Trying to Make it Easy: The Brief Guide to Building a Brand for Newbies
Hi! I am Sabbir Islam, and I decided to write an article on how to build a brand because, frankly, I thought of starting a Medium Channel to share my experience and knowledge on marketing which is mostly all self-taught and learnings from experience by the way, and many people ask me this question. So a bit about me, I hail from Bangladesh; I started my first business when I was 15, and it was an online magazine called Youthsparks; we ran it for four years, and at its peak had 100k visitors worldwide per month. Then I ran a food cart called Cinnamon Sugar, where I handled the digital marketing and branding. Then I worked in a digital agency as a project manager alongside being a freelance writer and an undergrad student; throughout the last six years, I have run my digital agency, Wire (www.wiredmm.com), and helped build, nurture, and grow sales of 200+ SMEs and nationwide brands. We have a 50+ people team HQ in Dhaka (The Capital) with regional operations in Chittagong (The business Capital), Sylhet (Major City), Australia, and India. Brand building and Strategization is the core of what I do in Wire, and most of Wire’s success has been based on the fact that we even brand SMEs as multinational corporations do. That’s our forte, and our data-centric marketing allows sales increment within months of retainers for most clients. We believe proper branding, witty campaigns, catchy copies, statics, and exciting creatives can generate much more ROI than extensive budget campaigns.
This is the making it easier series for brand practitioners, advertisers, brand enthusiasts, marketing students, and professionals; here, I try to summarize the tad-bit-more complex marketing concepts in a way that’s easier for my audience to understand. I also like to keep it digital-centric because, let’s face it, traditional marketing is already in the ICU. Creating an effective marketing funnel is often the next step towards creating your brand since all your promotional strategies will depend on this. How to create one? Well just click here to learn more.
A type of product manufactured by a particular company under a specific name. If you ever google the definition for a brand, that’s what it says, simple? Right? Any product by any company can be a brand. A bar of soap can be a brand, a restaurant, a TV can belong to a particular brand, and a piece of shirt, so as long as you are a business offering a product or a service, you are a brand. Regardless of the size of your business, branding has transcended to personal levels. Personal branding has been a thing for the past few years now (Where do you think the influencer culture came from?)
Alright, so let’s assume that you are an entrepreneur (SME or large doesn’t matter)/ a brand manager/ a marketing head/ a marketing executive/ an agency; you have a product, and you need to sell it. The sales team has given you a brief regarding the product and the Unique Selling Points (USPs) of the product. Don’t be afraid of the fancy term; in layman’s words, your USPs are why your product is different than XYZ’s product in the market and why customers should buy it.
Now, as the marketing person, your job is to create the promotional strategy for the product and ensure sales keep coming and the product is recognized. Now, what do you start with? Well, you start with brand development, which is a sequence of items I am going to explain cause it’s a holiday painstakingly, I have a lot of time, and I felt like no one should struggle like I did when I started.
Alright, so this is what the brand development process looks like:
- First things first, we Analyze the Market:
Market analysis involves a few steps, and I will go through the processes briefly.
# Market Research:
Market research is simple; you get a holistic idea regarding the viability of the product or service you will launch. You talk to people who you think may be potential customers of the brand and understand whether your product is required or not. Find out about your competitors and the history of brands that have succeeded and failed with the same product. Find reasons for each. Peak sales times and off-peak sales times in the year. Raw Material availability. Market research is a “whatever you can find out” survey regarding your product and service. There’s an extensive process that you can go through. I will write about it in one of my last articles.
# Brand Audit
A brand audit is a checkup that evaluates your brand’s position in the marketplace, its strengths and weaknesses, and how to strengthen it. A brand audit should cover internal branding — your brand values, mission, and company culture. (Source: score.org)
#Competitor Analysis:
Please find out your competitors' weaknesses, strengths, market share, promotional strategies, and historical campaigns they run. Find out everything about your competitors, market leaders, and market followers.
#Customer Analysis
Create surveys with Potential customers; remember that audience segmentation and pinpointing comes at a much later stage of the brand development process. At this stage, marketers can assume potential customers and run physical/online surveys which ask them about their pain points regarding the product or service, their current options, affordability, region, age, gender, educational qualification, etc. But make sure that the surveys are not too long and give you the necessary information. Remember that Survey response rate is directly correlated to survey length or duration; we’ve seen, on average, a 17% drop in response rate when a survey has more than 12 questions or takes longer than 5 minutes to complete. (Source: Pointerpro)
- Define your Brand Goal:
This part is simple, your organization should have a mission, a vision, and a goal for whatever product or brand you are starting or whatever problem you are solving. Figure those out and set out your brand mission, your brand value, and your goal.
Figure out the 3 P’s and then put forward values that align with your P’s, such as:
Define your core values first and then break them down to attribution values that align with your core values. Make sure your core values differ from your competitors, but it’s not a must.
- Segment, Target, and Position
One of the most nightmarish segments, but I believe that any marketer who has a good knowledge of the socioeconomic traits and psychographic traits of a particular geographical region or has an idea regarding its distribution can crack it. So Customer segmentation is breaking down your audience into as many divisions as you can:
The first two are pretty easy since most brands have sales teams determining geographical penetration over quarters. Demographics can be assumed from the competitor analysis, product type, research behind the product, etc. However, psychographic and behavioral traits are what you need to be worried about. Nowadays, thanks to digital behavioral characteristics, you can track people who order online regularly and target them or target people who purchased from your website or your store and retarget them. There are plenty of ways to retarget an audience once they engage with your brand, and intent can also be found by how much they interact with your brand. For example, 1 Like- Less intent; A random comment- may be no intent; A random comment is tagging a friend-high intent; Inboxing the page- super high intent.
For Psychographic evaluation, however, I have seen surveys to be the most effective. Especially online surveys, ensure you have a good sample size (at least 500 People for national brands) or 50–100 regional samples for SME brands. Questions will be based on their lifestyle, education level, hobbies, passion, preference, favorite time pass activity, and pop culture relevant questions.
Create audience personas out of each segment to know them better, for example:
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
Cause in the digital age, where there’s an advertisement everywhere you look, which only keeps increasing, you need to connect with your audience. My experiences and data tell me that audiences are 82% more likely to engage with content when they connect with it in terms of values, lifestyle, interests, and state of life. Remember that you may have more than one audience segment; you may have a luxury segment aged 24–28 while an upper-middle-class segment aged 42+; make sure you keep the segments separated. So that you can do a targeted campaign and produce content for each segment, and your communication is most effective.
- Build Your Brand Identity
Okay, so I promise to get back to this later in a later article where I will detail it since it’s a significant segment on its own, and it’s tough to explain them all here. Building your brand identity has a few parts involved in it:
# A Brand Story:
Tell a compelling narrative that connects your brand to your core audience.
# A brand Archetype:
Every brand worldwide is divided into 12 archetypes. Find out your fit.
# Brand Positioning:
What do you want your consumer to think about when they think about your brand? That’s brand positioning. Remember that Brand positioning has three primary rules:
However, it can just as usually be represented by a matrix of Price and Quality. Usually characterized by a simple graph:
# Brand Tone:
How you communicate with your audience has a lot of impacts. I love connecting with people in regional dialects via marketing channels when we target a specific region for a client.
# Brand Persona:
All of the above will create a personality for your brand; think of your brand as a personality. What does it wear, what does it eat, how does it talk, what does it listen to, how old is it in terms of a human being, etc.
# Brand Guideline:
This involves fonts, color palettes, color schemes, logo usage guidelines, design themes, etc.
I will use just an image to show the type of research that goes on to just deciding on a color palette:
And this is just one aspect of the brand guideline.
- Activation:
Voila! We have reached the last phase! We take our product or service to the market through ads, activation campaigns, BTL communications, etc. But first, before wasting your ad budget, find your consumer touchpoints.
Once you know your consumer touchpoints, you will know which media to use to reach out to them in each phase of your marketing funnel. For example, whenever we create a brand, the first thing that we do is create awareness.
Social media is excellent for creating brand or product awareness, and you can use metrics such as views, clicks, likes, reach, and impressions to quantify how many people are aware of your brand.
Lastly, let’s clarify that this is a brief guide, more like brand building for amateurs, if you start your career in brands and marketing. I have tried to briefly squeeze in the ADSIA (Analyze, Define, Segment, Identity, Activation) process I follow for brand building. This article will help you learn a lot of the nuances and give you an overview of the methods. But to truly master brand building, you will need extensive study of the techniques.
Other Sources that I used for illustrations and quotes, if I have missed any, kindly inbox me, and I will make sure to add them to the article:
* Positioning: The Battle for your Mind
Book by Al Ries and Jack Trout
* Digital School of Marketing
* Think Owl
My Medium blog also contains other articles regarding marketing strategy, brand building, digital marketing, and customer segmentation. Give them a read if you like! You can also follow me on LinkedIn.
