Brand Development Process: 5 steps to Create an effective strategy
In today’s competitive landscape, many businesses are vying to increase brand awareness and their ability to create personal connections with their customers. A strong brand bridges the gap between a company and its target audience. It goes beyond the logos, guidelines, messaging and marketing strategies.
Developing your brand is integral to its success and long lasting future, especially within a crowded environment. Yet, many brands are short on where to start and more importantly, what to improve.
In this article, we will help you create an effective brand development strategy where each step plays its role in shaping the future of your brand.
What is Brand Development?
Brand development is a strategic process that enhances and strengthens your brand’s reputation. It involves aligning your brand with a set of business objectives that can be communicated to your target audience.
This means that you need to work on creating an effective brand strategy that ensures you’re on the right path to achieving your objectives. This includes but is not limited to communicating through your logo, tagline, website, messaging, blogging, client stories and a whole lot more!
The strategy you implement is likely going to be refined over time as the behaviour of your customer’s changes. Therefore, we encourage you to continually communicate with your brand & marketing changes about any new trends and changes in buying habits that can help you to adapt but still stay on course for your goals.
What is the difference between brand development and branding?
These words are easily mixed up which is understandable, they are intertwined with one another but different.
Branding is how you advertise your brand to your target audience. This involves improving how you communicate with customers such as the website, logo, messaging and other forms of advertising.
Brand Development is going beyond that and looking to build trust with your customers.
The goal here is to create an emotional connection with your target audience. Now, there is no time frame on how long this can be achieved as you’ll continue to want to build on it for the future.
Ultimately, branding is a part of your brand development but both require different strategies to achieve. You should work together on both as this will make both more powerful and effective in achieving your business objectives.
Why is brand development important?
If you want to build a successful brand, chances are you will need to develop your brand over time. You will need to differentiate your brand from other competitors and showcase your value proposition.
This plays a big role in improving your reputation, increasing your authority and building a loyal customer base. If you take each component on its own, it’s no good to focus on them separately.
They should work together seamlessly and be involved in somewhat of a checklist when you’re creating your strategy. In doing so, businesses will have a stronger foothold in their industry, be able to understand their customers better and increase revenue.
A 5-Step Brand Development Strategy
Competitor Positioning
The first part is to understand how your business will be different from rival companies within your niche. It involves reviewing your competitor’s marketing strategies and working out what makes your business have a bigger IT factor.
Research your competitor’s brand, who do they work with? How fast are they growing? What are they doing that’s going well and that is underperforming? Begin to answer these questions and utilise the information to perfect your new brand strategy
Brand Perception Mapping
Discuss with your brand & marketing teams about how you want to be viewed by your customers. This should follow along the lines of your core values and what you want your brand to be remembered for. Ask yourselves this question, how would you want your customers to describe your brand?
Target Customers & Personas
Define your ideal customer. This should be shaped for the benefit of your product/ service. If you’re pitching your product to someone, who would you expect to benefit from its use or whom you’d like to work with.
For example, if you sell a skincare product which benefits anti-ageing. You want to create a list of personas that would use the product. Whether it’s designed for men or women, make this evident.
Create a list of questions like the following:
How old are these customers?
How do they buy?
What is their job role?
What industry do they work in?
Do they use social media? If so, which channel is preferable?
Why are their challenges/ pain points?
The more your audience feels you understand them, the more engaged and interested they will be in the things you’re saying.
Define what you want to be known for and what you don’t.
Map out a Customers Journey
This part of your strategy is to delve deeper into how your customers engage with your brand. These interactions can vary from your brand, service and or product. This will enable your business to understand the needs and wants of your customers.
In doing so, providing you food for thought with how you market to your audience. For example, if some of your customers use social media, do you have the right content to confidently communicate with them and encourage them to click on your site.
A customer journey map will build you a visual representation of these touchpoints, detailing what a customer needs at each stage of their journey. This can be pivotal in changing your marketing strategy and ensuring your customers have the best experience when they interact with your brand.
Create a Meaningful Brand Story
By this stage, you should take all of the key points from the previous steps as this will help you craft a powerful and memorable brand story. This story should include your product/service, core values, target audience and value proposition.
Combine these together with a bit of personality and clear messaging and you’re onto a winning brand development strategy. As suggested at the beginning of this article, you will need to review your brand development strategy over time but this so that you’re evolving along with your customers.
Brand Development with Harrison
At Harrison, we are at the forefront of brand development which has enabled us to help our clients differentiate themselves through having a coherent Brand DNA, storytelling and compelling differences.
Don’t take our word for it, the clients we work with speak for themselves. Over the past 30 years working with clients such as Nando’s and Hilton and Wyndham Hotels and Resorts.
We have added millions of dollars to their valuations through innovation, new sales, differentiation and increased perceived customer value.
We can provide you with a number of new ways to help you build a new and relevant brand for tomorrow’s customers
Contact us now for a no-obligation brand review.