious goal of merely making money.
The brand purpose must be communicated in more benign and almost altruistic terms, and presented as the elevated reasoning behind the business’s establishment. A brand’s vision is the brand’s conceptualisation of its future. It refers to the brand’s projected trajectory and what it hopes to achieve in the years to come. A good vision must inspire action, challenge and motivate you and your team, and ensure the business is carefully navigated in the right direction. The brand’s mission is a statement that drives purpose. These are often short, catchy and action-oriented, and encapsulate what your business does every day toward the fulfilment of its brand purpose. Brand values are a core set of abiding principles which guide every aspect of the business.
They are the key behaviours or virtues of the brand, and form the essence of the theme that the brand ultimately becomes like a belief system of the brand. Businesses often choose brand values that exude nobility and capture the deep and intrinsic attributes their target audiences mostly care about.
The second step is to position the brand. A brand’s positioning is concerned with how a company designs its product offering and crafts its image to occupy a distinctive place in the minds of its target audiences.
A key part of this is understanding the intricacies of your customers’ personal lives and what drives their purchasing and consumption behaviour. What makes them tick? What are their most significant pain points? What are their emotional inclinations? Understanding your target audience also implies having a keen insight into their demographics (age, gender, income levels, education etc.), psychographics (activities, interests, desires and opinions) and behavioural patterns.
This enables you to position your product as something they truly desire. Brand-positioning also requires that a business understands the market landscape and identify key gaps and areas where the competition is deficient at serving, and ultimately uncover your market position. Businesses must guard against contributing to market-noise and not just offer what already exists in the market.
Markets are getting increasingly overcrowded and competitive, and the uniqueness in what you offer is what will endear consumers to your brand and make them look favourably toward your product or service.
It is important to be known for some unique or extraordinary attribute: cases in point are safety (for Volvo), innovation (for Apple) and best performance (for BMW). Positioning also requires a constant communication of your offering and a deliberate and sustained effort at remaining in front of your target audiences. This might require the use of a website, blog, podcast, social media, email marketing, participation in trade shows and all such acts of penetrative and constructive publicity.
Develop a strong brand persona
Customers expect brands to have a clearly-defined persona. Like all humans, businesses consciously or unconsciously assume characteristics and personalities which make them either likable or repugnant. Customers often like to connect with brands that appear to have a real character they can trust and easily relate with.
It is important to humanise your brand so customers can feel a human connection in dealing with your business. Archetypes are a great way of establishing your brand personality, given that they are cross-cultural and universally identifiable and applicable.
First introduced by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, Archetypes are universal, inborn models of people, behaviours and personalities that play a role in influencing human behaviour. Brands must in essence assume personality types their target audience would most likely make a friend with, making you better able to connect with them on a personal level. Your brand persona also includes your brand voice which is basically how you sound to your customers.
The brand voice of a business must complement its chosen personality type and communicate in a tone that is seemly for its product or service type, and clearly resonates with its target audience. The brand voice of a bank, for example, should sound more formal, respectful and professional; while the brand voice for a business that has a younger target audience will most likely sound friendly and funny.
Also included in your brand persona is your brand tagline, which would be a few short words that capture the essence of your brand and reflect brand-positioning. Examples would be ‘Think Different’ for Apple and ‘Just Do it’ as in the case of Nike.
Analyse, Optimise and Evolve
Customers will invariably have varying levels of reaction to a company’s brand-building activities. It is imperative that brands critically assess the efficiency of their strategies and ensure they adjust as appropriate. This includes accentuating your activities which achieved greater brand resonance, and deftly modifying other activities that may not have had a particularly great response. It is also important that brands evolve with time or be at great risk of relinquishing their influence and impact in the market place.
Brands that do not evolve become stale, lacklustre and eventually become extinct. Blockbuster LLC – which was America’s largest provider of home video and video game rental services – ceased operations in 2014 because it failed to acknowledge and seize the opportunities offered by the digital age and position itself as such. Curiously, they failed to acquire Netflix – which is now worth more than US$100billion – for just US$50million in the year 2000.
Similarly, Nokia – which was the market leader of the mobile telephony industry in the 90s, lost its position because it failed to evolve and adapt to the needs of a rapidly changing market.
Having a clear brand strategy is a foundational pillar of business that enables you approach the task of marketing with purpose, and pursue your overall corporate objectives with distinction and meaningful pertinacity – ultimately yielding results which endure.
The writer is a Marketing Strategist and lecturer
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: 0244355576
