Traditionally, the word brand was always described as a way some company is perceived in the public eye. You can imagine how frightening this may sound in this day and age where channels for communication and new viewpoints seem to pop up in dozens with each new day.
Yes, appealing to a global market to countless people on countless platforms is a challenging task. But, you can always see your brand glass as half full and look at this communication clutter as a playing field where you have nearly limitless resources to craft unique approaches that will be tailor-made to your specific brand and your audience.
However, your efforts need to be anchored by some reliable strategies. Let’s take a look at some of the most important picks.
Establish and describe your business’s personality
If you want to be able to effectively describe your brand to others, you first need to be aware of its qualities. So, go back to your mission statement, long-term goals, target audience, and other parts of your business plan, and try to describe your business in a couple of simple traits that can be applied to a person – efficient, friendly, inspiring, traditional, etc.
These simple descriptions will be the building blocks you will use for all subsequent efforts. They should also give you a very strong sense of what channels you should use for promotion as well as the tone of your public approach.
Come up with consistent brand elements
Now that you have gone through the first step of the art of branding, it is time to put together the elements that will translate these qualities to the widest possible pool of people in the simplest manner. We are talking about:
- Interesting logo
- Stand-out packaging
- Compelling signage
- Recognizable color palette
- Consistent typography
- Email and PR templates
When designing these elements be aware of the channels you are going to use to promote them. For instance, a younger audience will most likely consume your content on mobile devices.
Your logo, color palette, and typography should look good on a smaller screen. Everything you have done so far and the results you’ve got should be penned down into one top-level brand style guide.
Spread out your efforts across third-party infrastructure
Branding is a collective effort and covers too many resources to be performed by a single party. So, instead of pulling off the entire process in-house, you should use the insights from the previous steps and pass them down to third-party experts who deal with more specific branding tasks.
This will give you access to tons of creativity combined with established resources. Also, you will get a far better shot at local markets. So, if you want to tackle the Australian market, you can hire a branding agency from Sydney that knows the local preferences. And, finally, there is a high level of scalability.
Make sure the brand is integrated
While you are spreading your branding infrastructure across third-party resources, be sure to keep all these remote teams and creative urges on the same page. You will do that by keeping the discretion of final approval for all produced branding elements as well as making sure your teams are working together rather than side by side.
Therefore, it’s obvious you should think about your cloud strategy and how you will ensure this global level of collaboration. If you want to abstract two things that will serve as glue to this project, you should go in the way of tone and expected emotional response.
Use the methods of reverse engineering
Your initial market research should give you a pretty good idea about who your target audience is. Well, now it’s time to put yourself in the shoes of that supposed consumer and think about the effect and the emotional response you want to incite upon the contact with the branding resources.
If you, for instance, sell financial services, you want to communicate professionalism and security. Now, with that in mind, you should trace your step back to see which resources you want to use to meet these ends and even which brand traits you should tweak to reinforce the sense of reliability.
Think about creating sub-brands
The idea of sub-brands may potentially frighten off less experienced business owners since it, at first glance, destroys brand consistency. But, one brand can’t possibly be appealing to everyone, so if you are dealing with a fragmented market, come up with sub-brands that tap into these niches. You can find great examples of this in the car industry.
The owners of Toyota’s exclusive Lexus series don’t really share the same values as the owners of the more economical Corolla line-up. But, you have Toyota’s signature written all over these vehicles. Don’t be afraid to think in this niche direction.
We hope these couple of examples gave you a better idea about how, even in the time of digital resource clutter we have now, memorable brands can be still made with simple strategies.
Use the mentions above as an anchor that will ensure your efforts are consistent, effective, and deliberate. As long as that is the case, you will have no problem popping up on the mainstream radar.
