Creating a brand is a crucial part of any business. It helps influence what your customers feel when they think about your business and typically involves your company’s name, the colours you use, your logo and the emotions that all these things evoke in the potential customer.
In order to convey the sense that your brand is one of trust and friendliness, for example, you might pick colours and symbols that make people feel safe and secure to represent your company. Additionally, you’ll want to include your company’s mission and values in your branding.
Although you might want to just get started right away, I recommend that in the early stages you make sure you establish the foundations of your business, such as determining and defining your company’s purpose, choosing an appropriate name, identifying your target market, and establishing how you will position your brand relative to competitors. To learn more about creating an action plan, see our workbook.
When implementing a brand strategy, you want to be able to track its effectiveness. Therefore three most important considerations are simplicity, consistency and experimentation.
Keeping it simple helps you to better control the direction of your brand, making it easier to monitor the smaller details and their impact. This allows you to start with the basics and build brick by brick in a clear, measurable and responsive way.
In addition to keeping things simple, staying consistent is essential when you are building a brand, especially if you do not want to confuse your audience. You can avoid this by researching your audience and market before developing your brand. Look for what they enjoy, gravitate towards, engage with and other key information you can leverage. By being consistent, you can establish your brand and build a reputation in your industry.
You might have learned a little about conducting experiments in school, this is kind of similar. To ensure that your experiments produce accurate results, you should have control; which remains constant, and a variable, which is what you are testing.
This is also where consistency comes into play. By keeping consistent with certain aspects of your brand you can experiment with other features and measure the impact and results. Making changes in response to preset metrics and measurable targets. This is also called A/B testing. A process by which two versions of something are compared to determine which of the two performs better.
If you’re just starting out, I would advise against outsourcing your strategy from the beginning. Rather, focus your resources on starting your business and monitor the response. After which you can use the insight garnered to learn more about your target audience and build from there. However, if you don’t have a physical product but provide a service, then I’d suggest creating a simple brand in order to build brand recognition with your audience.
Prior to getting a brand strategist, you want to have a fairly decent understanding of your product or service so you can clearly communicate the needs of your brand and users. Provide your strategist with the most accurate information to build the best strategy possible.
When choosing a brand strategist, rather than a picture-perfect grid, what you should look for is the clients they’ve worked with and how they’ve conveyed the client’s message in line with their brand. You also want someone whose work suits your style, is already in line with the vision you have for your brand and can easily represent you.
Starting simple and remaining consistent across all platforms will gradually increase brand recognition. The second thing to focus on is delivering quality products and customer experiences because this contributes to your brand and will further set you apart from your competitors. Thirdly, a brand strategist is an excellent resource if you have a good grasp of your brand identity and are in the position to hire one. And lastly, always prioritise the end-user.
A happy customer might tell a few people about your business, but an angry customer will tell hundreds.
Your brand is your reputation, so be careful with it.
If you’re confused, overwhelmed or unsure what it is you’re trying to do. If everything’s all scrambled up in your head and you are feeling lost. Here’s the first thing to do to gain clarity.
Creating a brand is a crucial part of any business. It helps influence what your customers feel when they think about your business and typically involves your company’s name, the colours you use, your logo and the emotions that all these things evoke in the potential customer.
As a founder you’ll have many important things on your plate and a lot to stay on top of. Therefore the last thing you want is to experience analysis paralysis. The term “analysis paralysis” or “paralysis of analysis” refers to over-analyzing (or over-thinking) a situation, or citing sources, so that a decision or action is never finally taken, resulting in paralyzing the outcome.”
© 2014 Brimah and John
