Build your brand the right way!

Brand is such an elusive and abstract concept that only a tiny minority of professionals, even in the marketing world, has a full grasp over the subject. When we think of the brand “Apple”, its logo, the “Think Different” tagline, light gray color scheme, or perhaps clean and minimalistic store designs come to mind. That is why many people equate Apple’s brand with its visible identity. A brand, however, is much more than that. In this article, let’s look at what a brand actually is and how startups and SMEs, like yours, can build a formidable brand and defend it in an environment of intense competition.

To understand what a brand exactly is, let’s first understand what it isn’t. Brand is not your logo, it is not your product either, nor is it the promise you made to your customers. Surely, the logo, product, color scheme, promises you made etc. are inputs to your overall brand perception but, these components do not create a brand on their own. According to Marty Neumeier, the author of “The Brand Gap” and “Zag”, a brand is simply the result of a customer’s gut feeling about your product, service, and your company as a whole. Since, you can not control how your customers feel, you, inevitably, have as many variants of your brand as the number of customers out there. Therefore, you, as a brand owner, must focus on the inputs which play a role in shaping your customer’s gut feelings. We will look at these inputs in detail in the rest of this article.

Let’s consider a simple brand management model shown below. You, the brand owner, control the Company Centric part of the model whereas, the Customer Centric part is the customer’s response to your communication with them.

Image 1: Brand Management Model

The model urges us to define crisp and consistent Brand Identity, Brand Personality, and Brand Positioning. After all, these are the three main levers with which you can influence your customer’s gut feelings about your brand. Once you have a clear brand vision it is easier to craft a consistent brand message across all communication channels such as web, social media, and TV advertisements. As your customers get exposed to your brand message repeatedly, they slowly become aware of your company, products, values, and promises and start building your brand image in their subconscious mind. If customers develop a positive image, they will bestow their loyalty upon you and will also become your brand evangelists. Since, startups and SMEs, like yours, have near zero prior history or brand awareness with customers, you should take this as an opportunity to develop your brand the right way.

Now, let’s look into each of the three levers of the Brand Management Model in detail to understand how you can shape your overall brand strategy. Lets begin with the first lever i.e. Brand Identity.

The purpose of defining the brand identity is to establish the right relationships with the right customers. There are two facets of brand identity, the Core Identity and the Visual Identity. The Core Identity represents the timeless essence of your brand. For example, “protection from 99.9% germs” is the core identity of Lizol. The core identity by itself, however, is insufficient to give the brand a well-rounded place in the market and hence, extended or visual identity is needed.

Image 2: Visual Brand Identity

The visual brand identity includes your logo, color scheme, website, marketing material etc. As your brand evolves, its visual identity may change, but its core identity must remain steadfast. To define the core identity you must ask the question, “Dear brand, who are you?”. It is crucial to answer this question to your heart’s content. Because, the answer will provide your brand a direction, meaning, and uniqueness. A clear and unambiguous brand identity helps you create a strong brand personality. This is the best segue to look into the second lever of the Brand Management Model i.e. “Brand Personality”.

We relate to brands the same way we relate to people. People have personality traits and character attributes and, so do brands. Brand personality is the set of human traits and attributes that are manifested by brands. To define the brand personality, you must ask the question “Dear brand, what is your personality?”. Answering this question is also crucial because customers who identify and relate to your brand’s personality are most likely to become your raving fans and brand advocates. As a brand owner, you may associate your brand with one or more aspirational human traits such as sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, or ruggedness.Image 3: Brand Personality diagram

For example, Apple’s brand exhibits Competence and Sophistication whereas Nike’s brand exhibits Sincerity, and Excitement.

Now it is time to look into the third lever of the Brand Management Model i.e. Brand Positioning. Brand positioning is core to your brand strategy. It is defined as the act of designing and crafting an offer and an image so that the brand occupies a very distinct and valued place in the target customer’s mind. Brand positioning requires you to answer a few questions: how do we want consumers to see our brand, what should they remember about our brand, which associations should come to their mind, and where do we place our brand vis-a-vis our competitors. The goal of the positioning exercise is for you to be able to articulate the unique value proposition of your brand.

 

Image 4: Brand competitive frame of reference

Let’s walk through the brand positioning exercise step by step.

Step 1: Identify your target customers based on demographics, usage, behavior, and needs.

Step 2: Define the nature of competition. Your brand may have direct competition from other brands or indirect competition from brands outside your industry, satisfying the same customer needs. For example, the Rolex not only competes with other luxury watch makers such as Lange & Söhne, Audemars Piguet, and Patek Philippe but it also competes with brands in completely different categories such as Louis Vuitton, Hermes, and Prada. All these brands satisfy the same customer need i.e. prestige and sense of accomplishment.

Step 3: Set up this competitive frame of reference by answering how your brand is similar (point of parity) and how it is different (point of difference) from your competitor brands . Points of parity must be fulfilled just to be able to compete in the category, whereas points of differences will open up a white space for you, providing you a competitive edge. For example, enabling digital transactions is a point of parity for any brand in the fintech space. Whereas, providing microfinancing at customer’s doorstep 24×7 would be a point of difference and would provide you an edge with customers in the target segment. By defining your target customer, nature of competition, and points of parity and difference, you are essentially positioning your brand to invoke a certain image in customer’s subconscious when they think of your brand.

Step 4: Once you have defined your brand positioning, you can craft your internal positioning statement that would serve as the north star for your creative and advertising team to deliver a consistent brand message across all communication channels. For example, an internal brand positioning statement for the Gatorade can be written as “ Gatorade is the brand of healthy sports-drink for body replenishment and thirst quenching for athletes of all ages and performance levels. Gatorade is better than competitors because it enables athletes to achieve their best performance through its unique formula. Gatorade is endorsed and used by all major professional athletes including Leo Messi, the Argentine MLB captain and one of the most influential sport personalities in the world”.

So far we covered the company centric part of the Brand Management Model i.e. the levers available to influence your customer’s gut feeling. Now, let’s look at how customers respond to your brand message. Let’s start with awareness.

Brand Awareness tells you how easily a customer can recognize your brand and how fast they can recall your brand from their memory. Brand awareness indicates the consumer’s ability to identify your brand given certain queues. Brand recall, on the other hand, indicates the customer’s ability to remember your brand while thinking of a particular product category or a specific benefit. For instance, mere mention of the word “coffee” could trigger a memory of Starbucks in the minds of many customers.

Image 5: Brand Awareness model

Brand recognition is important if your target customers make buying decisions at the point of purchase whereas, brand recall is important when your customers are not physically present around your product while making the purchase decision. Brand recognition and brand recall both require you to design a communication plan that gives the customer a consistent exposure to your brand message across all available channels.

Now let’s look at the other component of customer response to your brand communication i.e. Brand Image.

Is the Brand Image different from the Brand Identity? Yes, the Brand Identity comes from within the company when you define your brand’s core and visual identities. The Brand Image, however, is crafted by customers themselves through multiple exposures to your brand associations. These associations are in the form of the perceived mindset, personality, and heritage of your users (e.g. people perceive Harley Davidson users as rebellions and Coca Cola users as family oriented and festive people). Strong and positive associations will trigger positive emotions such as warmth, fun, excitement, security etc. in the customer’s mind. These positive associations will earn you positive brand equity.

Image 6: Brand Image example Harley Davidson

Now that we have learned about how to craft a consistent brand message and how customers will respond to it, let’s talk about how to measure the success of your branding effort. That is where Brand Equity comes into picture.

Brand Equity measures the value added to a branded product as opposed to a generic unbranded product. Brand equity can be classified into two types i.e. financials-based equity and customer-based equity. The financial-based equity is anchored on the principle of net present value of a brand’s future cash flows. The Customer-based Brand Equity (or CBBE), however, takes a customer centric approach to measure the premium customers are willing to pay to own your product. As CBBE increases customers are willing to pay more for your product. Using CBBE value, you can design your communications campaigns that achieves you a desired outcomes. To learn about how to measure CBBE please read this article Link

You can also measure the overall effectiveness of your brand management team using the Brand Funnel framework.

Image 7: Brand Funnel model

In this method, you record a percentage drop in the number of customers at each stage from awareness to consideration, from consideration to purchase, from purchase to loyalty, and from loyalty to advocacy.

Using the Brand Management Model presented here you can deliver clear, concise, and compelling Brand Communication so that your brand funnel becomes as wide as possible and its sides become as parallel to each other as possible. You, as a brand manager, must periodically measure effectiveness of your brand communication and course correct your brand strategy so that your CBBE remains at the desired level.