Brand Development

3 Questions to Ask When Building Your Own Brand

Before you lay down any solid ground work for your business, you have to come up with a brand. Why is this such a quintessential step? Because your brand is your business’ soul. It’s the personality that separates it from the rest of the crowd. Without a discernable, unique, vivid brand, your business is an empty husk.

However, creating a brand from scratch is a tricky task. No one ever said branding was easy, but it is rewarding…still, it’s only fulfilling if you know how to do it the right way. Otherwise you’ll have a lot of balled up scratch paper sitting haphazardly around you office trash can, covered in half-baked ideas that don’t go anywhere.

Like all artforms, branding comes from an idea — an inspiration. In order to cultivate that inspiration, you have to ask yourself these three important branding questions. If you don’t know the answers, you don’t have anything close to a workable brand.

Question 1: Why do you want to create this company or business?

This may sound like a simple question, but try to answer it in short-form essay format. It’s not enough to say “to sell stuff” or “to make a quick buck” even if those answers are true. No, branding requires something a little more raw and personal than that.

Say you want to start a business selling a new type of food tray for toddlers and infants. This might be your quick idea at a cash cow, but think of the brand itself: what does that type of product say to consumers? It’s a helpful product, meant to nurture infants and appeal to frustrated, tired mothers. This kind of branding image should be soft and maternal — maybe rounded and green in color.

Branding comes about when you truly get to the heart of why a business exists and what the product gives to people. This is the heart of any good branding schematic.

Question 2: How do you appeal to your audience?

Revisit the above toddler food tray example. For a product like this, the beneficiary is actually the mother even though the baby is using the tangible item. You’ll notice marketing shifts like this based on who the consumer is, not who the recipient is. Toddler’s TV shows appeal to both mother and child because both audiences consume the content, while only the mother is the true consumer of the feeding tray. In these examples, the toddler receives the product but the branding is different based on the audience.

You have to learn what your audience wants and how to appeal to them? Who is your audience? How does your branding work to identify with their needs?

Question 3: Does your branding leave room for growth and development.

Let’s look at that example one last time. You start out manufacturing baby trays, but maybe one day you’ll want to expand to include more baby-related items to your product line…does your current branding allow for this?

Products are products, but brands are brands. A good branding concept leaves room for expansion. Coca Cola isn’t just Coke Zero — the former is the branding umbrella, while the second is a specific product that can be branded.

Thus, it’s important to give yourself a general concept that leaves room for growth. Think of it as planning for your business future.

These 3 Brand Success Stories Will Inspire You to Greatness

These 3 Brand Success Stories Will Inspire You
Is your brand stagnating? Are you having trouble getting your branding to a place where you want it to be? Maybe you’re just uninspired so your creative branding brain is suffering. This is normal in business. We can’t be on all the time, so don’t stress too much.

Instead of focusing on your anxiety, instead focus on getting inspired. Sometimes what you need to get your branding mojo back is to simply looking to others for ideas and inspiration. Influential branding success stories are out there – in fact, there’s more than you can ever imagine. Here are three branding success stories that may just inspire you to make your own brand greater than ever possible.

Shopulse

Have you ever heard of the phrase “branding is so easy, even a kid could do it?” Probably not, but that doesn’t mean it’s not something that’s impossible. If you’re familiar with the shopping site Shopulse, you’ll know it’s a site famed for its great flash deals, but what you may not know is it’s the brainchild of a 16-year-old boy.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle is a teen from Moncton, Canada that’s had business aspirations since they first reached the double-digit age bracket. Over the years, he considered the problem that many retailers face: inventory management. Shopulse takes excess inventory from suppliers and uses this acquisition concept to sell goods cheaper to consumers while eliminating the back-stock problems of other businesses.

This kind of brand concept is attractive to consumers who want value both from the financial aspect of their products and the purpose of selling them. It’s also important to note that it’s impressive that Raphael has accomplished so much for someone so young. This is another lesson to learn – the more unlikely your success story, the more consumers will root for you.

 

Hootsuite

One of the best ways to brand yourself is to attach your own image to a popular trend. Not only does this boost the searchability of your campaign, it also infuses some personality and humor into your brand and business. When you show that you’re conscious of pop culture and can take a joke, your business is seen as more personable.

Take Hootsuite’s lead – after they noticed the huge popularity of the HBO drama “Game of Thrones,” the social media management company rebranded the trend as a viral video, “A Game of Social Thrones.” This video focuses on business value while still being humorous and light.

 

Disney

Maybe Disney has a head start with brand image and loyalty compared to other companies, but it doesn’t mean that they can fall asleep on the job. You may not have looked at it like this before, but Disney is one of the largest lifestyle brands in the world, they just don’t sell services or products that offer a tangible help – they sell experiences, magic and family happiness.

This isn’t just something that they do through their cruises and Oscar-winning films, either. Disney offers blog posts and other online content that furthers their family-friendly and experience-heavy brand. What can you take from this? Three things: brand consistency is key to customer loyalty, lifestyle branding is something you should focus on and promote this brand across a variety of mediums.

When you look to other brands for inspiration, always keep these questions in mind: what is this brand doing that could be valuable to me, and how can I take this success and turn it into my own?