6 Tips for Representing your Brand’s Main Idea
Getting your brand noticed is one of the most challenging things to do in a market as competitive as today.
Not only are you competing with businesses from the same area, but you’re also competing with businesses in other countries that have access to more cost-effective resources and cheaper labour.
And in this conquest of attaining a great brand identity, you will have to keep one self-explanatory tool in your war chest. That tool is “branding”.
Branding is a broad term used to describe several small steps a company can take to establish loyalty and trust between a company or brand and their buyers. But it takes effort. Sweat, blood, and tears go into the making of a brand.
Countless hours spent in meetings with several different people, all trying to help you decide and imprint your vision and mission onto every aspect of your business. So that customers can know what your ideals are.
When approaching branding for your company, it is essential to think “big picture” first. And one of the best ways to do that is to establish your brand’s vision and mission – its “main idea”. But it’s not as hard as you may think.
For example, if you’re running a hat store, you want to establish yourself as the best hat store, thereby promoting your hats’ quality and producing a great collection of hats for each season.
This is an excellent example of a mission statement in the sense that it has three things; what your business is, its main idea or end goal, and how it plans to achieve said goal.
On the other hand, your company must have a vision as well. You can define a vision as what you imagine your brand representing in specific periods. Often those times range from 6 months to a year, and even five years for companies that have made it this far.
The above two statements will help you form the basis on which your entire marketing and branding plan shall reside. This is because once there is an end goal in mind, it becomes much easier to promote your brand’s main idea to the countless potential customers out there.
6 Essential Aspects of a Brand’s Main Idea
We’ve already informed you about two main aspects of branding: your brand’s vision and main idea. But we must discuss six others to give you a complete picture of your branding strategy.
Audience
When it comes to branding or customer service, there is one thing that remains at the centre of your entire plan, and this is what decides how successful our strategy is in the long term; your audience. They are who will buy your products and who you will be trying to communicate your brand’s main idea to.
Hence, it is imperative that you understand one thing: the psychology of your target audience regarding how they perceive your product. By knowing this one detail, you will be able to create certain fail-safes in your sales funnel that will establish your image with the end-consumer as one of reliability and quality deliverance.
The first step to defining your target audience is to create a profile of your average customer. You should always include things like their age group, financial standing, political views, and other demographics in the mix to give your marketing team as accurate a picture as possible about what they should market the product or company as.
For example, BMW has a specific target market for each car segment. With different people buying different cars based on things such as:
- The sportiness of the car
- How luxurious is the car?
- Additional technological features
- How well the car is doing as a status symbol
- Price of the car
- Customisability
- Corporate social responsibility by the manufacturing company
BMW has remained a key player in a highly competitive and exclusive market by knowing the above factors and other aspects of what a person may think about when buying a vehicle. But another critical aspect that every brand, like BMW, must understand after the target audience is the market itself.
Market Analysis
Knowing your target audience is essential, but so is knowing the conditions or general state of the market, which is made up of people from different demographics all looking for the right product at the right price.
By analysing the market for gaps where you can insert your product, you will be able to the already available demand by tweaking just a few things about your brand’s main idea.
The greatest brands understand that they have to constantly adapt according to market conditions to remain the most liked brand in the eyes of their target market.
Studying a market isn’t just about knowing the buyers but also other key players. Such as government regulators and other publicly affected groups may feel the effects of your brand’s actions even indirectly.
By keeping your branding team up to date on current affairs in your industry, you can keep an eye out for potential opportunities in the market and then flood them with your products.
By knowing the particular preferences of key stakeholders such as investors, regulators, the general public, etc., your brand can be ready for when an opportunity comes by that can help fill the gap in a market with your brand.
Market analysis is also a great way to mitigate risk to your company. You will predict future demand and allocate your resources accordingly if you understand how much people value your product and how much could be consumed annually by your target market.
These predictions are often based upon factors such as:
- Market size
- Consumer spending habits
- Economic conditions of the relative area
- Number and quality of competitors
Of course, other factors can be more accurately explored when there is a physical or metaphysical market to analyse. But several other benefits come along when you analyse your market.
You can stay up to date with upcoming trends and make revenue projections up to a year in advance, which helps generate future stock revenue for large companies.
Market analysis also helps crate realistic benchmarks for performance by comparing key performance indicators with data from previous years.
Brand’s Core Values
Once you’ve established a healthy amount of data on market conditions and the conditions of your target audience, there is one thing left to do; production.
Well, realistically speaking, there are several hundred things to take care of before you can even assume you’re ready to produce an output. But a simple thing will determine how efficient and effective your production methods turn out to be, even if you have a reliable team working with you.
For production to be efficient, effective, and inclusive to people from all walks of life, there must be a set of rules or core values that every employee believes in on some level.
These core values determine how your workers approach a problem, both in public and behind closed doors. And it could very well dictate how your company is perceived in the public eye.
Some great core values have helped both startups and multinational corporations achieve their yearly goals and maintain a good image in front of their end consumers and other stakeholders.
However, they should plan these values carefully because if they contradict your vision and mission, they could cause hindrances rather than making the production process more inclusive and efficient.
Awareness Strategy
This is as equally important as knowing your brand’s main idea or core values, if not more. Your awareness strategy is affected by many things, such as where your target market is primarily active and what activities they like.
Your awareness strategy is a basic plan of how you plan on promoting your brand while keeping in line with the core values you have decided on and still maintaining the same appeal to your target audience.
For example, knowing that your audience primarily shops on Amazon or Instagram could help your brand create a presence on those specific platforms and then promote products with a specific plan in mind.
But what will you tell them? How will you entice them to choose your product over potentially a thousand others? Will you provide discounts or make your product exclusive by upping your price?
These are the sort of questions you must answer when it comes to your awareness strategy, which will give you a concrete step-by-step plan on how you must execute your branding and promotions.
By combining the above four factors, you can get one step closer to creating a lasting impression on any potential customers that grace your brand with their presence.
Brand Personality
According to Investopedia, a brand personality is the set of characteristics assigned to a brand to make it more likeable by giving it human-like qualities.
These human-like qualities aim to appeal to a particular market segment and are a highly effective tool for creating a long-lasting impression on new and present customers.
Choosing the right brand personality is one of the critical things that must be kept in mind when executing your awareness strategy and main idea.
In a digital age, it has become increasingly important that brands can be seen as organisations being run by actual human beings behind them rather than just robotic conglomerates of robots obsessed with money alone.
Brands often create a brand personality using their CSR or corporate social responsibility departments, which handle affairs such as charity drives and environmental awareness campaign sponsorships, which are both great ways to promote the fact that your business is socially responsible and cares about people and the planet in terms of more than just their average revenue.
This helps establish a genuine connection that makes your customers and other stakeholders want to believe in your brand’s main idea.
Although we cannot quantify the benefits of this, almost all entrepreneurs will agree that it does play a significant role in bringing your brand from a startup to a genuine business.
Brand Voice & Tone
As important as knowing the correct information and creating the right plan is, it becomes close to nothing when there is a lack of adequate execution. This is where your brand voice becomes a deciding factor.
How your brand is perceived is greatly affected by what you say and how you interact with consumers.
For example, a brand that deals in financial services will make itself presentable and professional. Hence, their brand voice will also have to radiate to each customer that they are the best at what they do and have specific standards in place.
On the other hand, a brand that deals in kid’s t-shirts will aim to please the parents of those children by presenting themselves as a safe and fun brand that provides quality products; hence their brand voice will be similar to that of a child they are perceived as friendly.
Conclusion
Launching or rebranding your business requires months of planning and immaculate execution to pull off. And we believe that almost any brand can become an industry leader with a quality product and dedication to their decided brand image.
However, we also believe that maintaining this image in times of great stress defines how well a brand will do in the future. At the fundamental level, all employees interacting with customers should be mindful of maintaining the respect and image of the brand at all times.
But, to get the real benefits of branding, employees from the managerial level to entry-level must genuinely believe the brand’s main idea and mission in their hearts.
Otherwise, there is always the chance that they may unintentionally take actions that go against the brand’s purpose.
Author Bio: Uzair Hameed is a passion for writing about various topics. A writer who loves to research everything that provokes curiosity. Bearing the right skills and years-long expertise manages to create versatile content every time that impresses the readers and leaves them in awe.