Building a brand can be a tough and arduous task. It involves finding the heart and soul of a business and is very much an art form. However, focusing on key aspects can help strengthen and build a better brand. These 4 steps will help you find and create a better brand for your next venture or small business.
1. Find Your Brand’s Experience
Every small business or big offers some kind of emotional experience. Whether your business sells toilet paper or beach-front resort properties your business offers an emotional experience. Some are flashy and exciting experiences but most of the time they aren’t. One exercise to find your business’s emotional core is by asking “5 whys”. Take the product or service your business offer and ask yourself “why?” 5 times and almost every time you should come to an emotional response of some sort. Many times you will reach it before the 5th why?
Once you hone in on the emotion you want to inspire think about what processes are used to bring out that desired emotional response. If the emotional response is to “comfort” for a toilet paper company, use that emotion and connect it to the experience you are truly offering. So when it comes to advertising toilet paper, make the core message, creative, and aesthetic about keeping customers clean and comfortable. Finding this point is a driving point for your brand and will help guide you much later on down the road.
2. Find Your Singing Voice
Every brand has to sing its song to be found and appreciated. Without people being able to find your business they will be without your solution/product and you will be without customers. This certainly is not the ideal situation, unless you want to go bankrupt. The 2nd key aspect of a brand is to find your voice. This is how you will want to be perceived by the community and how you will act inside that community. There isn’t a wrong answer here as long as you are goal is not to be evil, your voice matches the emotion you want to bring forth, and you commit. Many products and services have people that stand on the far side of the spectrum from nice and friendly restaurants to restaurants that treat customers rudely intentionally or promote you being fat. In this manner as long as you don’t shy away from yourself and own your brand voice you will be good.
3. Be Good
Lastly, be good. Even if you want to ride the fine line between being mean or rude to your customers you have to be good to them. You need to treat them well. Take their emotions and the hole you are fulfilling in their lives into consideration at all turns. Though being good in your customers’ eyes is of utmost importance it’s the last step here because if you don’t know what emotion you’re offering, or voice, and can’t stick with it you will fall apart.
4. Never Lose Sight of your Brand
Once you have found your emotional connection with your audience and established your voice now it’s the hard part… Sticking to it! This is probably the most important part of your brand. It is also the part where many struggle and fall apart. Once you have your brand logo, experience, and website set now all you have to do is use them. In a small business, this is easier but there are pitfalls. In a small business, you have no corporate office breathing down your neck to go against the brand “this one time”. So sticking to your brand and voice is all up to the owner and the marketers that spread the good word about your business.
Keeping these 4 steps in mind when you are crafting your brand will help you stand out amongst the competition. Making you more authentic and ultimately leading to greater success!
If you want to dig deeper into your brand reach out to us at 717-819-6885
