We now inhabit a universe of limitless supply.
Anyone can launch a business in a few clicks, and anyone may develop products, establish an online store, run advertisements, and connect with a market online. This implies that firms are oversaturating every market with identical goods, services, and solutions.
Therefore, your brand must be one that your customers care passionately about and connect with to stand out.
We’ll share some advice and techniques in this post to assist you in developing your brand. These observations are all drawn from our brand-new podcast, Breaking Brand, which is available for listening now.
What is a brand, exactly?
Let’s first define a brand before diving into some ideas and approaches for building a brand that your customers will genuinely care about.
The term “brand” is frequently employed in modern marketing. But what does “brand” actually mean? That question seems straightforward but quite complicated, and there isn’t a universal solution.
A brand is “the intangible sum of a product’s features,” according to David Ogilvy.
A brand is a person’s instinctive reaction to a good or service, according to the author and speaker Marty Neumeier, who writes about branding and innovation.
And Breaking Brand star Camille Baldwin, a Pattern Brands founding team member, explains, “Brand to me his identity. It includes everything that goes into forming your identity, including your ideas, values, and sense of self.
Let’s start with some lessons from Breaking Brand that can help you create a memorable brand that stands out from the crowd.
Building a memorable brand: 4 steps
1. Be aware of what matters to your audience
Most people are excellent at outlining the “what” and “how” of their businesses. For instance, describing the what and the how is quite straightforward if you run an accounting firm.
You assist people and organizations in making sure their finances are in order.
While the specifics may vary, it usually involves account management where you help with billing or balance the books every month or three months.
Moving from the what and the how to the why will make one accounting firm stand out from its rivals.
The “why” is what will persuade a prospective client to choose your company over a rival. The “why” is what makes you stand out.
Customers often don’t care too much about how you carry out your duties, including the methods you employ internally and the instruments you employ. Why does this company important in my life? Is it what consumers care about?
To return to the accounting example, the “why” may not be as clear-cut given that we had covered the “what” and “how.” For instance, if an accounting firm mostly works with small businesses, the “why” might give the business owner more time to spend with friends and family.
At Buffer, we frequently conduct research interviews with consumers to better understand how our product benefits them and how they perceive its advantages. To observe how Buffer fits into our clients’ routines and workflows, we’ve even sent team members to spend the day with them at their workplaces.
And in Breaking Brand, Pattern Brands co-founder Emmet Shine discusses the significance of understanding the client when creating a brand that consumers would care about.
Sweetgreen, a restaurant chain known for its nutritious salads and grain bowls, was one of the companies Emmett helped market before he founded Pattern Brands.
Emmett and his team spent a great deal of time dining at Sweetgreen eateries while developing the Sweetgreen brand and attempting to understand its customers. They would see how the employees made salads hear how customers made their orders, and get a full understanding of how the business operated.
In essence, they were attempting to grasp every nuance of what made Sweetgreen unusual and distinctive.
This made it possible for the team to create a brand that really highlighted what customers wanted from Sweetgreen and assisted them in discovering their “why.”
Currently, Sweetgreen operates over 75 restaurants and produced over £100 million in revenue in 2018. Therefore, it is evident that their brand matches what customers want.
2. Determine your company’s technical, functional, and psychological advantages.
After conducting your customer research, you can start to consider the many benefits your company might provide to customers.
Camille Baldwin, Pattern’s VP of Brand, explains how the brand pyramid framework may help you determine those advantages in episode one of Breaking Brand.
Although brand pyramids have been present since the late 1990s, they continue to be important in brand planning. You can use pyramids to get answers to key questions about your company’s positioning in the market. A sample brand pyramid from Instead Knowledge is shown below:
The benefits your company provides customers on a technical, functional, and emotional level are three of the main components of any brand pyramid.
technical advantages
The technical advantages of your brand (labeled “Features and qualities” in the above illustration) are at the base of your pyramid. In essence, this will assist you in defining what your business does. At this point, you should inquire as to how this company benefits its clients. How will it generate income? What do we provide?
For instance, at Buffer, we would claim that managing all of your social media content and profiles in one location is the technical benefit of our platform.