Branding Defined

You got a business and you’re ready to push your branding online and offline. You are face with the question of How to go about with branding of your products.

You probably think branding involves the following:

● Logos, color schemes, and website design

● Brand identification, links, and social popularity

● SERPs visibility, ad campaigns, and other promotional efforts

You are completely looking at branding the wrong way if you consider the aforementioned as what defines your brand. What I have mentioned are all marketing tools and strategies, and they only scratch the surface of branding.

Difference between marketing and branding?

Marketing is the set of tools and processes promoting your business. This includes SEO, social media, PPC, local search, mobile, and traditional promotional methods and tools. Branding, on the other hand, is the culture itself, the message that permeates and rules all the process of your business.

Misconceptions about Branding

Mixing up marketing and branding is only one of the most common misconceptions about branding that you will encounter. Many businesses and marketers handling branding tasks also make the following misconceptions:

Misconception #1: Branding is marketing / advertising / promotion / anything to that effect.

This is a misconception because branding goes deeper than marketing. Marketing, advertising, and other promotional activities only communicate your brand personality and message. Your brand is comprised of your personality, your voice, and your message; branding is the process of establishing these traits.

Misconception #2: You are the ultimate authority when it comes to your brand.

This is a very common misconception, especially among first-time business owners. The truth is while you set the tone and get the ball rolling for your business, and you set the guidelines that your organization will follow and live by as they work with your brand, this does not automatically make you the ultimate brand authority.

Your customers are the ones who ultimately define your brand. Their perception of your brand is what sticks with the people they influence. This is why it’s very important to select your brand values carefully; otherwise, your brand may be taken the wrong way – or worse, it may fail when you don’t see repeat customers.

Misconception #3: There exists a formula for success when it comes to branding.

Just because everything in online marketing can be measured doesn’t mean everything has a formula. No two companies are alike. While a similar process for developing a brand may work for businesses in the same field, for example, these businesses will still have unique identities and needs.

The truth is that there is no formula – branding is and will always be a customized experience. The good news is you can measure the success of your brand easily. What you should look at in this case is the behavior and the interests of your target audience.

Branding the Right Way

In order to create and establish a strong brand, you’ll need to ask the most fundamental questions behind its development. Before you begin to plan your online marketing strategies, you need to do the following first:

Find your Purpose

The first thing you need to clarify is why you do what you do. You won’t get the answers right away – you’ll need to ask yourself why several times before you get to the root purpose, the very core of your business. Start with questions like:

Why did I build this business?

Why do I want to help out this specific group of people?

Why does it matter to me that these things get done?

As you keep going, note the answers you are giving each “why” – these answers will form your purpose. Walt Disney answers this question very well, and is a good example of a company that knows why they exist: they want to bring joy to children everywhere. This permeates everything that they do.

Choose Your Personality and Voice

After asking why you do what you do, ask yourself: What is my brand? This will help begin to shape your brand, becoming a skeleton on which you will attach the rest of the ideas, values, and messages. At this stage of brand building, ask yourself the following:

What kind of voice do I want to use for my brand?

How do I want to be perceived – do I want to be approachable and casual, corporate and formal, etc.?

Will I be able to stay true to this identity throughout the existence of this brand?

The last question is specifically important because your audiences will be looking for a solid, consistent identity. Your ability to stay true to your brand is one of the most important elements that will earn you customer loyalty.

Outline Your Values

Once you finish asking yourself what you are, it’s time to ask yourself “Who am I?” The values that you get from the previous step will define who you are as a brand. List these down and define these values in light of your business.

Some companies does a great job of outlining and defining their values. They have core values that they live by, and if you go through their blogs and their website, you’ll see these values permeating every process they have. You’ll also notice the people following these values to heart, from the blog posts, to their performance, to their customer service. Defining a good, solid set of values will help you become consistent and serve as your company’s guiding principles for work.

Define Your Culture

Your integrity as an organization depends heavily on the culture you cultivate in your business. Happy employees are productive, passionate, and cohesive, making your business stronger and your processes more easily manageable. This is why it’s important to establish what kind of culture you want to nurture in your establishment.

Google’s culture is very famous for encouraging creativity and innovation by giving their employees time and resources to explore new things. Their 80/20 policy had paved the way for innovations like Google Glass and Android. Although it is not being implemented as a policy anymore, their engineers are still encouraged to take on side projects that allow them to innovate. You can see how the culture lives on despite the fact that the policy has been removed – that’s the power of culture.

Communicate Your Brand

Finally, you get to the point where marketing comes in – you now have to decide how you want to raise awareness about your brand. The previous steps, combined with market research and analysis, will play a huge role in determining how and where you communicate your brand to reach your target audience effectively.

The following will be the most important points to discuss when planning communication strategies:

Your company’s mission statement, which you can easily derive from your purpose;

The benefits your customers will get from your business, which is also answered at the beginning of this process (the answers to the why’s)

Your chosen platforms and the appropriate media for each

Your calls to action – what goals do you have, and how do you plan to entice your audience?

Branding : Target the Youth Market

As a Brand Manager myself, I always try to find ways to reach a certain segment of the target market, here I have come up with one of those bulk of the consumer market which is the youth, what makes them embrace a brand, recognize and gives preference over other brands.  The Youth market is a big chunk of the market pie and for brands and companies not to understand them is a complete abandonment of one brands goal of staying ahead.

So fundamentally, how can a brand be cool for the youth market? How can it successfully emulate and embrace the youth’s cultural codes of cool?  Here are what I have learned by doing a thorough research on the youth market.  Coolness is key to reach this broad spectrum of the youth culture.  Hope this will serve companies and brand managers to catapult their own brands into this cool, hip market.

1. Act, don’t tell

Brands’ actions will earn respect far more than their words. Channel V’s approach to improving women’s safety through an interactive app instills the brand with coolness, inherently communicating the safety message without being preachy. Cool acts like these are a shorthand that convey a brand’s principles to users.

2. Evolve: It’s the only constant

For the easily bored youth who gets the point in 140 characters or less, brands need to be fast and ever changing to stay interesting. Companies and brands has to do this remarkably well through its consistently evolving brand narrative that stays in sync with what’s top-of-mind for younger generations.

3. Stay true to your roots

While evolution is critical to survival, staying in character is just as crucial. Brands that step too far out of their zones to capitalize on a clever youth story will often face ridicule. Diet Coke tried to be hip with its You’re on Coke brand campaign but ended up with more trouble than it bargained for. Straying from a brand’s DNA is totally uncool.

4. Create tribes

The ideology of the brand combines doing good with looking good, inducing younger generations to sport the brand logo and demonstrate their belief in the brand. This creates a sense of belongingness to the youth culture that they can call their own and identifies to their generation.

5. Give customers control

Brands that act as a platform for youth to express themselves in unique, personal ways often have a distinct advantage when it comes to being considered cool

6. Don’t sell, integrate

Brands that become a seamless part of youths’ lives foster the strongest bonds. Condom brand Skore accomplishes this by connecting to the very progressive and experimental youth generation through its mobile app, providing tips and tricks to spice up one’s sex life.

7. Be humorous and have fun

Bring some fun into the daily lives of the young through adventure, surprise, and entertainment. Gamifying otherwise boring and repetitive activities is one easy way to do this. Brands can also use color and graphics to connect to the youth culture. We accomplish this through brand’s quirky, eye-catching, and bold look and feel.

8. Take a stand

If brands dare to say what others will not or take a stand on a topic that is uncouth, they often grab the attention of the younger generations.

Conclusion

Following the cool toolkit is not about prescribing to a firm set of rules. Rather, each mantra in the toolkit is meant to help brands guide their actions while also enabling them to remain relevant. By considering the mantras in tandem with a brand’s promise, products, target audience, and societal context, brand managers can help increase their brand’s cool quotient and gain new admiration from the youth market.

A word of caution: If you’re trying too hard, it probably isn’t cool.