When you try to build a brand that genuinely reflects your personality, the first thing you should aim for is authenticity. It differentiates you from your competitors, and it allows your clients to reach you at a more personal level.
Deciding how to launch your brand in 2024 may feel challenging. In fact, for small businesses and individuals, brands can often seem the domain of big multinational corporations. However, that could not be further from the truth.
Defining Branding
A brand is not just a name. It is the entire process through which your organization connects with the world outside it. To paraphrase, your brand immediately recollects for your consumers your business practices. Hence, a brand is dictated by many factors such as your website, business card, online and offline reviews, to name a few. That is why it is crucial to associate colours, designs and phrases that you trust in, and they then should reflect the vision and mission of your business to evoke yourself in your customer.
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Challenges to Building a Brand
When we talk about how to launch your brand in 2024, you might do well to follow some of the steps we list below and take it step-by-step. Break all the creative elements of the process into different stages. Revisiting some of the steps multiple times should not be a cause of discouragement; in fact, that is only natural. Some of the decisions you take at the outset will not match other steps that you decide to take down the line, and you would have to reframe them again. However, this list can help you devise a rough framework and prepare you for the work that comes ahead.
Steps for Building a Brand
The first step involves the target audience and competition analysis. Market research is fundamental in any business, and there is no way you can ignore it when it comes to branding. The first question you must ask yourself is regarding the identification of your target audience. After that, you must focus on creating a unique selling point. That means that you must prove that your product or service is different to existing brands in a way that services some unmet need.
Endeavoring to answer these questions will create for you the right mentality to seek out potential customers. They will also inform you how the competitor is approaching them. In this way, you can get a preliminary direction to your branding process. At the outset, you can dump all styles of brands that have been claimed or previously rejected. You can also get feedback from your median customer about images and graphics for your brand. Taken together, it helps you create a mental framework to proceed further.
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The second step is brand definition. A generic brand generally does not appeal because it is not focused enough on the target audience. Hence, it is important to make something that connects with your ideal customer and simultaneously aligns with your mission and vision statements that you may have already created. Given below are a few ways to fine-tune your approach.
Associate Words with your business. Define the essential characteristics of your business. A business that deals with knowledge and information will differ from one that deals in fast-moving consumer goods. See what tone suits it; sometimes it needs to be serious, and sometimes it is quite the opposite. Try to zero in on a few words only for your business, so that you can distil the essence of your operations succinctly. Define your audience to get a better handle on this process. The voice and the tone can help you in both imagery and replication.
Do a value proposition. Simply put, it means that you define why your business adds value in the first place. In other words, define what it does to your potential clients that other competitors cannot do. It should ideally help them surmount some obstacle that others cannot. For this, it is absolutely vital that you know your product or service inside out, so that when asked why it is better than the others, you can explain it in very few words. If it requires too many sentences to explain, customers will lose interest and stick to existing brands.
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Tweet about it. Social media is ubiquitous these days, and you cannot avoid it. Combine the two elements listed above and it should give you the core reason for your business and the value it brings to the table. You must be able to express yourself in 280 characters or less. This is not a one-time effort and needs to be done continuously. Practice it from the start, and slowly, you will master the skills needed to do it regularly. It will provide briefs about your brand which can then form the thread for longer advertisements, emails, newsletters, to name a few.
The third step is to select a name. At this point, hopefully, you will have a pretty good idea of where you want your business to stand. Hence, it is now time to name your brand. We wish to reiterate again that names and logos are not enough, but a name still needs to be distinctive and memorable. It needs to have the added quality to convey most of your business values by a single utterance. However, it is not what necessarily gives the body to your brand. Choosing a name involves selecting something that no one has ever used before or is currently using. Furthermore, it should be easy to remember, and it should not be constrictive that you cannot grow your business with it. Thinking of a name is not as easy as it sounds, so below are a few hints from our side.
Use a word combination and see if it works. There are many famous examples of this, such as Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube. The brand names carry zest, and once you have got it, they are difficult to forget or associate with anything else. They should be difficult to replicate as well and to see if you can use this, you may attempt to combine some of the words you came up earlier in the process.
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The next way to go about this is to take a common word. Think of Apple, Blackberry, Slack, to name just three, that are common words but convey something more than their original meaning. There are many ways that common words can get associated with a brand. Some can invoke metaphorical comparisons, while others themselves become the primary meaning. Just like before, see the words in the previous steps and see if any of them works.
Another great way to do this is to select an abbreviation or acronym. Think of HBO, NBC, GAIL, to name a few. They are easy to remember and are almost never spoken in full. These are very useful when you are not able to settle on a name. Because they are short, they are often also easier to remember. Another way of abbreviating a word and creating a brand is by removing a vowel and keeping the word structure so that the pronunciation remains the same. Think of brands like Tumblr, Vectr, Flickr, to name a few. It is essential to check every single name after you think about it and discard it immediately if taken in all the steps above. You do not want to go through this whole process only to find the name of your choice is taken. Not only does it duplicate work, it can really put you off the process.
The fourth step, after selecting a name, is choosing brand colors and fonts. While a name is important, it often comes as a surprise to entrepreneurs that your brand’s visual rooting is more important. That is what jumps into customers and moves your products with them.
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Remember that when you choose colors, they should emote. This can often lead to a wide variety of choices, but there are ways to narrow down the options. One oft-cited example concerns the fast-food industry, which generally incorporate shades of red, orange or yellow in their products. All of these colors convey warmth, which can drive up your hunger impulses. Remember that just as the colors themselves are important, so are the shades they come in as they differentiate your brand and make it stand out. Sometimes, the color combination can push your brand over the top. See what works for you and, more importantly, your target clients. Use some core colors and add flourishes to it to accentuate it. However, once you are done, a vital check is to ensure legibility. The best way to verify this is by pasting black and white fonts over your brand colors and seeing if they are visible.
This brings us to fonts. Fonts are generally not as direct a message as colors, but many a time, they play more on the subconscious. For example, consider that there are many fonts which either have serif or are sans-serif. The former is more traditional and therefore conveys trust and dependability. On the other hand, the latter is more modern and conveys innovation and invention. But let these not be the limit. Combine multiple types of fonts to create a totally unique brand imagery. Combine fonts from different languages if it works for you. It does no harm to check your competitors and the fonts they have used but ensure that they only inform but do not influence your choices. Remember also that fonts are not just for the heading, but also for the body. Ensure to have a different style for the body, which makes it stand out, without the potential volume putting the reader off.
The fifth step in the whole process is to write a tagline. Taglines should be brief yet descriptive. It should be memorable as it will go into advertisements, with your logo, in webpages, in headers and pretty much everywhere your company needs to brand and market itself. A good idea is to make the slogan slightly accusative, which makes your customer take action. Remember, though, that while this is important, by no means is it fixed. As businesses grow, visions and missions change. Thus, you should not be hesitant to experiment with this. However, there are times when a tagline itself becomes legendary. Think Vorsprung durch Technik for Audi.
The sixth step is to associate images. Beyond the logo, images can often help associate the customers with the brands. A very powerful example of this are the Nike or Adidas promotions. They have a defined theme and consistent messaging. Go and download some images that convey your brand. Try using words from your vision and mission statements to see what goes. See what is unique and memorable. Such photos can go on all online and offline promotional materials and, therefore, should give ideas whenever you look at them. While you may begin with stock imagery, as your brand grows, it is always good to hire a personalized photographer to do the shoots.
Making your logo is the seventh step and perhaps one of the most critical too. However, people often mistake jumping directly to this step and missing all the above, which leads to unsatisfactory imagery for your brand. This happens because nice pictures are easy to draw, but making them align with everything your brand represents is tough. Since you would have already selected the color scheme by this time, it should not be too tough for you to design a logo. Ensure that it is easily identifiable even on smaller objects and does not get distorted on scaling it up or down. Make sure your brand name features naturally with the logo. Just like the slogan, do not be hesitant to modify your logo as your business grows.
The penultimate step is listing the branding assets. Once you have undertaken all the above steps, you need to make the brand solidify all your assets. That means retaining the core composition of your brand and customizing it for different forums. Some of them are websites, digital ads, video ads, social media posts, print ads, etc. Begin with your website and then work onwards from there.
The final step is to create brand guidelines. They govern when and how your brand will be used in different contexts and settings. Check your competitors or consult a professional designing firm to get an idea.
The above steps give you a ready reckoner to build a brand. It is not going to be easy, but it is definitely going to be worthwhile. If we were you, we would get started immediately.
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