To identify the personality of your brand, you need to find the human characteristics of your company. Your brand strategy gives you a unified plan for everything from the core of your business and positioning your brand to formulating a brand personality that resonates with your target audience. Therefore, finding the purpose of your brand is the first and probably the most important element in developing an effective brand strategy. Your brand values will show customers, suppliers and the general public what the company represents.
Like the other two elements of brand strategy, brand values guide the brand internally and help with decision-making. In the positioning section of your brand strategy, the most important component is to define your target audience and discover details about their lives. You can start defining your target audience by creating a profile of your average target customers. A market analysis is the second very important step in the process of positioning your brand among your competitors.
The purpose of this element is to decide how you are going to create awareness, so that your target audience can discover your brand. Along with your target audience and market research, your goals can help you get the word out. Define your tone of voice to set guidelines for how you want your target audience to sound. At a very basic level, the essential elements would include the purpose of the brand, audience and personality.
95% of brand creators ignore internal branding. A common misconception about trying to find a differentiator and develop a differentiation strategy is that you have to be revolutionary. This is a description of what your business is, who you are, what you offer and to whom. As the basis of your brand, your brand definition should be stable and solid, and never confusing.
Although this seems simple enough, it can often be communicated in a way that is too complicated, making what you do the first obstacle to presenting your brand. Keep your brand definition as clean and simple as possible. These are the ideals that your brand represents. What do you defend? Whether your brand values are quality products, reasonable prices, or sustainable business practices, these are the things you believe in and want your customers to believe in as well.
Many consumers care about doing business with like-minded companies, so make your core values known. This is the underlying guarantee that you offer your customers when doing business with you. It's something that all members of your organization should internalize and that is easily reflected in your messages, preferably as one of the first things your audience reads. Your brand promise must be aligned with both your brand values and your brand experience.
This is the visual side of your business: its “appearance”. Your brand identity includes the elements used to visually communicate your brand definition, such as your logo, brand graphics, colors, fonts, and images. Having a well-designed and well-defined brand identity will make your company memorable, help define your personality and greatly improve your public perception. Is your brand identity strong? If not, hire a professional graphic designer or design agency to develop or update these visual aspects of your brand.
This is the voice of your company, what you need to say and how you say it. Brand messages include elements such as the slogan, positioning statement, brand promise statement, key messages, and marketing text. The messaging strategy is an important part of building a brand, since the topics of conversation you use and the writing style you adopt help define your brand. Your brand personality should be reflected in your messages, which helps attract consumers on an emotional level.
It must always be relevant, coherent and faithful to your brand. As a brand struggling to gain a foothold in the minds of your audience, you must use all the means at your disposal to differentiate yourself in the minds of your audience from the competition. But only brands that enlighten their audiences and detail their fears, challenges, hopes and victories will attract their audience through the partnership and familiarity of the main character. They tell the story of why their brand was born, who their founders are and where they are going (which doesn't become a story where your audience can see themselves).
This is the position in the market held by your brand, based on a calculation of quality and price. The perspective of these questions, if applied throughout your competitive analysis, will give you an accurate idea of how to differentiate your brand from the rest. If you can define a slogan that stays in the mind of your audience in an intelligent, concise and memorable way and tells them why you should be remembered, you'll pave the way for your brand to remember. All of these media provide a platform for brands to talk to their audience in a way that is familiar to them.
For your brand to gain the trust of your audience, you must communicate consistently at all touchpoints. A detailed summary of what each of these elements includes provides the brand with a long-term guide to consistent messaging. Just like a machine is missing a gear, ignoring any of these elements can be detrimental to the longevity of your brand. Today's shoppers expect their brands to “behave in a certain way”, create certain things and “talk to them in a way that suits their own personality.”.
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