The short answer to building a stand-out brand is easy, employ us! The slightly longer, less biased answer is to give your branding the respect it deserves.
Plenty of would-be brand builders have fallen by the wayside because they considered branding to be simply a nice shiny logo, or a veneer that only needs thinking about when the rest of the business in is in place.
In reality, brand building needs to be at the very heart of a company, otherwise it won’t resonate. It must be borne out of the very reason the business exists in the first place. Only then can it be expressed through the logo, the visual identity, the personality, the tone of voice etc. Following the four steps below will help ensure your brand becomes a stand-out one.
Look within
What is your brand truth? What makes your brand different from its competitors? Take a good, long, honest look at why you do what you do. Ask yourself why should your target market care about your brand? Identifying what defines your offering is crucial, and should be done as soon as possible.
Find your story
Whether yours is a new brand or an existing one, you need a story to take to the market. How can you present your offering in a fresh, exciting way? Is there something practical you can do to make your proposition more coherent and compelling? Got a 99% green line of products? Drop the 1% that’s not. Tweaking your commercial structure can often help you tell a powerful consumer story; one that truly connects.
Be bold
Say what it is you do in the most memorable, engaging way you can. That doesn’t mean being wacky for wacky’s sake. It does mean being aware of just how much communication your target market receives a day – 80% of which gets filtered out instantly! If you want to engage you have to be bold, but also relevant to your audience.
Be bloody consistent
Stick to your plan. Don’t get bored of your proposition after the second month. You may have heard it a thousand times. But your audience won’t even have noticed it yet. It’s the brand that hammers home a simple truth again and again, who wins the day. By all means flex your communications to suit different media, but keep the core message the same.
The proof is out there
Stand-out brands are few and far between. Too many of the steps get missed out or become diluted when new marketing brooms come in. The brands that do stick-out from Snickers to Marks & Spencer, from Compare The Market to Apple all have the fundamentals in place. They’ve a story to tell. They tell it well. And they tell it consistently. And that’s how you build a stand-out brand.
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