Knowing how to develop a brand includes the understanding that the process never ends. Your brand will change as customer attitudes and needs evolve, just as your products and services adapt to meet new customer demands. Establishing a brand includes keeping the brand relevant and strong, so when changes come you can adapt quickly.
Your brand influences everything from logo design to the custom products you choose for promotional campaigns. Establishing a brand that’s strong enough to elicit powerful emotions in your customers, while remaining flexible enough to change when needed, provides you with a powerful marketing tool.
That said, here are five ways to build and strengthen your brand.
1. Know Your Audience
Perhaps the most important step in establishing a brand is understanding your target audience. Which demographic are you targeting, and what do they want from your product or service? If your brand is your organization’s personality, who would want to be friends or partners with it?
Be as specific as possible when identifying your target audience: consider age, gender, marital status, income, education level, and occupation. Depending on how specific your audience is you may also want to consider political affiliation, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation.
One of the fastest ways to get a sense of your target audience demographic is to check your competitors’ social media accounts. Watch for who actively responds to and interacts with your competitors' posts. You can unearth plenty of information about your target audience by examining the questions they ask, posts they like, and posts they share or retweet.
2. Know Your Brand’s Personality
Understanding exactly what you offer customers is another vital aspect of knowing how to develop a brand. Do you provide practical solutions or entertaining diversions? Do your products trigger happiness in customers, or are they designed to address and resolve pain points?
The answer to such questions helps you craft your organization’s brand persona — the “person” you want people to associate with your company.
A funeral parlor would likely be better served with a dignified, comforting persona, while a producer of a zesty snack item is more likely to have an adventurous, fun-loving brand personality.
To illustrate how important your brand’s personality is for success, take the two examples above and switch their personas. Neither funeral parlor nor snack producer would last long under such circumstances.
3. Which Emotions Do You Want to Trigger?
Branding is all about generating emotional responses in people. While many people research the quality of products and services before making a decision, their final choice is usually guided by emotion. A good brand triggers a specific emotional response in people.
Considering our funeral home and snack company again, the funeral home’s brand might trigger feelings of comfort, dignity, and the need to grieve in a safe environment. The snack company might trigger feelings of excitement, wanderlust, and curiosity.
Here’s where establishing a brand can get tricky. While a company can design their brand to generate a particular emotion, the customer’s actual emotional response may be quite different. Knowing your customer base increases (but does not guarantee) that your brand produces the emotions you want.
4. Building a Brand with Promotional Product
Promotional products can help build your brand if you tailor your promotional gifts to your brand’s personality. A law firm might focus on providing customized pens, USB drives, or calendars to clients, while a white-water rafting company would be better served with athletic custom t-shirts.
Whether you opt for custom t-shirts or other custom products, it’s important to tailor promotional items to match the needs of your target audience. It’s also important all custom products showcase your logo in the best possible light. Which brings us to one of the most important aspects of how to develop a brand: logo design.
5. Designing the Perfect Logo
Your logo is, in most cases, the first exposure your customers have with your brand. As such, it needs to really shine. A good logo is simple but intriguing. It’s shape and colors bring your logo to the viewer’s mind immediately. The Coca-Cola logo is an excellent example. Even when written in another language, the sweeping, flowing letters are instantly recognizable.
Logo design is not an easy process. It takes time, an in-depth understanding of your company brand, and a keen sense of graphic design to create the perfect logo.
Understandably, few companies have the right mix of knowledge and talent for logo design, especially smaller businesses, so contracting logo design out to third-parties is the norm. This sometimes means surrendering a degree of creative control over your own logo design.
At Triple Crown Products, we believe you should be involved throughout the logo design process. Our Art Service works with your original logo concept, transforming it into a logo that looks great whether it’s on letterhead, your storefront, or custom t-shirts. Contact us today, and we’ll help you create a logo that fits with your brand.