Perhaps one of the most popular methods of maintaining relevancy in the eyes of the stakeholders, especially in small businesses, is the amount of time and effort being directed towards branding and the efficiency in doing so. Most consumers prefer to go with a brand that they already know and trust, and setting yourself apart from the competition through branding is a great way to obtain and retain loyal customers.
When looking at branding, for either a small business or simply a product, there are a series of steps an entrepreneur like yourself should follow to ensure that their brand resonates with their target market. So - what is a brand? Well, according to Shopify, "Your brand is how people perceive you wherever they interact with your business [or yourself] —both the impressions you can control and the ones you can't". Branding is a recognizable name and logo that sets yourself apart from the competition in your industry, but it is also the way that your actions dynamically set yourself apart from your rivals. Now that we know what branding is, how do we do it? What are the steps we should take to establish a good brand? There are five essential steps that we have identified that you should follow to establish a successful, strong brand.
Know Your Audience
The first step to branding is the research and identification behind understanding your target market, your position, and your competition in the industry. This is the most important step as it will lay the groundwork for the rest of your brand and addressing this step properly with the right amount of effort will show great reward.
Conducting market research on your current consumers, your competition, and their consumers, and on the environment as a whole is a great way to identify short-fallings and gaps in the services or products provided. Identifying where you can fill in to create a stronger presence and align yourself with consumer demands and interests will help you capture a larger part of your market, or at the very least, allow you to anchor down in your position creating a better experience for your existing consumers. Finally, forming consumer personas, or generalized profiles of your consumers, will help you gather a stronger understanding of who your consumers are, and why they choose to do business with you. Profiles that consist of age, gender, demographics, likes, dislikes, and behaviors all are important supplemental data to have on your, and your competitors, consumers.
For more ways to beat your competitor, see Trevor Meyer's post on Using Your Competitors to Help You Be Successful in Social Media Marketing.
Pick Your Position
Whether the position you pick offers a niche product or service, or addresses the industry as a whole, picking, understanding, and ultimately sticking to your position is important to your brand identity. When looking at your target market, you must determine whether or not you would like to be the cost-leader or a premium service, what words and feelings you would like to be associated with your brand, and how you want to be seen by your target market.
You can't be everything to everyone, so not only having that deep knowledge of your average consumer but having that intense understanding of who they are and what they want is even more important now. The best way to communicate your position to your audience is to develop a short, one or two, sentence positioning statement that explains who you are and what you do. For example, a local auto shop may write, "Jack's Auto Services provides quality auto body services at community-backed prices to our loyal, car-loving consumers in Oak City". What may differentiate Jack's Auto Services from other auto body shops in his area would be the "community-backed prices" referencing the fact that the local community finds great value in his work. This positioning statement also addresses who is providing the services, and what market Jack is addressing.
Finally, if you are having issues deciding on how to position your brand a fun exercise is to imagine if your business was a person and then write down 3 to 5 attributes that would describe your business as a person and go from there.
Design Your Brand
Name and Font
Designing your brand can encompass a lot, and adjustments may have to be made if you are already in the operating stages of your business. To begin, decide on your business name. Now if you are already in operation and have an established business name it may not be very smart to change it as you may already have brand recognition in your community and not realize it. Studying your consumers' habits and finding out your consumers' perception of your business is vital in deciding whether or not your current business name is sufficient enough to sustain growth or if it does not align with the industry. If starting a business and deciding on a name make sure it is relevant to the industry or brand your business as such. Developing a strong name that will trigger an emotional response in the mind of the consumer can eventually develop a strong competitive advantage such as Apple or Mercedes, and making sure that it is memorable and can roll off the tongue well will ensure that it remains active in the consumers' mind.
There are different types of names to choose from including but not limited to:
Descriptive, involving the product or service (Oak City Flowers)
Anthropomorphic, or assigning human, emotive attributes to non-human entities (Calm Oils and Perfumes, LLC)
Namesakes, named after important figures of the business such as the founder (Ford)
Compound, a combination of two words (FedEx)
Acronyms, created from a longer name to make it easier to remember (UPS)
Additionally, choosing the right font for your business is important. The font should be unique but simple and easy to read. Choosing a font that a large business already uses can be risky because some large corporations actually have copyrights on their own font, as well it can lead to brand confusion. Having a set of two fonts, one for headings and one for the body text, is the safest method to follow.
Color Scheme
Next, when looking at the design of your brand it is important to look at the color scheme and design of your business, as different colors invoke different emotions. Again, referring back to your target market and consumer personas you must decide what emotions you would like to instill in consumers when thinking about or interacting with your business. Listed below are the various colors and what emotions they invoke:
Red - excitement, youthfulness, boldness
Orange - friendly, cheerful, confident
Yellow - optimism, clarity, warmth
Green - peaceful, growth, health
Blue - trust, dependability, strength
Purple - creative, imaginative, wise
Gray - balance, neutral, calmness
These colors can be used in collaboration with each other or alone and various other color combinations can invoke different, more precise, or niche emotions or feelings. For instance, many fast-food restaurants use a combination of red, yellow, and orange, to invoke hunger. As well, different versions of the colors can be used to achieve similar effects.
Logo
Finally, the last aspect of designing your brand is designing your logo. A business's logo is one of the most important aspects of a business's brand as it can communicate intense emotions and feelings with a simple icon. The logo should not be too complex or wordy and should be easily transferable to various mediums of application. The colors from your color scheme should be incorporated as well.
Currently, the trend of logos today follows a minimalist approach incorporating very little detail to make it simple and easily transferable; this minimalist trend has flooded into interior design as well because simple and common styles of design are easier to resale in the case of business failure. Some examples of well-designed logos are the Apple logo and the Nike logo. When analyzing their respective logos those icons alone communicate so much to their consumers and even internationally as a whole. Apple's logo is simple and easily applied to stickers, shirts, hats, their product, and countless other mediums. Apple's logo alone represents innovation, quality software, and premium products. Nike's logo, the Swish, is a longstanding and highly-praised icon in the international environment. The Swish is simple enough to be applied to every product Nike produces but communicates athleticism, premium products, long-lasting designs, and quality. Nike and Apple have established such a strong brand awareness and presence that nowhere in the world can it be ignored. Nike and Apple don't even necessarily have a high, per-unit production costs but because their branding is so strong they are able to charge premium prices due to the demand they have created.
The following are various types of brand logos that you can use on your own:
Emblems, an abstract image representing your business (Google Chrome, Starbucks)
Mascots represented by a character or the face of a character well-known or associated with your business (Colonel Sanders, Wendy's)
Letter Marks, a specially-designed series of letters, usually your business's acronyms (IBM)
Icon, or simple images, usually flattened and a single color, that represent the business (Twitter, Nike)
Word Marks, typically your brand name, specially designed into a logo (Facebook, LinkedIn)
Combination, a combination of styles incorporating two or more aspects (McDonald's, Taco Bell)
Write Your Slogan
Finally, one of the last steps to building a brand is to write a catchy slogan that encompasses and expresses the intentions of your business in a witty saying. The slogan, similar to the positioning statement, helps the consumer understand what your company does and how it does it. The slogan is a dynamic and changing aspect of your brand so don't be too anxious when writing one as many companies change theirs; companies such as Pepsi have changed their slogans well over 30 times. You can plaster your slogan everywhere your business name is found, on the website, on business cards, on social media pages, etc. A good slogan should be short and memorable while making a strong impression.
The different types of slogans can be found below:
Establish Your Position, placing yourself firmly in the industry as a strong brand (Death Wish Coffee: The World's Strongest Coffee)
Metaphorical, making a metaphorical relation to an aspect of the consumer experience (Red Bull: Red Bull gives you wiiiings)
Consumer Attitude, relating it to your consumers' general attitude (LG: Life's Good)
Labeling Consumers, assigning a label to your consumers to invoke an emotional response (Cards Against Humanity: A party game for horrible people)
Rhyme Scheme, writing a catchy rhyme relating to your business, product, or service (Goldfish: The snack that smiles back)
Description, a literal description of your business, product, or service (Chihuahua Cerveza: The original Mexican American beer)
Catchy, a generalized statement incorporating the theme of your business (Burger King: Have it your way)
Many slogans are universal enough to turn into jingles that play in commercials on social media, TV, or the radio. McDonald's slogan may be one of, if not the most famous slogan that also translates to a jingle. Their famous slogan "I'm lovin' it" operates well in word form, but is also being sung making it a short, catchy tune that can easily get stuck in a consumer's mind. Finally, when deciding on a slogan it is important to think about legal outcomes. Famously, Red Bull's slogan had to be changed from "Red Bull gives you wings" to "Red Bull gives you wiiiings" because they had been sued by a consumer when Red Bull failed to give the consumer literal wings.
Apply Your Brand Universally
The last step in building your brand is to apply all the work you have done up to this point universally throughout your business. If you haven't caught on by now, transferability was one of the most major attributes of forming a brand or aspects of a brand throughout everything that we have addressed - here we see your work come to fruition.
Taking everything you have developed up to this point, including the positioning statement, business name, font, color scheme, logo, and slogan, and incorporating it into all aspects and media that your business operates in, of course where it fits appropriately. This means applying your logo, color scheme, and font to your webpage and social media profiles, placing the logo and maybe a short slogan on your business's uniforms, incorporating the logo, slogan, color scheme, and font to business cards, and whatever other combination of themes to business supplements. Of course, you do not want to add everything you have developed to every aspect of your business as it could cause crowding and disorganized content or application. For instance, you do not want a uniform to have the logo, font, color scheme, slogan, and positioning statement all crammed onto one shirt, but a combination would make it look better and not so plain or crowded.
Once you have sufficiently incorporated your branding into all aspects of your business where it respectfully belongs then you are ready to push your branding to your consumers and take on the industry!
Resources
About the author, Braveen Kumar Braveen is a content creator and marketer at Shopify where he develops resources to help entrepreneurs start and grow their businesses. Outside of work. (2020, August 17). How to start your own brand from scratch in 7 steps. Shopify. Retrieved April 25, 2022, from https://www.shopify.com/blog/how-to-build-a-brand
Qayum, A. (2022, March 9). How to build a brand: An 8-step guide for 2022. Oberlo. Retrieved April 25, 2022, from https://www.oberlo.com/blog/how-to-build-a-brand
Wheeler, K. (2022, January 12). How to develop a unique (& memorable) brand identity in 2022. HubSpot Blog. Retrieved April 25, 2022, from https://blog.hubspot.com/agency/develop-brand-identity
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