How to build a brand that people will love

Brand - noun; the emotional and psychological relationship you have with your customers.

Just within a decade, we’ve seen a shift in branding that was once reserved for massive corporations move down market to anyone who sets up a website and sells a product—they are now brands.

What this means for you is that you’re able to build mindshare with potential customers that previously wouldn’t have paid your company a second thought.

While this nomenclature doesn’t have any effect on how you actually build your business, this article will guide you through several pillars of building a successful brand, which is vital in the modern business environment.

Defining Your Brand Identity

We like to say that it’s one thing to build a business, but an entirely different task to build a brand. In this section, we explore how you actually start to build an identity for the brand you’re working on.

Brand Foundational Elements

In order to build a brand, you first need to start with why.

• What is the mission, vision, values of your brand?
• What are you looking to achieve or show the world?
• What do you want people to say about your brand?

While it may seem silly to define things like mission and vision, you would be surprised at the number of small and medium sized businesses that don’t have these things defined. For your first brand, put together a mission, a vision, and a set of values that will guide you through every decision you make.

Your Brand Story

In all honesty, you may never truly define your brand identity without first understanding who your brand serves. To stand out in today’s crowded market, your business needs to be aimed at providing value for a specific audience.

In order to discover more about your target customer, you’ll need to dig deep in order to find their pain points and goals, and take a very specific approach with your brand.

That is where your brand story and values come into play—even more than the products and features you sell.

In order to define your brand story and values, put yourself in your customers shoes and ask yourself what your brand will mean for them.

• How will it shape their company and/or identity?
• How will interacting with your brand create a better life for them?
• What does your brand stand for? What side does it take?

Brand Positioning

As you build out your marketing materials and website branding, what will make your business stand out from the other options you potential customers have to choose from?

This is an important question you have to consider as it seems like every day there are more and more options for different audiences. We think this is a great development but it adds the difficulty of a rapidly expanding market.

That’s why you need to create a brand that will help your company stand out from the crowd. This process is known as creating brand positioning.

We like to keep things as simple as possible, so we have a few basic questions you can answer in order to come up with your brand positioning:

• What is unique about your brand, compared to your competition?
• If your company didn’t exist, what current pain points or needs of customers would not get solved?
• What perspectives have gotten your company to where it is today?
• What will get your company to the next level?

Developing Your Brand Visuals

While your brand’s mission, vision, story, and customers serve as the backbone of your brand’s identity, you need to also keep in mind that other people (potential customers and website visitors) will see your website and brand as what is visually on the site.

To take one step at a time, we suggest following a brief that can get your designers and your internal team with a better understanding of what the website will look like once it is finished. This is known as a brand style guide.

Your Growing Story will show you the steps you need to take to create a brand style guide that incorporates not only the brand colors, but also the typography choices, your logo, and your brand visuals brief—a PDF deck that you can show to your internal team or freelancers you hire to help with your website and branding.

Creating Your Brand Style Guide

Here are a few brand style guides that you can draw inspiration from as you create your own brand style.

Gradient created a brand book using a simple monochrome color scheme and a selection of engaging, bold fonts.

Coast Studio integrated brand book elements into a robust web design that conveys energy, passion, and purpose. By utilizing a prominent color and shape scheme, everything comes together to exhibit a favorable brand resonance.

Most important when putting together your own brand style guide, do what feels right. You want to have this guide so designers and other team members can get a feel of your brand before jumping into a web page design—but since this guide will never get seen by your customers, do what makes you and your coworkers feel most comfortable when you are putting things together.

Brand Strategy for Startups

One area where we see new and aspiring business owners go wrong is their assumptions and perspectives around what brand building really “means” and what it will takes to actually implement it within their business.

In this section, we will unpack a few of the key brand strategy concepts that almost every business owner will want to learn and master in order to build a brand that not only creates product-market fit but also has the potential to scale for years to come.

Positioning Strategy

If you had to boil this all down to one single point, this aspect is the most important: defining where your brand stands in prospective customers minds relative to each of your competitors.

In order to really put to work what a brand positioning statement can do for you, there are a few key components to unpack and exercises to complete around your target customer, your brand’s objectives and promise, and your differentiators alongside competitors.

• The more you have an understanding of who your target customers are, the easier it will be to define a position that will appeal to and attract your brand’s ideal customers.
• Your position will need to appeal to your customers on both a rational level (is your brand a fit to solve their problem or pain point?) and a emotional level (does your brand create an identity that has them feeling and being perceived a certain way to those around them? relatives, friends, coworkers).

While a full dive into positioning starts with deep discovery into your customers’ needs, it’s also important to orient your core focuses within the broader market. This involves looking at your brand hand in hand with specific and similar competitors—both who operate in a symmetrically similar fashion to the way you intend to run your brand, as well as others who identify with your target market in a similar, but differentiated way.

We’re sorry if this sounds trite (err no, we are not sorry…conceptual learning is pivotal—take the due diligence and do it right), but there are simply no shortcuts to do this part of the exercise layer by layer, so your understanding of the broader industry that you’re planning on entering (or to grow and flourish within).

We find working through a Positioning Statement document like this to be an excellent tool to help you work through these discoveries and move towards an answer:

Long-Term Demand Creation Strategy

Certainly any and every business is trying to ship their product (generating near-term revenue) and has a longer-term view of where they want to scale and position their business.

A strong brand is one fundamental key for enabling you to do just that by way of the brand recognition, product usage level, viral mechanics, and other components that get unlocked when you effectively dial in your brand’s unique visual vibe and customer appeal in the market.

When you stop and think about how you want to position your brand, the questions you need to ask in order to unearth the most powerful answers, and then subsequently the tactics and go-to-market strategies that will unlock this vision you have, there are two essential components of it:

1. Leveraging the thought leadership capabilities you and your team possess in order to demonstrate how to overcome prospects’ pain points using both branded and non-branded materials. Lean heavily on your brand as a connector of people who are frustrated prospects and those looking to share a solution to those in-need.
2. Anything and everything related to actual product adoption by new customers, which will include your landing pages, marketing and advertising tactics, as well as other elements you’ll need to have in order to track and measure your initial forays into capturing the attention of your target market and having them sustainably choose your product over your competitors.

Your growth strategy around your brand will encompass one small part of your overall acquisition strategy for your product and company.

We think this graph of growth models, composed by Alex Schultz (current CMO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook), shows the 3 essential structures that startups (in reality any business but added the parentheses around startups for effect 🙂 need to understand in order to maximize their product launch and subsequent market position:

[Images Source: The Secret to Stellar Growth Advice: Blend Science and Art]

Brand and Startup Train of Thought

Just to drive this point further home (yeah, we have quite a bit to share about how to build a brand)—we think an exercise like this one is important to help guide you towards forming a clear and confident point of view on those pieces so that you bring this worldly perspective into the decisions you end up making as you build your business, first business brand, and products you bring to market within said brand.

Not too heavy (we don’t mean to turn you away from actually reading or learning this stuff, as it is soo important), but there are a few important books that we think would be good first steps to read:

• The Brand Gap
• Start With Why
• Zero To One
• The Lean Startup
• Made To Stick
• Life After The Death Of Branding

We strongly believe in the above assertion of “embrace tension”—in today’s startup world, businesses are pushed to make a choice on the side of the following two marketing methods:

• Direct-response marketing—an approach that prioritizes creating quantifiable revenue in the here and now (through things like AdWords, Media Buys, etc).
• Brand marketing—advertising that is more focused on long-term growth of the company and development of customer loyalty and brand ambassadors.

Media and other non-shy brand-building channels are seen as “outmoded” and “obsolete”, even given the incredible growth stories that legacy brands were able to utilize to grow their businesses over several published case studies.

In zero to one terminology, both Reid and Blake advocate for their audience to not focus on channel-based marketing growth and instead focus on the following question:

“Are you creating a new market, or are you trying to steal share from an existing one?”

If we were to start a new company today, often we can identify unique points of differentiation in order to create a new (or enhance our unique take on an existing one) brand.

By answering this question thoroughly and succinctly, you’ll have a grounded perspective to connect all the other strategy tactics and marketing activities that you end up implementing in your start up.

Implementing Your Brand Across Your Business

Once you’ve gone through the hardwork of building a brand strategy and identity, as well as effectively communicating this to your team and any designers/agencies you hire to help with the creation of your website/_other marketing assets, there are several small factors that need to be remembered when you are implementing your brand across those different business functions and departments.

There was a great post on HBR we read that talked about What the owner of a luxury shop can teach you about branding, where Kaas Tailored the author went into a few different factors of implementing an effective brand based on the retailer she was visiting throughout the world.

One aspect that she talked about was layering. One great quote to sum this up is the following:

”Every time a customer experiences, discovers, and feels kd3—be it through the product, service, relationship, conversation, interaction, technology, or touchpoint—the impression adds up. It’s these impressions that, like layers of paint, weave over time to create the robust and resonant brand known as kd3, which is active not only in the physical space of the store but in the digital and the social space as well.”

One of the most important pieces that you can take from Kaas, is the concept of both the digital and social layer in addition to the physical paint layer.

While your business may operate in a physical store, the importance of implementing an online business model is simply too important to ignore. Don’t get confused, the layering that Kaas observed and wrote about is what we at AS have realized that a growing number of our friends and family now shop—almost at least half of the purchases they make in a store, they go home and get the same item on Amazon or order more of it through an online retailer. They like to touch and feel things, but love the ease of buying things online.

If the market is dictating to also play in this space, you can’t ignore it.

Yes, the words that potential and current customers see on web pages, marketing materials, and the actual products are important to how they perceive your brand—but what about the visuals?

You’d be surprised at how powerful of a difference one or two quotations you include on your web page can have on marketing materials—along with other ways to improve emotive aspects of your customers’ journeys towards a new favorite brand.

Check out this past article we wrote about the spread of design and how customers have become numb to it—it is worth exploring further in order to gain a point or two on how you end up deciding on the visuals you want to use when customers interact with your brand across different sales and marketing channels.

Lastly (and maybe most importantly in this day and age), an effective brand is also one where the company stands for doing more than only selling products.

Having your company and brand take a visible stand in not only supporting local community movements, but also standing up for things that are important on a nation (and even international) level is core to the ethos of your brand and ensuring you will attract customers willing to do business with brands that shows the world it is more than only trying to make a profit.

The importance of giving back goes a long way these days.

An Excellent Startup Brand = Distilled Signal + Memorable Breakthrough + Postive Association

The author of Contagious: How to Deliver a ‘Viral’ Message updated his asset with an equation differentiating what memorable and powerful brands possess versus other brands.

Have you solved for this equation in order to define what you want your first brand to feel like from the standpoint of your audience?

Creating Signal/Association:

Not only will you need to have a deep understanding of what a positive emotional connection around your brand will mean for helping you create a set of values and visual identity that your target market can identify with and appeal to, but the other aspect is that you will also need to build your brand in such a way where the association that is developed will be able to stay with customers no matter what and for a long time.

Your brand will change and evolve over the years—sometimes even months! And that is ok. As you build your brand identity, we suggest going through a similar facet Microsoft does as well:

Meetings are memorable when:

This also goes back to the first point that we wrote about—the difference between a good brand and a great one is defining the emotive and human feelings that you want to create around the idea of people doing business with your brand.

While we covered what will likely create that positive association in a prospective customers’ minds, you should also explore the other side of the coin as well:

How do my (!not potential customers, however all the same, important to account for in your branding strategy)_feel about me creating a brand that identifies with these customers and not them?_

Expanding this thought further, we think answering tough and honest questions that are core to some strong-running debates today, will enable you to unlock your true feelings, and the subsequent answers that will influence brand decisions for many years to come:

• non-Is equality more important or community?
• non-Is peace more important or justice?
• non-Is economic efficiency more important or benefit to society?
• non-Is technological efficiency more important or greater human connection?

So why go through such tree-hugging-diving-deeping-exercises? The fact of the matter is if you can arrive at honest answers for yourself, your own opinions and feelings around why this or that is important—the more clear you will arrive at tangible visual brand assets (like your logo) or aspects of your product that you end up building out that reflects your values and opinions about the world.

Your answers will help your team (as well as help you!) think about how to integrate your identity and desired customer outcome not only into your product development, but your sales and marketing activities and your websites copy and brand voice through emails and support—the list of impacts goes on!

Conclusion

We hope you now have a better understanding—and have been inspired in at least one way—about how you can build a great brand that people will love, today and years in the future.

The brand you create is so important not to only your prospective customers, but to the team that you end of building around your first idea—as well as an inspiring beacon for you to come back to whenever you are having a tough week or are struggling to ship the next product update.