February 29th, 2016 | 4 min
As we all well know, the power has shifted from businesses to consumers, therefore, having a strong company brand is necessary in order to position yourself above the competition.
Having a strong brand will define who your company is, it’s not just about having a recognisable logo, it’s about your values as a business, your service, social engagement and all your marketing efforts that will make all the difference.
Your mission statement is the formal summary of the core values and objectives your company should operate by. It should summarise what you do, how you do it, and what you can offer your customers. Your company should use this in all key aspects of your operations.
It serves as a differentiator between you and your competitors, but that alone isn’t enough, in a market where consumer confidence is so low it will take more than a promise to build their trust.
What consumers truly admire are brands that emphasise their willingness to achieve more than just profitability, and that is what your mission statement should focus on.
Both your messaging and visual branding should be clearly and consistently applied across all your communications. In order to reinforce your brand identity, build trust and creating a longer lasting positive impression.
This doesn’t mean all your communications should look exactly the same, but you should strive for visual cohesion. To do this, ensure you stick to a set of standards – same colour palette, visual style, font, size of your spacing and logo.
Have written out and well-documented brand guidelines, covering everything from business card templates to letter headings and font styles. Then ensure the whole company has access to this, and are using it, to help create a cohesive, consistent visual across the board.
Emotive branding is all about forming an emotional connection with your customers. With much of our decision-making process, as humans, being based on emotions, it’s an obvious strategic point in any marketing or branding strategy.
Creating an emotional bond with your customers can result in positive correlation to building profitability. You can achieve this by providing them with an opportunity to feel as though they are part of something special – as cliche as that may sound.
This is all because of our innate desire to build relationships and be part of something – psychologists describe it as the belongingness hypothesis.
Trigger their emotions by finding a method that connects to them on a deeper and more emotional level; this is what will foster loyalty and strengthen the relationship between your brand and your customers.
In a fast-paced digital world, remaining flexible is the key to staying relevant.
We understand it may be difficult to find the right balance between flexibility and consistency, but once you’ve established your brand it will only help to keep things fresh by engaging your customers in new ways.
The key to this is to make slight adjustments that will build and gather enough interest and distinguish your approach from your competitors (without steering too far left).
In other words, “effective identity programmes require enough consistency to be identifiable, but enough variation to keep things fresh and human,” explains president of PeopleDesign, Kevin Budelmann.
You can keep yourself in the loop by signing up to marketing blogs and news forums. We personally love Google Alerts, Hubspot’s and Moz’s blogs, skim read over the lastest articles a few times a week to ensure you stay current.
As mentioned before, achieving a sense of consistency is important in order to ensure you have a cohesive brand and employee involvement is a part of that. The brand makes the promise and your employees deliver it.
At every interaction, your employees should be well versed in how they should be communicating and be representing your brand. If your brand is playful and bubbly on social media then it wouldn’t make sense if they called in and connected with a grumpy and monotone representative, right?
As brands battle it out for higher affinity, you must connect and cultivate with your customers on a regular basis. Value your clientele and aim to create a community that builds a buzz around your brand.
To establish brand loyalty you must live by your company’s core values (see 1. Mission Statement), delivering on any promises that you make and going above and beyond in exceeding your customers expectations.
For those that already love your company, sustain their appeal by rewarding them. They are the people that will be actively acting as brand ambassadors, raving about your brand to their friends and family – i.e. free promotion and you should already know about the strengths of word of mouth.
Without a doubt, your competitors will be working just as hard to position themselves above your business. Don’t make assumptions, analyse their strengths and weaknesses and use them to improve your own strategy and create a general greater valued brand.
Staying in tune with your competitors doesn’t necessarily mean you should let them dictate your every move, of course, once in awhile you can jump on any trending bandwagons, but essentially you should aim for differentiation.
Do you want to build credibility and trustworthiness? Then honest customer reviews are the way to go. However, don’t be tempted and fall into the trap of this new trend called ‘astroturfing,’ paying
for reviews to manipulate the market. The repercussions of this can tarnish a brand’s reputation permanently.
Take online retail giant Amazon, who sued over a thousand people it claimed provided fake reviews on their website. The steps they took helped reinforce how dedicated they are to having real and trustworthy reviews on their site.
Be daring, change the rules of the game and take calculated risks to bring attention to your brand. Using the same strategies overtime will become boring and repetitive. You can’t expect a different outcome if you continue to use the same strategies every time.
Conduct some research and get some insight into how you can make your campaigns speak to your customers personally, then experiment with fresh marketing ideas and surprise
them with it. If done correctly this will bring lots of positive attention to your brand.
Whether you’re looking to establish or strengthen an existing brand, these essential tips are the foundation for creating a strong company brand that will differentiate you from your competitors and sustain your company’s appeal.
If you require a new brand for a product, service or company, Brave Creative will work closely with you to achieve that goal. From corporate branding through to logo development, we can offer you a unique brand to help target and maximise your current and your potential future customers.
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