As the branding pioneer Walter Landor said, products are made in the factory but brands are created in the mind. Furthermore, the physical value of your products is easy to calculate, but the value of your brand on the marketplace is determined by why your consumers’ perceptions. Therefore, the long-term success of your company depends on your ability to build value into your brand and to deliver that value to the customers using the marketing tools available.
Customers’ perception of your products and services based on their opinion of your brand is called brand equity. Companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft all have high brand equity. It is hard to express a brand’s value in terms of money, but there are some factors that make a brand contribute to the success of a business. Factors like awareness, credibility, reputation, and customer satisfaction serve to attract mindful consumers willing to buy from a brand with high value. The real question is how to to build and establish a brand name for your business that will attract customers. This article will provide you some of the methods to do that.
Stand Out
The world generally but especially the marketing world is full of mundane things, which is the main reason why people generally don’t pay attention. The main objective of successful marketing is incorporating eye-catching elements into your brand product or service. Your brand has to stand out from the rest to be recognized as valuable, like a purple cow, red sheep or a rainbow-colored alpaca. Now, about strong brands. Strong brands are defined by superlative attributes concerning the way they work. If customers associate your brand with something extraordinary, that’s a good sign. In order to build a strong brand, you cannot limit your marketing to one department. The entire company needs to oblige the highest standards in order to demonstrate value to customers. The favorable customer experience is the best foundation for you to build your brand on.
Target The Right Audience
It is very important not to get too wide while searching for the right audience for your brand’s marketing campaign. Instead, it’s recommendable to find a group of people who really wants to hear what you have to say. You will build your value easily if you find a crowd that would value your brands and your products in the first place, rather than casting a wide net over the potential customer pool. To achieve that you need to find your ideal audience’s marketing channels and tailor your brand message to adapt to those channels. There are various ways to target the right audience, and most of them are some sort of exploration of a certain area in search of information. One of the most popular and simple ways to find out more about your customers are social media polls. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn offer effective ways of surveying your potential target audience. You can also use online and email surveys. Concerning the surveys, it’s important to know what you want to learn from each question. That’s why questions should be short and easy to answer.
Be Consistent
Consistency is a very important factor when building a brand. Some might say that consistency is boring, but it’s not really true unless you consistently show a lack of interesting content. If your organization’s personality is constantly presented to potential customers, the bigger are the chances they will remember you. Your audience will create easy as association with your content if you keep the same language tone and opinions. Speaking with one voice, so to say, removes any confusion and creates a stronger picture of a brand. There is even a formalized set of guidelines that will help you align every single document so it looks like it was all written by a single person.
High Standard Design
Basically speaking, the design is a visual communication between brands and customers. Your usage and organization of visual elements on a website page, email or even a package determine the level of perception of your brand as valuable. The importance of visual design cannot be overstated, because it greatly affects how your brand is perceived and interpreted. With the help of a dedicated production team, such as Veritas Events, even a small company with a strong visual branding system can demonstrate a big brand power. Of course, the opposite also works, a big company with an underwhelming visual solution can seriously damage the value of the brand.
Brand Meaning
As we already mentioned, all brand value is perceived value. Therefore in order to create a successful brand, you need to give your brand meaning. There are several ways to do that.
The first way is to make your brand a status symbol. There’s a story about the king who, in order to avert hunger in his kingdom, declared the potato a royal crop. He even put guards around the potato fields. As a result, people completely changed the perception of potatoes worth, as potatoes were previously rejected by the majority of people. Now, you cannot pronounce your product Royal unless you are a member of a royal family, but you can create a similar demeanor of exclusiveness around your merchandise. If you cannot make your brand the status symbol you can make it symbolic. Even if your product isn’t intrinsically valuable, it might carry a great symbolic value nevertheless. Your brand can represent something the people are proud of, or it can carry some qualities that remind people of bright moments. Finally, your brand can connect to the emotions of your customers. Emotional connection can create a positive attitude and present products in an empathetic way.
Conclusion
The brand is quite different from the product because the value of the brand cannot be expressed in money. What gives the value to a brand is the perspective of customers. If you’re able to create a brand that associates your customers to the best aspects of your business, you might say you did a good job. However, brand development is not the responsibility of the marketing department only. Everyone in the company is responsible for keeping the brand strong and doing their job the best way possible is the optimal method of achieving that goal.
