Brand Values Archives : Page 4 of 6 : Persona Design

Brand Stories: Top 7 Tips for Creating a Great Brand Story

February 9, 2015/0 Comments/in Brand Personality, Brand Profiling & Positioning, Brand Story, Brand Values, Brand Voice, Branding /by Lorraine Carter

Your brand is the most powerful asset your business owns. A compelling brand will drive sustainability and long-term profits, increasing your market share and elevate your business above the competition. In order to develop, maintain, and grow your brand, you need an effective brand strategy that combines several elements—and one of the most crucial of those elements is your brand story. To quote Seth Godin “marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make but about the stories you tell.”

What is a brand story? It’s more than a quick background sketch on your About page. A great brand story taps into the emotions of your target audience, tying your company values to your brand promise and conveying the overall brand experience. Effective brand stories are evocative, relevant, and highly memorable, with the power to connect with your primary customer in a way that supports building a strong and loyal customer base.

Here are some of the elements we include or consider when creating our clients brand stories using our Brand Story Selling System™. These seven tips will also help you create your brand story so that it engages your customers, encourages brand loyalty, and ultimately helps you boost your bottom line.

Top 7 Tips for Creating a Compelling Brand Story

1. Know Your Brand’s Big “Why”

When creating your brand story, it’s essential to know your brand inside and out. This includes not only your production values and target audiences, but the reasons your brand exists. Many companies make the mistake of focusing a brand story on the what or the how of their products or services—what they do, how they help people or features and benefits—when the focus should really be on why you do what you do.

Emphasising the “big why” of your brand allows you to create an emotionally compelling, human-centric brand story. It’s important here to differentiate a brand story from marketing collateral, the aspects of your brand that convey the benefits of your products and services to your customers. The purpose of your brand story is to bring your brand to life, in a way that people can connect with and actually relate to. When you highlight the big “why” of your brand, it’s easier to create that emotional connection.

2. Set the Right Tone

The tone of your brand story should reflect the values, emotions, and experiences you want people to associate with your brand. Whether your brand is elegant and sophisticated, timeless and traditional, fun and modern, or serious and influential, your brand story needs to capture that tone with appropriate wording and imagery that reinforces your brand values.

Image via www.smilesquared.com

One effective method of brand storytelling that conveys a relevant tone is a heartfelt message from brands that are committed to making a difference in the world. Toothbrush brand Smile Squared serves as an excellent example of this—their About page tells the story of how a husband-and-wife team founded the company after travelling to disadvantaged countries and witnessing the impact of a lack of basic dental care firsthand. Smile Squared is built on a “buy one, give one” philosophy: for every toothbrush a customer buys, the company donates a toothbrush to a child in need.

Fun and humour can also create a memorable, engaging brand story that sets the tone for the brand experience. For example, DollarShaveClub.com created a fun and unique video that tells the story of their brand, which went viral and currently has more than 18 million views on YouTube.

3. Tie into Your Provenance

Placing a focus on the home location of your brand can make for a powerful and engaging brand story. Provenance is the origin location of your brand, which can mean either the geographic area of your business, or the original country or city of the company’s founders.

Many effective brands have built a brand story around provenance. The story can be general, such as brands that emphasise cultural values and originate from small towns, or region-specific, such as brand values that are tied to the perceptions of their country of origin. L’Oreal is a well-known example of brand provenance. The cosmetics company consistently ties their brand story and platform to Paris, focusing on the chic and stylish reputation of the French city to differentiate the brand.

4. Build a Brand Hero

Brand stories that revolve around a central character can create a powerful connection with your customers and strengthen brand loyalty. There are several different types of brand heroes that can be used to tell a brand story. Some of these include:

Fictional characters (Keebler Elves, Tony the Tiger)
Brand mascots (Pillsbury Dough Boy, Churchill the Bulldog)
Founder characters (Colonel Sanders)
Brand personas (Google Chrome)

A well-crafted brand hero allows your customers to connect directly and personally to your brand. The best character brand stories encapsulate your brand values and promise, and personify the aspects of your brand that set you apart from the competition.

5. Keep Your Brand Promise Consistent

Brand storytelling is a concept that should extend beyond the About page of your website. The most effective brand storytelling is woven into multiple aspects of an overall brand strategy, including social media, marketing campaigns, and even your brand tagline and slogans. In order to make your brand story work for you, it’s essential to ensure that your brand promise is presented consistently across all your brand collateral and platforms.

The Red Bull brand is an excellent example of brand story consistency. With brand values that include freedom, adventure, and extreme lifestyles consistent with the company’s energy drink offerings, Red Bull marketing campaigns continually reflect those values and tell the story of the brand. The strong sense of challenge and adventure that pervades the Red Bull story creates an immediate connection with the brand’s target audience that customers can expect from every interaction.

6. Be Authentic

Authenticity is a primary key to an effective brand story. An authentic brand story is true to your company’s values and mission statement, aligning strongly with your products and services while remaining genuine and heartfelt. Brand stories that attempt to sell, or those that are obviously disassociated from the brand, will fail every time with audiences.

Being authentic doesn’t mean there is no room for creativity in your brand story. It simply means that the your core brand values embodied by your brand’s storytelling are a true reflection of what your brand offers, and that every brand touchpoint reinforces the ideals presented by your story.

7. Make Your Brand Story Shareable

Finally, an effective brand story is one that can be easily shared. A great brand story should be a central core of your overall brand strategy—not merely relegated to your About Us page, but highlighted through a variety of media and collateral and displayed in ways that allow your customers to spread the word and get involved.

In addition to telling your brand story through words, you can create videos, post images or quotes, and develop taglines that capture the essence of your brand storytelling to help the message spread. Particularly for modern audiences, a great brand story is the best way to create a connection and make customers want to share your story with the world. Shareable brand stories help you harness word of mouth and elevate your brand to new heights of success.

• Rebranding Strategy: Why Your Rebrand Must Embrace Storytelling

• Creating New Brands: Top 10 Tips for Brand Success

• Brand Personality: Is Your Brand’s Character Big Enough to Compete?

• Packaging Design: How to Make it into an Irresistible Customer Brand Magnet

• Brand Strategy: 6 Lessons Learned from Tourism Queensland, One of the Most Successful Brand Campaigns Ever!

So, what do you think?

• Is your brand story confined to your About page?

• What is the bit “why” of your brand? How can you articulate it in a compelling brand story?

• Does your existing brand story accurately reflect the tone of your brand?

• How can you effectively tie your brand to provenance?

• What type of brand hero would best represent your brand?

• Is your brand story authentic and honest? Is it consistent?

• How many ways can you share your brand story with your audience?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

Brand Profiling: Top 6 Components to Creating a Strong Brand Personality

February 2, 2015/2 Comments/in Brand Personality, Brand Profiling & Positioning, Brand Promise, Brand Relevance, Brand Story, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Brand Voice, Branding, Target Market /by Lorraine Carter

Your brand is much more than merely product or service related features and benefits, or a logo. Brands are an experience—the relationship between your business and your customers. In the words of Simon Sinek “people don’t buy what you do, they buy ‘why’ you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe.” In other words people buy what your brand stands for, something that has meaning – which is both personal and important to them. And in order to create an exceptional customer experience, underpinned with strong meaning, your brand must have an irresistible personality.

Typically, customers choose one brand over another because they’ve made an emotional connection with that particular brand because it means something important to them and they trust that brand. While that connection may sometimes be the brand with the lowest price, more often than not it’s due to the distinctive personality, characteristics, values and behaviours of a brand – the emotional experience and meaning that association with that brand gives them.

Martyn Newman, PhD, consulting leadership and emotional intelligence psychologist and best selling author of ‘Emotional Capitalist – The Ultimate Guide to Developing Emotional Intelligence for Leaders’ is one of the leading speakers at Europe’s largest EQ Summit in London in March 2015. Newman talks about emotional capital; the asset on the balance sheet you can’t afford to ignore. In short without sounding cynical, “there’s money in emotion”, “trust is fundamentally built on an emotional experience and emotions are involved with everything a company does. Emotions determine whether or not people will work well with you, buy from you, hire you, or enter into business with you. For this reason, the value of these emotions eventually shows up in financial performance.”

“In the new economy it is no longer sufficient to view a company or a brand simply as a commercial entity and its assets cannot be fully accounted for by inventories of financial capital and not even human capital.” “Ultimately, the only way to create real profit is to attract the emotional rather than the rational customer by appealing to their feelings and imagination.”

Image via www.eqsummit.com

“In the information age and globalised economy where values and meaning matter more in the market place, the value of emotional capital increases. This creates brand value and goodwill and results in repeat sales through customer loyalty, lifetime relationships and referrals. In other words, the brand is more than a name or a logo; it creates trust and recognition and is a promise and an emotional contract with each customer.”

Brands that compete on price alone fight in a commodity driven arena where only those with the deepest pockets win. Brands with strong, compelling personalities are able to rise above this lowest price, dog fight and command premium pricing, greater market share, and an expanded base of loyal customers.

Brand profiling is the systematic process of creating, developing and implementing your brand character and personality through shaping its brand promise, values, the do’s and don’ts of its behaviours, story, emotional benefits, its culture and what it stands for and so forth. It’s this humanized entity that gets your brand message out into the market, cuts through the noise and gets the attention of your primary customers in a way that matters to them. It gives you a clear understanding and expression of what your band offers and what that means for your customers, partners, and key audiences.

When creating and developing the profiles for our clients’ brands we use our bespoke Personality Profile Performer™, a systematic approach which underpins the commercial, rational, and holistic aspects of successful brand profile building. The following six key elements are representative of some of the core ingredients included within this branding process, used to create and deploy a compelling personality for your brand.

1. Know Your Market

Market research is crucial for any successful brand. You need to be absolutely clear on who your target market is in terms of things like their needs, wants, loves, dislikes and aspirations. Where they live, their life stage, what they do in their leisure time and work life, what matters to them, their interests, education, holiday preferences, what other brands they like, buy or aspire to owning etc.

Essentially you need to develop a ‘pen portrait’ or ‘buyer persona’ of who your ideal customer is so that you can create a compelling brand that meets their needs emotionally and rationally. And you need all this information as the basis on which to develop your brands’ profile or personality.

As part of your knowing your market you also need to research your competition. Where are they most successful and why, where do the untapped opportunities lie and what simply doesn’t or hasn’t worked in your market sector and so forth. You also need to find out and evaluate what your existing or potential new customers think about your competitors together with their perceptions. Remember 60% of branding is about perception and only 40% about the product or service.

It’s only then when you have all this groundwork covered that you can create and actively shape your brand the way you ideally want customers to perceive it. Make no mistake, customers are very intelligent and perceptive so whatever you do, or whatever approach you take, you must do it with good intent, authenticity and integrity if you want to be successful. Brands that ‘mislead’ or behave ‘dishonorably’ are always ‘found out’ and invariable suffer the consequences, particularly via social media.

You can gather this market research information through a variety of ways e.g. desk research, surveys, one-to-one interviews etc. Your choice of methodologies is often driven by what is most appropriate to your sector, market size, business or organization size and resources, but usually involves a combination of some of the approaches mentioned.

Customer surveys are a great strategy for gaining some of this important information and insights. You can design longer, more formal surveys for use in email marketing or on your business website, or use your social media channels to post quick, informal surveys. Some helpful survey types may include:

Give customers a list of personality adjectives, and ask them to rate your brand or multiple brands on each one, using a scale (1 to 5 or 1 to 10)
Display photographs of individual people and ask customers which brand(s) in your product category they believe each person would use, and why
Ask customers to perform free association with your brand name or slogan—list the first words or phrases that come to mind when they envision your brand
Provide a list of brands (including your own) and ask customers to relate them to other types of items such as cars, animals, movies, or books—for example: “If this brand was a movie, which one would it be?”

By using these direct-to-customer types of research methods, you’ll not only generate large amounts of information that will help you define the parameter of your brand personality—you’ll also increase customer engagement and interest in your brand.

2. Define Your Brand Personality

In addition to evaluating your market, you must also develop the parameters of your brand in the context of what is relevant to your primary target audience. This means determining a brand personality that will be authentic and believable for the customer, accurately reflect your brand values and brand promise, and is consistently represented across your entire brand platform, and throughout all your brand collateral.

Remember, your brand personality is a set of emotions and characteristics, rather like a real person, it’s a humanized entity that’s underpins your total brand experience. Brand personalities are often reflective of the target market—for example, brands aimed at Millennials may be fresh, energetic, innovative, or “fast,” while brands focusing on an older demographic base may embrace characteristics like tradition, nostalgia, and reliability.

As a basic start to determining your brand personality, consider which of the Big Five Personality Traits your brand falls under. Originally categorized as openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, in relation to brands they are: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.

These Big Five traits are traditionally used in personality tests, and virtually any brand can be related to one of them. Choosing a broad brand personality category can help you to refine this choice further in your brand profiling.

3. Create Distinction for Your Brand Profile

Once you have an overview of your brands’ personality, you need to refine your brand profile in order to differentiate from the competition. Take certain aspects of your brands’ character traits and amplify them to create increased distinction and memorability. There are many ways to accomplish brand differentiation, ranging from subtle yet continually reinforced messaging to truly stand-out separation. Regardless of the level of your brand differentiation strategy, it all begins with the essentials of your brand profile.

As an example of subtle distinction, major U.S. based department store brands Walmart, K-Mart, and Target share very similar operations and strategies. Yet the Target brand distinguishes itself by focusing on different elements of the brand experience compared to its competitors. Where Walmart and K-Mart typically focus on more affordable pricing, Target infuses its brand collateral and customer-facing content with style, design, and lifestyle choices. The fact that they are competitively priced and offering ‘value’ (which is not just price related) is assumed.

Some brands achieve distinctive personalities through a massive departure from convention. One example we’ve previously discussed is FMGC brand PooPouri, a bathroom odour control product that inverts the traditional discretion and euphemistic elegance of the industry by embracing the idea that poo stinks—and their product stops the stink.

4. Develop or Refine Your Brand Story

Brand storytelling is another powerful strategy and important part of your brand profile. A great brand story should fully incorporate and reflect your brand’s personality with compelling, memorable elements that help reaffirm, explain and exemplify what it stands for, its brand values and brand promise, how it sees the world, its humour type, tone of voice, what it likes and doesn’t like and so forth.

Image via www.hootmarketing.co.uk

There are several methods for approaching brand story creation – ranging from actual brand origin stories that are emotional, compelling, interesting or engaging, to brand stories that restate your brand values in creative ways, to brand stories that revolve around a symbol such as a brand mascot—think the Keebler Elves, the Pillsbury Doughboy, or Tony the Tiger.

FMCG brand OXO created a powerful brand story through their series of commercials aired through the 1980s and 1990s, starring the “OXO Family.” These adverts showed the family growing up and progressively evolving through various stages of life, held together during each stage by a mum who cooked meals using OXO stock cubes. The brand story proved so effective that when the lead actress, Lynda Bellingham, passed away in 2014, more than 150,000 people joined a Facebook campaign to resurrect the advert series.

5. Develop a Strategic Direction

In order to use brand profiling effectively in your brand communications plans, you must have a well-planned strategic direction for infusing the personality and characteristics of your brand into your all brand collateral and various touch points. It’s essential to find creative and engaging ways to communicate your brands’ personality congruently to your customers across multiple platforms, including physical presentation in retail stores, online media and marketing channels, and internal branding with your employees and leadership team.

Online channels like your company website and social media channels can provide excellent opportunities to reinforce your brand personality. Use things like your company’s “About Us” page to creatively reflect the main characteristics of your brand profile—replace stiff images and droning corporate copy with carefully selected content and brand image collateral that conveys the personality you want to communicate. Engage your customers on social medial with posts that reflect your brand’s chosen qualities and characteristics.

Image via www.papajohns.com

Pizza chain Papa John’s employed a smart strategy when expanding their U.S. based market into the UK—translating larger-than-life chain owner John “Papa” Schnatter’s sports enthusiasm into an association with the UK’s Football League and weaving this association heavily into their social media channels. As a result, Papa John’s market share in the UK has risen dramatically over the last 12 months.

6. Maintain Brand Consistency

Consistency is critically important in every aspect of your brand strategy, and this applies to your brand’s personality as well. The more consistently your brand’s personality is reflected across every platform, every customer touch point, and every piece of brand collateral, the stronger and more established your brand becomes.

Brand consistency must apply to both the tangible and intangible aspects of your brand—everything from your logo and corporate colors, to your packaging, to your employees’ attitudes and customer experiences and engagement strategies.

With a compelling brand personality, applied consistently, you can establish a strong brand profile that increases your market share—and ultimately your profits.

So, what do you think?

• How well do you understand your brand personality as it’s perceived by your customers?

• Do your brand’s current market perceptions reflect the embodiment of the brand personality you’d like to achieve for your brand?

• What distinction or distinctions separate your brand’s personality from your competition?

• How does your brand story tie into your brand profile? Could it be better aligned?

• What is your strategic direction for reinforcing your desired brand personality?

• Is your brand profile reflected consistently across all touch points and brand collateral? How could you be more consistent and more congruent?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

Brand Trends: Top 20 Branding Trends for 2015

November 27, 2014/0 Comments/in Brand Audits, Brand Health Check, Brand Profiling & Positioning, Brand Promise, Brand Story, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Branding, Branding Trends, Integrated Marketing, Interactive Marketing, Mobile Commerce, Online Marketing, Packaging, Packaging Design, Trends /by Lorraine Carter

As 2014 draws to an end, now is the time to review, revamp, and update your branding strategies for the year to come. Successful branding is the key to driving business growth and profitability – and in 2015, it will be more important than ever to have a strong, thriving brand.

In the coming year, to be successful branding will need to be even more customer-centric. Honesty, transparency, personalisation, and social responsibility will hold center stage, and the technologies that drive an effective brand strategy will be mobile, responsive, and real-time. Here’s a look at the top 20 branding trends your business can expect for 2015.

Top 20 Branding Trends for 2015

1. Authenticity Drives Success

More than ever, your customers want to feel connected to your brand. Being authentic enables this type of connection, so make this a key strategy for 2015. Use valuable content and brand collateral to engage your target market and give your customers the opportunity to participate in your brand story. You can see more about what we mean by this in our recent blog about ‘Millennial Branding’ with particular reference to how Marriott International is making its customers feel authentically connected and participatory in their brand. With authenticity, you can create an audience of powerful brand ambassadors and harness the single most effective marketing force: word of mouth.

2. Mobile Matters More

While mobile markets have been growing continually, expect 2015 to be the year they explode. More of your customers will be using mobile than ever before – and you’ll need a brand strategy that responds to their needs.

Recent research from eMarketer shows that:

50% of shoppers who conducted local searches on smartphones visited the store within one day

18% of local smartphone queries led to a purchase

When it comes to marketing brands online, mobile inclusion is headed into mobile-first. Make sure you’re prepared with responsive design and increased mobile spends for your brand campaigns.

3. Metrics Turn Toward Revenue

Technology continues its rapid advancement, and in 2015 brand analytics will be more focused on revenue. This is made possible through automated marketing tools that measure brand performance in real time, allowing brand strategies to adapt quickly to suit emerging trends and changing customer tastes. Real-time brand analytics will also be critical to gain a competitive advantage for your brand.

4. Segmentation is Key

Many brands have the capability of appealing to different market segments, but not all are taking the opportunity to segment and diversify their brand campaigns. But in 2015, increasingly savvy customers will know exactly what they’re looking for – and your brand needs to deliver. This includes diverse sets of brand messaging, brand channels, and marketing approaches customised to each of your target demographics. A brand needs a well developed brand profile, using a system like our Personality Profile Performer™ which is used to create its story, values, promise, mission, personality, positioning and so forth in order to achieve cohesive brand messaging and effective segmentation successfully.

5. Brand Targets are Ultra-Personalized

Closely related to segmentation, 2015 will be the year of the customer, with individualised brand campaigns to match. Advanced customer data capture and innovative manufacturing techniques have made it possible for brands to deliver unique customisations, shifting the brand target from the masses to the individual. For example, Holiday Inn is moving its branding strategy toward customised holiday experiences that meet the personal needs of the traveller – from families to business travellers, young couples to adventurous singles.

6. Packaging Goes 3D

Brand packaging is a crucial component of your brand’s success, and the arrival of 3D printing technology has made it possible for brands to create innovative, customised packaging designs that draw in customers and stand out on retail shelves. In 2015, consider giving your brand packaging a boost using the latest technologies.

7. Streamlined Naming Conventions

The market is incredibly crowded, and customers’ attention spans are shorter than ever. To boost brand recognition and foster brand consistency, more brands will re-engage fundamentals and use clear, relevant names for products, services, and the overall brand itself. These short and simple names pair well with quick descriptors, creating easy-to-grasp concepts – think Google Wallet, Google Glass, and Google Play or Apple Watch and Apple TV.

8. Brand Stories Take Centre Stage

A compelling brand story will be an even more vital part of heart and mind capture to drive your brand sales strategy in 2015. Powerful and authentic stories that are worked into every element of your branding strategy can lift your brand, and provide the connection your customers are looking for. A great brand story evokes an emotional response, and most importantly, reinforces the brand experience for your customers. Creating irresistible brand stories is a key part of our brand profiling service when working with clients to help them create and build the personality of their brands, using our Brand Story Selling System™.

9. The TMI Line Blurs

For branding in 2015, there will be no such thing as too much information. Today’s customers crave transparency and want to know everything they can about a brand, often before they decide to make a purchase. Much of this transparency will be provided with updated brand packaging that clearly and efficiently conveys a wealth of information, including the brand story. As an example, Stone Creek Coffee’s Lab Series prints detailed coffee bean information on each package, including the elevation the beans were grown, the harvest date, and the name of the farmer who grew them.

Image via www.stonecreekcoffee.com

10. Cross-Channel Integration is Crucial

Brand consistency has always been one of the most important factors in the success of a brand. With more brand channels and customer paths than ever before, integration across channels is a must. Your brand design, messaging, and metrics should be presented uniformly at every touch point – from website and social media platforms to packaging, retail locations, and traditional media channels.

11. Customers will Not be Sold to

The marketing noise level is reaching critical mass. Brands that continue to “pitch” their products or services in 2015 will find themselves ignored. Customers are no longer interested in the salesy, hard-sell approach, and they’re savvy enough to know when your brand message is all buy and no bargain. Look to value-added brand strategies that highlight perception, inclusion, and the customer experience to help your brand sell itself.

12. Brands as a Consolidated Experience

Once again in the vein of brand consistency, the most successful brands of 2015 will present a singular customer experience – no matter where your customers interact with your brand. Your customers’ experience should not vary from PC to mobile to social. Look for ways to streamline your brand collateral and exceed customer expectations, delivering on your brand promise through a seamless presentation on all fronts.

13. The Video Explosion

Online video will continue to expand rapidly in 2015, and video should be an integral part of any branding strategy. Video is a popular, powerful, and engaging medium that helps brands strengthen their messaging and increase profits.

Some of the most recent statistics for online video include:

100 million Internet users watch online video every day

90% of online shoppers find video helpful

64% of online shoppers are more likely to buy after watching a video

80% of Internet users recall a video ad they’ve watched online in the past 30 days – and 46% took some action after watching the video ad, from visiting the company’s website to making a purchase

Video increases marketing email click-through rates by 200 to 300 percent

14. Brand “Smarketing”

The line between sales and marketing is becoming increasingly blurred, and 2015 will see even more integration as online selling converges with internet marketing. Both functions use many of the same techniques for promoting brands, including content creation and real-time engagement, and both have the same goal of revenue generation. Effective brands will combine marketing and sales into a fluid and cohesive set of strategies.

15. Brands Mobilise with Click-and-Collect

UK marketing research firm Mintel predicts that the popularity of click-and-collect (C&C) services will increase in 2015, and about 17% of all Internet retail sales will be collected by customers at these physical service points.

C&C services currently used across the UK include:

Amazon lockers in London Underground railway stations

Doddle pop-up parcel collection stores

Asda and Tesco C&C vans

Waitrose chilled food lockers

Argos food lockers (coming in 2015)

In a survey by Mintel, 35% of UK shoppers have used C&C services in the past year, and 64% say they’ll shop more online because of C&C services.

16. CSR Packs a Bigger Punch

Look to corporate social responsibility (CSR) as an even bigger brand trend for 2015. Today’s customers are concerned with both human rights, consumer rights and giving back to the community, and will reward brands that engage in visible social responsibility – while punishing brands that violate those rights.

Issues that matter in particular to UK consumers, according to Mintel, are returns policies, ethical treatment of workers, environmental policies, and negative press coverage. And for millennials, many make purchasing decisions based on a company’s ethical or political stance, such as brands that support the LGBT community.

17. Green Brands

More environmentally conscious consumers mean that brands must be aware of the environmental impact they have, and take steps to mitigate damage and leave a clean footprint. Packaging plays a large role in the battle for environmental friendliness. Brands that emphasize responsibly sourced, recycled, minimized, or biodegradable packaging can expect to be welcomed in 2015. This is a key consideration in all the brand packaging design projects we’re involved in with our clients.

18. Big Data Delivers Brand Insight

As the use of big data becomes more refined and accessible, brands will use it in 2015 to generate more personalisation and segmented brand approaches. Pretargeting is an emerging market strategy that uses big data to target customers based on their behaviours and preferences by delivering relevant messaging during the buying phase, instead of after it.

This type of advanced analytics can allow brands to predict trends before they’ve actually happened. Unilever partnered with Google in 2013 to do this, using big data to predict and capitalise on a rising trend in hair care. The YouTube channel launched by Unilever in response to this trend forecast, All Things Hair UK, became the number one hair care channel in its markets.

19. Social Brand Success is Pay-to-Play

Customers may be spending more time than ever on social media, but they’re spending it being social. The effectiveness of social branding as an organic strategy has diminished but pay-to-play advertising platforms on major social networks have increased in sophistication and effectiveness. Successful social brands will invest strategically in paid social media for smart, segmented campaigns, which will trickle down to increase owned and earned media effectiveness.

20. Facebook Fades for Millennial Brand Audiences

Speaking of social, in 2015 Facebook may not be the go-to network if your brand is targeting millennials and a younger crowd. While the social network with its own major motion picture is still the dominant channel, it’s far from the only game in town. Young people in particular are drifting away from Facebook – so if your brand targets millennials, it may be in your best interests to grow your presence on up-and-coming social platforms, such as Instagram and Tumblr.

At the close of 2014, take the time to thoroughly review your brand strategy. Consider a comprehensive brand audit to gain an accurate picture of your brand performance, and incorporate the trends that will change branding in 2015 with heightened transparency, authenticity, and customer-focused experiences.

So, what do you think?

• Is your brand strategy on track for success in 2015?

• How consistent is your brand presentation across all platforms?

• What is your planned spending for mobile? Video? Social?

• Are you targeting the right channels to connect with your target audiences?

• Does your brand platform represent timeless appeal? Could it benefit from a refresh for 2015?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

Social Branding: The New Rules for Brand Success on Social Media

October 14, 2014/3 Comments/in Brand Experience, Brand Personality, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Brand Voice, Branding, Integrated Marketing, Social Engagement, Social Media /by Lorraine Carter

There’s no doubt about it: If you want a successful brand, you need to incorporate social media into your branding strategy. Customer interactions are increasingly taking place online rather than in person or over the phone, and your audience expects to find a strong social media presence for their favorite brands.

Just how important is social media?

Here’s what the landscape looks like as of January 2014, and the statistics just keep growing:

74 percent of the world’s Internet users are active on social networks

44 percent of users in Western Europe are active on social networks

Mobile is increasingly used for social, and Western Europe’s mobile penetration stands at 128 percent—or 1.28 devices for every person

Social penetration is 78 percent in the UK

Source: US Census Bureau, ITU, CIA

In the early days, brands were successful on social media if they had a lot of fans or followers. The bigger the numbers, the better your brand was perceived. But now that social has exploded into a vast sea of noise, effective social branding has moved out of the numbers game. It’s not the size of your customer base on social media – it’s what you do with it that counts.

Top 4 of today’s most important rules for social media branding success.

Rule 1: Be Consistent

As with any other element of your branding strategy, consistency is vital for social media success. Each of your social channels and platforms should clearly belong to your brand – but remember that consistency extends to much more than your logo and signature colours. With social media, you also need to develop consistent brand messaging, and a consistent tone and voice. Your company can’t be formal and serious on Facebook, yet irreverent and fun on Twitter.

Being consistent on social media requires your brand to develop and adhere to a style that is followed without fail. If you have more than one employee participating in your social media campaigns, especially if they work on different platforms, make sure they’re on the same page when it comes to your brand messaging, promise, values, voice and your brand tone.

Etsy is a strong example of a brand that maintains social media consistency. The online community marketplace with an emphasis on hand-crafted and vintage items has a branded presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest, that makes use of the Etsy brand’s simple, memorable logo and distinctive orange brand colouring, paired with plenty of stunning product photos. Etsy frequently and consistently cross-posts to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, and makes full use of Pinterest with dozens of organized boards arranged into product categories.

Rule 2: Be Active

Simply being on social media will not help your brand. In order to drive social branding, you need to have an active presence on the platforms you use, and interact with your audience frequently. In fact, having an inactive social media page can turn potential customers off, because your brand will be perceived as not interested in hearing from your audience.

For this reason, it’s important to choose the right platforms for your social branding strategy. Many companies make the mistake of thinking that the more social networks they join, the stronger their social marketing will be – but creating accounts on dozens of social platforms and ignoring most of them is actually detrimental to your brand.

Instead, look for the networks where most of your target audience is, and focus on building a strong presence on those networks. Facebook and Twitter might be totally suitable for some brands and a lot less relevant for others. Your chosen social platform is driven by what is most appropriate for your core target audience and where they interact most. LinkedIn is very effective for professional and B2B brands. If your brand has a strong visual component, Pinterest is an excellent platform.

Once you’ve chosen the right platforms, get active. Post frequently – but don’t make all your content about marketing. The goal of social media is not to sell, but to build relationships. Your social media posts should entertain, inform, inspire, or interest your audience.

Taco Bell has a highly active social media presence that gets results. With a brand platform dedicated to fun and delight, and frequently posted content that focuses on customers, the restaurant chain’s Facebook page has more than 10 million fans, and 1.37 million follow them on Twitter.

Rule 3: Be Engaging

An important part of Taco Bell’s social media success, and many other brands that understand how social works, is engaging the audience. The best brands on social media don’t broadcast – they have conversations. They post content that invites audiences to participate, and encourages them to share with friends for even more visibility. From simple questions to elaborate contests, these brands make followers feel like part of the brand experience.

In 2012, Domino’s UK ran a Twitter campaign called “Tweet for Treats” that engaged audiences in a very direct way. For a time period of two hours, they invited followers to tweet with the hashtag #letsdolunch, and stated they’d knock a minimum of £0.01 off the price of their pizzas for every tweet sent that day for lunch. The campaign knocked the pizza price from £15.99 to £7.74. Anyone who followed Domino’s UK on Twitter or liked their Facebook page could order pizzas at the final discounted price through the Tweet for Treat Facebook Tab between 12:00 – 15:00 GMT on their Facebook page. The campaign gained the brand lots of interaction and hundreds of new followers, and helped them sell a lot of pizzas.

Rule 4: Be Social

Another highly effective strategy for social branding is to make it social – in the name of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Practicing good CSR boosts brand perceptions and brand awareness, and social media is an ideal channel for spreading the word about your brand’s social consciousness.

Brewing company Molson Coors Canada uses social media to leverage CSR and increase reach for their responsible drinking initiatives. The company’s social media team focuses not only on selling beer, but also connecting with communities for their programs that include responsible drinking education, the TaxiGuy program that provides cab rides for people who’ve had one too many, and covering the costs of public transportation for drinkers on New Year’s Eve.

Your brand can’t afford to ignore social media. Effective social branding doesn’t have to be complicated – when you maintain consistency. Focus on the best platforms for reaching your audience in terms of what is relevant to them, keep an active brand presence, and engage audiences with informative, interesting, entertaining, or interactive content that meets their needs.

When done strategically and consistently social media can amplify your brand visibility and boost your bottom line.

What do you think?

• How many social channels is your brand on? Are any of your pages inactive?

• Have you integrated social media into your brand strategy or rebranding strategy?

• Which social networks are most likely to attract your target audience?

• Is your brand displayed consistently across all of your social platforms?

• Are you using a consistent brand tone and voice for social media?

• Does your social presence reinforce your brand messaging and values?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!

Brand Naming: Top Ten Methods for Brand Name Creation

September 23, 2014/2 Comments/in Brand Name Origination, Brand Profiling & Positioning, Brand Promise, Brand Relevance, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Branding /by Lorraine Carter

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” This immortal line from William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” reminds us that names have only as much power as we give them – but Shakespeare didn’t have to worry about branding.

The name of your company, product, service or range etc. is often the first thing anyone will come in contact with. It’s your first impression. The question here is, do you want your first impression with your primary audience to be something that’s interesting and helps tell your story? Or do you want something that sounds like many others, an industry or category norm but consequently has less impact because it blends in with the rest. That might be a strategic choice but often not the one most desired.

So what’s in a name, really? Everything, when it comes to your brand. A great brand name is a vital element for brand success, yet so many companies neglect to place enough emphasis on this key ingredient as a fundamental aspect of what makes a sustainable and impactful part of their branding strategy. Naming is all about strategic rationale, not emotion and not politics. If its comfortable and safe – don’t be tempted, it’s totally forgettable too.

Why is your brand name so important? A good name is a compact easy-to-communicate piece of information. It can grab peoples’ attention and make them want to know more. Ideally a good name should communicate one key objective which is strongly founded on your brand promise, positioning, brand values and tailored to fit with your core customer mind set. An effective brand name is memorable and enables it to carry a hugely significant portion of your brand recognition all on its own. It captures a piece of your customers mind share. On the other hand, a forgettable brand name forces you to work much harder to keep your brand visible or even memorable to your customers.

Here’s some ideas on how you can create a powerful brand name that’s memorable, resonates with your target audience, and serves to strengthen your brand collateral while adding amplification to your overall branding strategy.

Understanding the Different Types of Brand Names

Brand naming should not be a haphazard process or a random occurrence. It’s equally a systematic, holistic and creative process driven by very clear branding and commercial objectives. The first step to choosing an effective brand name is to familiarize yourself with the many styles of brand names, and decide which type is conceptually appropriate for your company, your products or services, and your target audience. Set clear and consistent objectives with a solid brand naming brief for your name selection. Avoid the temptation to choose your name subjectively and rigorously benchmark against your agreed criteria during the creative process. Before we start any work creating names for our clients we’ll have completed the brand profiling work which shapes and provides the direction and rationale for the whole brand together with the brand naming brief and its only then we set to work using our Nail It Naming System™.

Here are several brand name types that can serve as a starting point for your brand naming process.

Top Ten Brand Name Creation Categories

1. Founders’ Names:

Among the simplest type of brand name, this one can also sometimes be difficult to use effectively. This style uses the name of the person who founded the company as the brand, with or without further qualifiers that describe the products. Disney, named after founder Walt Disney, is one of the most famous examples of this. Other examples include Cadbury (after John Cadbury), Tata Group (after Jamsetji Tata), and Horlicks (after founding brothers William and James Horlick).

Image via www.cadbury.ie

2. Descriptive Names:

Another fairly straightforward brand naming convention, this style uses brand names that describe the products or services offered. Some examples of this include Internships Ireland, Slendertone, O’Egg, Whole Foods and Internet Explorer. One important thing to note with this category is that sometimes, brand names which seem to describe a product are actually powerful brands that have become synonymous with the products they offer – such as Xerox for copy machines, Band-Aid for elastic bandages and Scotch tape for clear cellophane tape.

When you get so big you’re your trademark protected brand name becomes the byword for the whole category, it potentially becomes a huge problem for the brand owner. These types or brand names are almost victims or their own success and are now fighting the problem of generification. Whenever we say we want to search for something online we say ‘I’ll Google it’, now the byword for search! Frequently people will say they’re ‘Hoovering’ when they mean vacuum cleaning! When a brand name becomes so commonly used, it can lose its value and in worse case scenarios, it can also lose its legal protections! Although it has to be said the brand’s with these problems are in the minority!

3. Geographic Names:

Once again, this simple naming convention is what it sounds like – the use of a region or landmark associated with a product or service in a brand name e.g. Patagonia, Clonakilty Black Pudding. Connemara Seafoods is a premier shellfish company named after its location, the coastal Ireland district Connemara. Emo Oil is named after the company’s home village of Emo. Global tech company Cisco Systems, Inc., draws its name from a shortened version of the company headquarters’ location in San Francisco.

4. Personification:

These brand names are centered around either a real or mythical person who is not the founder, and may not even be associated with the company. Personification brand names may use historical figures, legends, or may create a brand personality around a fictitious company mascot – such as Aunt Jemima or Betty Crocker.

Image via www.bettycrocker.com

5. Evocative Names:

This type of brand name is designed to paint a vivid and relevant image for the customer e.g. The Body Shop, Amazon. For example, Sea Wynde rum evokes images of relaxation on a Caribbean beach with a cool drink in hand.

6. Alliteration or Rhyming Names:

This category includes names that are both memorable and fun to say e.g. YouTube, Piggly Wiggly. Dunkin’ Donuts uses alliteration and a shortened word to create a rhythmic and easy to remember brand name.

Image via www.youtube.com

7. Derivative Names:

This category includes names that are almost like something you’ve heard but have somehow been changed to sound different e.g. Nespresso, Zappos. It can be one of the most creative ways to create a name that is unique and is very reflective of more contemporary naming trends and can be easier to legally register, protect and buy the relevant URL.

Image via www.zappos.com

8. Neologisms (new made-up words):

Some brands use completely made-up new words, which creates a sense of uniqueness and infuses memorable qualities with the brand that help to set it apart from the competition. Examples here include Omniplex, Kodak and Twitter. Neologist brand names, when developed properly, can be among the most powerful brand naming strategies and like Derivative names, easier to register and protect. However they typically require more initial marketing resources to become highly recognized and given meaning through the branding strategy.

Image via www.twitter.com

9. Hybrid Names:

This category refers to brand names like Swissair, ThinkPad, Microsoft, Swisscom and Nice and Easy. All are combinations of current words or recognized syllables which when combined send the right message and potentially highlight attributes and benefits relating to the brand. This form of naming can deliver very creative and memorable results too and like Derivative and Neologist Names are less likely to infringe on other trademarks.

Image via www.swissair.com

10. Acronyms and Initials:

This category refers to brand names that stand for something longer, such as KFC for Kentucky Fried Chicken, VHI for Voluntary Health Insurance, and HP for Hewlett-Packard, GE for General Electric. Names like AA for Automobile Association and BMW for Bavarian Motor Works, only became acronyms after each company had made its mark. They’ve typically rebranded when the long name version no longer served its purpose as effectively e.g. it was so well known and well established in the market place and customers were shortening it colloquially because it was too long winded!

Image via www.bmw.com

Note: Initial or acronym brand names typically work best for companies that are well known or large corporates and have already established a brand under their full names, and shortening the names won’t impact their existing brand equity. For most brands this type of naming convention is best avoided as it effectively amounts to a meaningless mix of letters leaving the customer confused and indifferent.

Image via www.ikea.com

Brand naming can also combine several of these conventions to arrive at a distinctive and powerful name. IKEA is a great example of this. On the surface, IKEA is a neologism, a made-up word that’s easy to remember, and it’s also fun to say. But looking into the origin of the company name, it’s actually an acronym for the founder’s name and the Swedish property and village where he grew up: Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd.

Below are three brand naming methods and tips with strategies you can use to come up with a memorable and effective brand names.

A. Brand Naming Methods: Strategic Brainstorming

Brainstorming, or coming up with as many ideas as possible in a short amount of time, is a great way to get the creative juices flowing. When it comes to naming your brand, you can engage in focused brainstorming by asking and answering a series of questions in as many ways as you can, and then narrowing down to the best choices. It’s important to do this also within the context of an agreed naming brief and a very clear branding rationale based on your brand profile and brand strategy to keep everyone on track.

Some questions you can brainstorm include:

What does your product or service do?
What is the purpose or function of your industry?
How does your product or service benefit your customer?
What’s your brands’ mission?
How does your brand promise solve your customers problems?
What is unique, different, or interesting about your product or service?
How do your brand values enhance your customers lives?
What are some of the common terms in your industry’s lingo or jargon, that apply to your products or services?

Once you have a list of solid possibilities, you can take your brainstorming a step further and list all of the synonyms for the words or phrases you came up with during the session.

B. Brand Naming Method: Name and Word Lists

With this method, you can generate lists of words or names in certain categories that are relevant to your brand, and spin the results into possible brand names. For example, a brand that is based on heritage, classic themes, and timeless roots might look up lists of geologic periods, Latin or Greek roots, historical figures or events, and geographically appropriate legends or myths. Enter “list of [your term]” into Google, and you’ll find plenty of lists to choose from.

When choosing which lists you’ll look up, consider your products or services both literally and abstractly. You may find useful, evocative, or memorable words and names in unexpected places that can create powerful connections with your audience.

C. Brand Naming Method: Puns and Plays on Words

If your brand would benefit from a sense of fun, a touch of whimsy, or cheeky and humorous themes, using a pun or play on words can give you a memorable and highly effective brand name. There are some great examples of brands that use word play like alliteration, alternate spellings, partial word or letter replacement, letter dropping, rhyming, and more, including:

Poo-Pouri®: A toilet odour control product
Krispy Kreme®: An American donut brand
Slim Jims®: A brand of meat jerky snacks
Burt’s Bees®: Natural skin care products made with beeswax

Image via www.burtsbees.com

Play with your brainstorming and word list phrases, and look for opportunities to create plays on words. Experiment with combining and replacing until you come up with several possibilities.

Your brand name is one of the most important elements for the success of your company. Taking the time to create a memorable, evocative, and distinctively unique brand name will give you an unshakeable foundation for an effective branding platform that ultimately leads to your brands success and growing profitability.

What do you think?

• Do you already have a brand name for your company, products, or services?

• How did you come up with your brand name? Was it a process, or did you end up using the first idea that came to mind?

• What brand name type or types is best suited to your brand’s goals, themes, and brand personality?

• Are there any people (real or fictional) or places that tie into your brand? How would you use them in a brand name?

• What categories would you consider relevant to your products or services, either literally or abstractly, that would help you create a great brand name?

• Are your products or services suitable for a brand name that’s a play on words?

• Is your brand naming part of a rebranding strategy and if so how near or far away from the previous old name does it need to be?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!

Brand Personality: Is Your Brand’s Character Big Enough to Compete?

September 9, 2014/0 Comments/in Brand Personality, Brand Profiling & Positioning, Brand Promise, Brand Story, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Brand Voice, Branding /by Lorraine Carter

Just as people can be larger than life, a brand’s personality can take on a life of its own. Creating a brand with an authentically strong character is central to your branding strategy success and effectively the decider between just another average price fighter or a truly magnetic and profitable brand.

And the good news for smaller brands – who frequently think branding is purely the remit of deep pocketed big national or global entities – it’s entirely within your grasp too, if you develop the right ‘know-how’. With a solid brand profile and the right brand strategy in place, your brand can punch above its weight and become bigger than another mere product or service, and consequently generate tremendous brand impact and instill an unshakeable brand loyalty in your target audience.

Here’s how you can be a small player with a big heart—and big profits—by using brand profiling and amplification strategies to create an magnified personality that brings your brand to life and makes it truly compelling to your primary target audience.

Note: These tips are some of the magic sauce we use coupled with our ‘Personality Profile Performer System™’ when working with our clients to help them develop their brand profiling.

Key Ingredients for a Compelling Brand Personality

What goes into a great brand profile? Brands with compelling, customer centric personalities are able to reach out to, and engage their target audiences in ways that elicit strong emotional responses.

An effective brand profile provides the direction for creating a customer centric, brand resonance or affinity with your customers through the emotions your brand endeavours to elicit in them, whether it’s gritty and real, sophisticated, entertaining, decadent, or simply warm, feel-good pleasures. Regardless of the overall effect, brands with strong personalities share characteristics that include:

A Compelling Brand Story: Delivering an incredible brand story gives your core target customers a foundation for engagement and loyalty, and adds depth to your brands’ embodiment.

Clear Brand Values: When your brand stands for something that matters to your target audience, your customers can feel like they’re part of something bigger whenever they engage with your brand.

Evocative Emotions: Funny or poignant, lighthearted or dramatic, brands that make customers feel strongly about something that matters to them are far more memorable, referable and engaging than the bland, boring or just another ‘me too’ average. People buy with emotion and justify with rationale!

Your Big Why? Your Brands’ Mission: Coca-Cola wants the world to be happy. Apple wants everyone to enjoy and intuitively use their cutting edge technology and enhance peoples’ lives. What does your brand want to accomplish? A great mission statement is an authentically lived experienced which encapsulates the DNA or core essence of your brand and not only generates buzz and excitement for your brand but gives it substance and depth. It’s not something clinical and stark living on the corporate wall gathering dust or buried somewhere in your annual report or on your website. It’s an integral part of the way you fundamentally do business and interact with the world around you and most importantly it’s about what you do, with or for your customers and how you want them to feel.

Absolute Consistency. Developing and sustaining an incredible brand profile requires consistency across all aspects of your brand, throughout every channel and touch point. Each customer interaction should reinforce your brand personality and keep your brand promise.

1. Building an Emotional Response

Strong emotions are central to a larger-than-life brand personality. The most effective brand profiles are developed to evoke a specific feeling that your primary customers value and experience each time they choose to buy that product or service from you.

An effective brand profile is also developed in order to amplify the brand’s difference and set it apart from all the other pretenders competing for wallet share. And this is the fundamental core of the work we do with our clients in helping them build their brands.

Many companies believe an emotional brand is customer-generated, and therefore unattainable—but successful brands understand that emotional responses can be evoked through creating a strong brand personality coupled with strategic brand engagement. Successful branding is a two way interaction between the brand and the customer.

It’s a shared ‘meaningful’ exchange that the customer values. In short its a humanly emotional engagement where the customer electively participates in the exchange because it positively enhances their lives in some way that they value. And this is what brand profiling is all about – using systems like our ‘Personality Profile Performer™’ for creating the character of your brand and then developing the ‘road map’ of how it will be brought to life.

Image via www.besamecosmetics.com

Such is the case with Bésame, a niche cosmetics company with a powerful brand personality rooted in the glamour heydays of the 1920s to 1950s. This entrepreneurial business set out to develop its brand profile from the beginning, and intentionally created a nostalgic brand with old-fashioned values that evokes wistful memories of a bygone era.

Image via www.besamecosmetics.com

Gabriela Hernandez, the founder of Bésame, was inspired by the vintage original cosmetics of her grandmother. Prior to launching her company, she decided that her brand’s personality would be very feminine, romantic, nostalgic and elegant in a traditional sense, while delivering very modernly efficacious products.

Image via www.besamecosmetics.com

Every aspect of the Bésame brand was developed to amplify this glamorous and nostalgic personality to create differentiation in an incredibly busy category noted for the billions spent on selling hope and aspiration to its largely female audiences!

Image via www.besamecosmetics.com

The company’s distinct packaging design uses very tactile high quality materials including rich fabrics, metals and colour palettes designed to stand out from the oceans of plastic containers. Consistency across all brand channels, a distinctive experience from start to finish, and internal branding that extends to the way the company’s phones are answered and staff interactions all contribute to underpinning this distinctly nostalgic brand profile. Collectively it’s what makes Bésame a highly successful brand that’s carried in major department stores around the world.

2. The Bold and The Brave

A strong brand personality, even if it’s controversial, can elevate your business to success. The key to this strategy is to start out bold and stick to your guns, regardless of any potential criticism or public outcry from a small minority. Taking a stand—preferable a defensible one—can help you define a brand profile that outshines your competition consistently.

Image via www.benjerry.com

For specialty ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s, that stand is irreverent fun. The entire company, which began with founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield selling homemade ice cream from a renovated gas station, is built on the idea that if you’re not having fun, you shouldn’t be doing it!

Image via www.benjerry.com

The small brand made a big impact early on with its whimsical and cartoonish packaging, outrageous flavour names like Cherry Garcia and Wavy Gravy, and a high-demand strategy of selling only pints instead of half-gallons, offering exclusive batches and retiring flavours. In fact, the Ben & Jerry’s website maintains a Flavour Graveyard that showcases “de-pinted” flavours throughout the company’s history.

Ben & Jerry’s has never shied away from controversy—it’s all part of the fun. The company has embraced such controversial flavours as Black and Tan, named after an alcoholic beverage but perceived as associated with a paramilitary police force, and Schweddy Balls, named for a Saturday Night Live character and decried as “too explicit for grocery store shelves.” Ben & Jerry’s consistently bold stance has earned their ice cream an outrageous brand personality and a strong, loyal customer base.

3. Redefining a Niche

Finding a new twist on an old industry standard is a fantastic strategy for building powerful brand profiles. This involves highlighting and amplifying one or more aspects of your brand differentiation, and turning those amplified characteristics into a brand personality that can stand on its own.

Image via www.poopourri.com

An incredible example of this comes from an FMCG brand making a huge stink, namely Poo-Pourri! Founded in 2006, the odour control company has already made a huge impact by turning the usually discreet nature of bathroom odour product marketing on its head and flaunting the fact that its product deals with poo!

Image via www.poopourri.com

The secret blend of essential oils and other natural compounds eliminates bathroom odors by creating a protective film on the water’s surface. More than 4 million bottles have been sold, according to the company’s official website. When I first wrote about this brand a few years ago they were already making waves but take a look at what they achieved now – and they’re not a massive company!

Image via www.poopourri.com

This brand has absolute clarity over who their target market is, namely glamorous, silk robe wearing, youngish women and they’re not afraid of who they might offend. They’ve developed their whole brand personality around suiting this target audience’s needs and they never waiver from it. Yes they have other secondary products aimed at men, parents and even pets with Pooch-Pourri, but their primary audience is a very particular kind of women and everything is geared to engage her in a certain way!

Image via www.poopourri.com

Take a look at how their brand personality extends onto their product scent names:

• Hush Flush – A fresh Floral Blend of Wildflowers in the Spring, Before You Go, Give the Bowl a Spray, the Air Stays Fresh as a Spring Bouquet

• Deja Poo – A Soft Sweet Blend of White FLowers and Citrus, You’ve Been Here Before But Now With a Scent You Adore

• Party Pooper – A Fresh Crisp Floral Blend of Mandarin, Tangerine, and Lily, When Glasses CLink, Don’t Ruin the Party With a Stink

• Poo La La – An Elegant Blend of Peony, Rose and Citrus, Embrassing Odors… Say Adieu

• Sh*ttin Pretty – A Delightful Fresh Blend of Rose, Jasmine and Citrus, It Ain’t Awesome Till Smells Like a Blossom

And this is just a small sampling of a pretty extensive list!

Poo-Pouri’s marketing has a very definitive brand voice that features loads of toilet humour woven throughout its website, commercials, and other brand collateral. The brand’s very first social media marketing campaign, featuring a video called “Girls Don’t Poop,” went viral almost immediately with over 6 million views within a week, doubling Poo-Pouri’s Twitter following and increasing Facebook fans by 70 per cent in just a few days, not to mention their bottom line!

And while this advert might be ranked by USA Today as one of the worst adverts of 2013 it’s got 29,334,105 views and counting, with 67,298 likes and only 3,572 dislikes. They don’t give a ‘crap’ about anyone else – other than their primary target market!

Brand Amplification Strategies for Spreading Your Brand Personality

Once you’ve defined a distinctive and larger-than-life brand personality, there are multiple ways in which to leverage your brand profile through brand amplification strategies. When your brand has an attention-grabbing personality that stands for something your audience cares about, amplifying that brand message will get you noticed in a crowded market place. However you must consistently deliver on that personality and brand promise in everything you do.

Brand consistency is critical to any amplification strategy and especially effective for smaller brands too. Being truly consistent with your brand means ensuring that your website, packaging, brochures, vehicle livery, social media accounts, brand collateral etc. and all customer-facing touch points congruently mirror your brand profile and echo the same ‘exaggerated’ characteristics that infuse personality into your brand and everywhere it lives or interacts.

Your company’s public relations should also reflect your brands’ personality and the stories associated with it in the media. Community activities and corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns are also an important part of your brand strategy, especially for brands with feel-good, give-back mission statements and socially mobile brand stories.

When it comes to brand personality, the size of your brand truly doesn’t matter. Larger-than-life brand profiles help you rise above the noise and breathe life into your brand, so you can capture the imagination, emotions and ongoing support of your primary target customers.

What do you think?

• What kind of personality does your brand have? Does it match the profile you envisioned for your brand?

• How can you differentiate your brand and amplify those differences into a brand personality?

• What emotional response do your customers expect from your brand?

• Are you delivering your brand personality consistently across all channels?

• Does your brand packaging reflect a larger-than-life personality?

• Which aspects of your brand platform fail to capture your brand personality? How can you change that?

Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

Personal Branding: Tips for CEOs & Senior Executives

August 19, 2014/2 Comments/in Brand Personality, Brand Profiling & Positioning, Brand Promise, Brand Reputation, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Branding, Business, Personal Branding /by Lorraine Carter

Branding is essential for the success of your business, but your products or services aren’t the only aspects of your company that need a strong brand. As a CEO or executive, and the public face of your business, developing a distinctive and consistent personal brand complements and further solidifies your business brand—while at the same time helping you achieve personal development, growth and enhanced career success.

Personal branding is a natural extension of your leadership. Your personal brand encompasses your expertise, your career accomplishments, and your professional reputation. In large part, it is the emotional response your customers have when they hear your name—it is the experience of ‘you’.

As a CEO or executive, you don’t have to be Sir Richard Branson or Jeff Bezos to enjoy the benefits of a well-developed personal brand. The following four tips will help you create a consistent personal brand that will help elevate your professional reputation and drive brand effectiveness for your business.

Top 4 Personal Branding Tips for CEOs and Senior Executives

1. Understand Your Existing Personal Brand

Whether or not you’ve worked to develop it, you already have a personal brand. The problem is that it may not be the brand you want.

Your personal brand is defined by your reputation, and by other people’s perceptions of you. This is especially critical in today’s digital world, where trusting online information and resources is the rule rather than the exception. What kind of picture does a Google search for your name paint?

Controlling your personal brand begins with awareness of the reputation that’s already out there. Your professional website, social media profiles, and published content should all reflect the brand promise you want to deliver to your customers. Without active participation in shaping your personal brand, it will be created for you—and you may not be pleased with the results.

Some of the most crucial ingredients for managing your personal brand online include:

A professional photo: Maintain personal brand consistency with one high quality, professional headshot that’s used for all of your online platforms, from your website to Linkedin to Facebook to Google Authorship etc. Having a great photo not only encourages brand recognition and visibility, but also helps to create personal connections with your customers.
A unified profile: As with your photo, use a single, succinct and compelling personal bio for every aspect of your online presence that encapsulates your personal brand and strengthens brand recognition.
A defined and consistent brand position: Make sure your personal brand philosophy is reflected in every piece of content that appears under your name online. Conflicting or incongruent presentations can undermine or dilute your brand and raise doubt in the minds of your audience about your integrity.

2. Define Your Niche

You may know how to define a niche for your products or services, but what about your personal brand? You can’t identify a target audience, because your customers aren’t buying you—or are they?

The goal of personal branding is to sell your audience on ‘you’ as a professional, an expert, and a business leader. This means you do have a target market, and it includes your business customers as well as your colleagues, strategic partners, stakeholders and the thought leaders in your industry. So defining your personal brand niche means deciding who your ideal audience is, and determining how you can best connect with them on a personal level.

3. Elevate Your Personal Brand By Association

As the saying goes, you are known by the company you keep. This holds true for personal branding, where a few strategic endorsements from industry influencers can enhance your personal reputation and allow you to be perceived as successful by association with known name brands.

Image via www.timferriss.com

Tim Ferriss, entrepreneur and New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Work Week, has seen phenomenal success as a personal brand, bolstered by multiple endorsements from highly recognizable names. The bio page of Ferriss’ website places him in the company of big business and personal brands, from working with Google, Harvard, and Nike, to appearances in Forbes and on CNN, to receiving mentions in the class of Richard Branson and Jack Dorsey.

As a CEO or executive, networking with influencers in your industry and gathering testimonials is a powerful way to build your personal brand and draw on the success of association.

4. Own Your Brand

Even in an impersonal medium like video or the Internet, your audience can tell when you’re being authentic—and they can spot a phoney. Your personal brand will not be successful if it’s not authentic. In fact, authenticity forms the foundation of a unique personal brand that helps you stand out. As writer and poet Oscar Wilde (who was a strong personal brand before the term was defined) said: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

Many CEOs and executives fear the possibility of polarizing their audiences with a strong, authentic brand. But it’s essential to realize that, like your business brand, your personal brand won’t appeal to everyone—and it doesn’t have to.

Image via www.apple.com

Take, for example, Steve Jobs. The former CEO of Apple was unquestionably a powerful personal brand. Innovative, dynamic, and widely respected, Jobs was also known for his strict perfectionist tendencies and for being harsh on his employees. He never tried to hide these qualities or apologize for them, yet even after his death, Jobs remains a beloved icon and a symbol of technological innovation.

Jobs’ less desirable personality traits remained a known but low-key quantity throughout his life and career. But even more polarizing personal brands can be successful, whether at the positive or negative end of the spectrum. Consider the unprecedented success of UK entrepreneur and celebrity chef Gordon James Ramsay, Jr, OBE. Abrasive, brusque, and demanding, Ramsay has built his personal brand on unending criticism delivered in crude language that has actually reduced his guests—his customers—to tears on occasion.

Image via www.gordonramsay.com

Still, Ramsay’s audience can’t get enough. The reason is that despite his caustic demeanor, Ramsay is absolutely authentic. He has a genuine interest in, and a passion for, helping others succeed, and that passion shines through. And while he may seem to work at cross-purposes, at its core, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares aims to create more successful restaurateurs through the application of Ramsay’s demonstrated expertise.

Defining, shaping, and promoting your personal brand as a CEO or executive requires concentrated effort and some brand strategy inputs, but the results are worth the challenge. By maintaining a powerful and consistent personal brand that is distinct from, yet complementary to, your business brand, you can engage your customers and strengthen your platform for ongoing success.

What do you think?

• Are you aware of your existing personal brand? Is it positive, negative, or neutral?

• How can you monitor and shape your personal brand online?

• What niche audience does your personal brand appeal to, and how will you reach them and engage them positively?

• Where would you start looking for influencer endorsements in your industry?

• How can you define and enhance your authentic personal brand?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

Personal Branding: The Difference Between Product and Personal Branding

July 23, 2014/0 Comments/in Brand Personality, Brand Reputation, Brand Story, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Branding, Personal Branding /by Lorraine Carter

Branding is crucial for any business looking to be competitive in today’s marketplace. When most organizations mention branding, they’re referring to the carefully crafted perceptions surrounding their products or services designed to create an emotional response in their target audience. But there’s another type of branding that can be equally important in marketing your business—namely, your personal brand.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur or business owner, a professional or an executive, a spokesperson, marketing associate or CEO, drawing a distinction between your product and personal brands, and working to position each of them, can help you propel your business forward and increase public recognition, customer loyalty, and profitability.

What is a Product Brand?

Defining a product or service related brand is paradoxically simple, yet also quite complex. A brand is what your product or service ‘stands for in people’s minds, what it means to them,’ and ‘branding is the process of executing and managing things that make people feel the way they do about your brand’. What your brand stands for—its values, promise, customer experience, and those associated feelings your brand provokes through its story, and so forth—is what makes up a product or service brand. It’s a combination of all those intangible and tangible elements associated with your products, services, or the organization as a whole that gives your brand meaning in a way that’s relevant to your target customers.

Companies endeavor to suggest and influence customer perceptions and predispositions to buy through their branding strategies—and this is where the definition becomes more complex. Defining a product brand on the company side can involve a number of components, all working together to reinforce a desired brand perception. This can include brand positioning, brand values, the brand story, and the brand promise.

A product or service brand shapes customer perceptions of the things they purchase, everything from eggs to airline travel! These types of brands can become so powerful that they’re perceived as synonymous with the function of the product or service provided. For example, many people refer to all disposable tissues as Kleenex, all copy machines as Xerox, or all clear adhesive tape as Scotch tape or Sellotape.

What is a Personal Brand?

Your personal brand is all about you, as a person, but in the more public sense of how you project your image to the outside world. A personal brand doesn’t necessarily reflect every detail of an individual’s private life, unless an individual chooses to live their life in a ‘reality TV’ way! Just as with product or service brands, personal brands are (or should be) carefully crafted in terms of both perception and authenticity. In a very fundamental sense, your personal brand is your reputation.

A personal brand includes the perceptions, qualities, and characteristics people associate with you, your name, how you conduct yourself (professionally and privately) and your professional position. Personal brands can be leveraged in brand strategy terms just as effectively as product or service bands. They too represent the emotional experience others will expect when encountering you in a professional capacity. Your personal brand is a unique promise of value that can be attributed to you as an individual, which can also tie in to your company’s brand promise on some level as well.

Image via www.virgin.com

Take Sir Richard Branson and Virgin or Michael O’Leary and Ryanair. Both have very separate, individual personal brands that are distinct from the product or service brands they head up. They are, in effect, the spokespersons and visionaries behind the product brands, with brand personas which are aligned to the brands they stand beside—but neither are one and the same.

Image via www.02b.com

The most successful personal brands are an authentic reflection of that person’s true qualities, without necessarily divulging every micro detail on a private level in their personal lives.

Image via www.marthastewart.com

One strong example of a successful personal brand is Martha Stewart. In this instance, her personal brand is tightly linked to her products and services, which typically also carry her name. The public face of a vast business empire, Martha Stewart the person is also Martha Stewart the brand. Customers associate her as an individual with taste, quality, and comfortable living. Interestingly Martha Stewart’s personal brand was strong enough to carry her through a legal ordeal that had her serving time in prison—after her release, her reputation recovered and her business empire continued to grow.

Product and Personal Brands: What They Share, What’s Different

While personal and product brands are different, they are not totally separate either. Regardless of your personal brand’s standing in the market in terms of its recognition and associations, the strongest personal brands are often linked in some way to your company’s product or service brand. There are often commonalities—for example, Martha Stewart’s personal style is reflected by the brand promise of her company to lend that style to customers’ home décor, clothing, and other Martha Stewart Living product lines. Richard Branson’s personal brand is reflected in some of the characteristics of the Virgin brand, such as being seen as a game-changer, a challenger of the status quo, and an innovative risk-taker that puts the customer at the heart of everything.

Image via www.marthastewart.com

Generally, product and personal brands are similar in that they stand for something that’s meaningful to their audience, and must be consistent in how they are reflected or presented to the world. Consistency is an important key for both personal and product branding. The more customers experience the same values and emotions through each interaction with you, or your products and services, the more they will trust, expect and value a similar relevant experience every time.

There are several differences between product and personal brands, and the most important is one that’s inherent to the nature of what these brands represent. Product or service brands are created by branding and marketing campaigns, which help to shape customer perceptions. On the other hand, personal brands are a deliberate choice by the person who is that brand.

Image via www.starbucks.com

A cup of Starbucks coffee can’t choose to be a social status symbol, representative of discerning cultural tastes and community responsibility. But Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, can choose to launch an initiative to create more jobs and encourage entrepreneurs, and kick-start that initiative with a $5 million donation.

Establishing Your Own Personal Brand

One vital realisation in personal branding is that, no matter who you are or how you comport yourself professionally, you already have a personal brand. If you’re known to people in a professional capacity, you have a reputation and a set of expectations that surrounds your involvement—good or bad. And you can allow others to continue establishing your personal brand according to their own perceptions, or you can take control to actively shape, promote, and grow the personal brand you want to project.

Sir Richard Branson, founder and CEO of Virgin Group, takes an active role in shaping his personal brand. Branson is widely perceived as pioneering and inventive, which has led to the formation of an array of diverse, yet wildly successful industry groups—from Virgin Records to Virgin Mobile, Virgin Airways, and Virgin Trains. Branson’s business pursuits are continually evolving, and they continue to succeed based on the strength of his personal brand as much as the aggressive effectiveness of his business decisions and the perceived value of the Virgin brand itself.

Building a personal brand involves first defining the perceptions of yourself that you want others to expect, and then remaining consistent in your presentation of those perceptions throughout your professional appearances, both online and in person. Creating central pieces, such as your biography and professional photo, and using them to identify yourself consistently wherever you appear online or in more traditional media are important tools to manage and reinforce your personal brand.

In general, your personal brand won’t require as much research, campaigning, and analysis as your product or service brand—but the effort to shape and maintain personal branding can be highly effective in supporting the growth and success of your product or service brand or indeed your career!

What do you think?

• Is a personal brand important to you as a professional?

• Have you developed a strongly established personal brand? When did you last audit how others perceive your unique personal brand?

• How can you tie your personal brand to your product or service brand and maintain authenticity to yourself?

• What opportunities can you identify to showcase your personal brand?

• Will your personal brand evolve separately from, or in tandem with, your product or service brand?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

Branding Amazon: 3 Lessons to Learn For Your Brand Success

July 15, 2014/0 Comments/in Brand Experience, Brand Promise, Brand Values, Customer Engagement, Customer Service, eCommerce /by Lorraine Carter

Amazon is one of the most recognizable companies in the world, occupying and serving more global regions than any other organization. And while it may seem hard to imagine branding a store that sells “everything,” the world’s largest ecommerce store has managed quite well! In fact, the name Amazon has practically become synonymous with online shopping.

While your company may not have the reach and capabilities of Amazon just yet, there are still several branding lessons you can take away from the mega-store’s strategies, positioning and brand management.

Image via www.amazon.com

1. Root Your Brand Identity Through Your Business Story

The humble start of Amazon is among the best-known business origin stories in the world and this story has been a tremendous asset in establishing the company’s customer-centric brand positioning. Millions of people know that founder Jeff Bezos left a high-paying career to found a startup bookselling company, which at first he operated out of a garage. The company’s unusually rapid ascension from selling books to U.S. customers, to selling everything to the whole world, completes the Cinderella story, even with its ups and downs along the way.

With this powerful brand story firmly established, Amazon is able to maintain its image as an organization that will always care about its customers, no matter how unimaginably large it becomes. Amazon’s story is a differentiator, setting the brand apart from other mega-corporations through its entrepreneurial grass-root beginnings. Their customer centric approach still is one of their highest brand values and drives the whole focus of the business in terms of their business model, brand strategy and customer experience.

Your brand story is a really important part of your whole brand strategy and any business seeking to strengthen its brand leverage should consider amplifying it appropriately in a way that’s relevant to your customers.

People buy with emotion and your story helps build that emotional connection. That said, your story needs to be worth talking about so you really must craft and communicate it in a way that your core target audience finds truly compelling, memorable and referable using a systemized approach like our ‘Story Selling System™’. Develop your brand story by revisiting the reasons you launched your business in the first place. This can help you pinpoint the areas worth leveraging to increase your brand recognition in the market. What was and still is your big ‘Why?’ To quote Simon Sinek, ‘People don’t buy what you do, they buy ‘why’ you do it.’

2. Highlight Your Brand Differentiation at Every Opportunity

Ask anyone what sets Amazon apart from other online retailers, and they’re likely to answer in a number of ways: the product selection, the customer centric approach and the prices. Regarding the selection, the original tagline for the company when it only sold books was “Earth’s biggest book store.” As the organization experienced exponential growth and added product line after product line, it became known as “the world’s largest online retailer.” Today’s Amazon customers can expect to find anything they’d like to buy—and some things they would never buy—available for sale on Amazon. This enormous selection of products is a crucial part of Amazon’s brand differentiation.

The second prong, regarding the lowest prices, has been part of Amazon’s branding strategy from the beginning. In fact, the company is so dedicated to under-pricing its competitors that part of Bezos’ business plan was not to make any profits for the first four to five years of operation, in order to keep prices low for customers. Other money-saving features have been added to the retail site in addition to low pricing—the most notable being the Amazon Prime program, which offers customers free two-day shipping, unlimited movie streaming, and now unlimited music streaming for a yearly subscription fee of under $100—amounting to around $8.25 per month.

Amazon’s huge selection and low prices figure prominently into their branding, marketing and positioning. Then their customer centric approach means they are constantly innovating on ways to enhance the customer shopping experience. Customers are continually informed of money-saving opportunities through onsite callouts, email notifications, and public announcements. Every customer’s online experience is bespoke and tailored according to their browsing interests.

3. Remain Flawlessly Consistent with Your Brand Promise

Above all other factors Amazon’s brand promise has driven the company’s explosive growth, worldwide expansion and enduring popularity among customers from every walk of life. It is a simple promise, though from a business standpoint it’s not so simple to keep: consistently deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Everything about Amazon is engineered to serve the customer in the best possible way. From the unmatched product selection, to the powerful search engine that allows shoppers to find exactly what they’re looking for in seconds, to the customer review system that supports shoppers research products from trusted sources (other consumers) as well as an opportunity to voice their own opinions and experiences with products, to low prices and highly responsive customer service communication. When you shop with Amazon, you’re guaranteed a flawless experience with as little hindrance as possible. And if you don’t get what you expect, Amazon will make it right.

In addition to setting the standards for the online customer experience, Amazon has built in several innovative customer features that enhance the overall environment. The company’s popular 1-Click ordering feature, which saves shoppers’ preferred payment and shipping information and lets them complete purchases with a single click, not only improves the customer experience but also increased impulse buying. And along with the extensive customer review system is a massive online community, with forums and message boards that allow Amazon customers and vendors to interact, discuss products and more.

The key to successful branding is, amongst other things, absolute consistency in everything you do combined with an unshakable brand promise. When your brand promise is reflected in every facet of your business, from customer-facing features to employee actions, to your products or services themselves, you create a customer experience which engenders lasting loyalty, high profile brand recognition and a much more powerful market position.

And in case you’re thinking otherwise, you don’t have to be Amazon to apply these brand strategies. All of this is very doable at a micro local business or national level and when done well, with absolute commitment, significantly contributes to your abilities to achieve brand success, sustained growth and increased profitability.

What do you think?

• Is your brand story really well developed and most importantly, known to your customers and resonating with them? If not ask about our Story Selling System™

• Have you identified the best way to integrate your brand story into your brand positioning?

• Is your brand really different, distinctive and memorable and are you capitalizing on your brand differentiators effectively?

• How can you draw attention to the unique aspects of your brand?

• Where is your brand promise being fulfilled properly and which areas of your business are weak and could benefit from reinforcing your brand promise more effectively?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!

Entrepreneurial Branding: 5 Top Tips For Brand Success

June 24, 2014/0 Comments/in Brand Experience, Brand Launch, Brand Profiling & Positioning, Brand Promise, Brand Relevance, Brand Research, Brand Story, Brand Strategy, Brand Values, Branding, Business, Entrepreneur, Return On Investment /by Lorraine Carter

Entrepreneurs typically face an array of challenges with a failure rate which is dauntingly high. Estimates range from 75 to 90 percent of startups failing within the first few years – those numbers are enough to give even the most stoically resilient and determined entrepreneur pause for thought.

The good news is that a strong brand strategy can vastly improve your chances for entrepreneurial success. If over 80% of the Fortune 500 Company CEOs, rate ‘their brand’ as their company’s number one asset, then maybe you should be giving the planning and thought around your brand a lot more consideration than merely tokenism. When building a brand, it’s vital for entrepreneurs to realize that brands are not solely visual. The most common misperception is that many think their brand is just their logo and not much else! A logo is not a brand. This one of the most prevalent mistakes business owners, and designers alike make – much to their detriment.

A brand is what your product or service ‘stands for in peoples minds, what it means to them’ and ‘branding is the process of executing and managing things that make people feel the way they do about your brand’. What your brand stands for, its values, promise, customer experience and those associated feelings your brand provokes through its story, and so forth, are what determine the creative design brief for what you logo, and all your other visual materials, actually look like. Your logo is merely the visual idnetifier for your brand, assuming it is well designed enough to appropriately convey your brand meaning in a very distilled visual representation. In short you need to build your brand profile first, before you start designing your logo.

If you define what your brand is all about from day one, through your brand profile, it will provide you with absolute clarity on the direction of your brand strategy in parrallel with your business strategy and overall business plan. It will provide you with the right direction for all the different choices you will need to make such as suppliers, communications, online interactions and marketing activities etc.

The question here is what’s different, really different about what you’re offering? Slightly different is not good enough. If you want to stand out, you’ve got to be brave and think bigger – dare to be different with your brand in a way that is really relevant to your primary customer. This is what gives your brand substance and potential sustainability – not a logo. You can have the most beautifully designed logo but that still won’t make it into a brand.

Image via www.financialpost.com and Patrick Fallon/Bloomberg

One entrepreneur that has defined a brand very succinctly is Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, when he said: “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” Successful branding is about winning and keeping customers, about influencing choice, and ultimately about finding and dominating your place in the market.

Checkout these top five branding tips to help you achieve a stronger start and give your budding business a better chance of success.

5 Foundational Branding Tips to Support Your Brands Success

1. Start Early, Brand Consistently and Congruently

For any entrepreneur or startup, it’s never too early to begin building the foundations of your brand. In fact, you should have your brand well developed and thought through so you can put it to work for your business long before you interact with your first customer. This can be summed up in Simon Sinek’s quote ‘People don’t buy what you do, they buy ‘why’ you do it, and what you do simply ‘proves what you believe’.

Understanding is the first step to building a successful brand. You must know, as a company, exactly who you are, what you stand for, why you do what you do, and what you have to offer your prospective customers that they can’t experience or get anywhere else. Your brand must emotionally and intellectually have the power to engage, motivate and inspire both your prospective customers and your people internally.

Dedicate committed time and effort to determining your brand vision. Challenge your thinking, don’t settle for second rate ‘me tooism’ or hybrids of what’s already out there. The greatest sin is to be bland, obvious and ordinary. You must be different, distinctive and memorable for the right reasons if you want success. Be rigorous and thoroughly challenge yourself. Be able to answer questions such as:

What is your company’s mission? What will you deliver to your customers—not just in terms of products or services, but emotionally and as an overall customer experience?
What benefits and features of your company’s products and services are unique to your business?
How will your brand enhance your customers lives and/or solve their problems?
What qualities do you want your consumers to equate with your company?
What should your business be synonymous with in one year, five years, ten years?
Will it still be relevant and powerful in one year, five years, ten years or twenty years plus?
Would you fight to protect what your brand stands for? Do you believe in it so strongly that you simply won’t compromise on it? Is it fundamental to your core belief system?

Once you have fully fleshed out your business brand vision and values, you can begin distilling your core message into a powerful and captivating brand communications strategy that puts your brand to work effectively.

However this can only be done authoritatively when you have a very clear picture of who your ideal core target audience is. Do you know what their needs, wants, loves, hates and aspirations are? How and where do they live, what age and gender are they?

You need to build your customer persona or avatar because its only when you have absolute clarity on what this is, that you can create a brand that will truly resonate with your core target audience. You need to create a brand that meets their emotional needs because when people buy, be that a product or service or into your ideas, they buy with emotion – not rational. Think about it, you can’t build something of substance and compelling meaning if you don’t know or understand who you core customer is and what matters most to them.

2. Create the Right Visuals

While a brand isn’t just about visuals, your brand collateral or visual materials are far more important than most entrepreneurs often realise. Think about all the brands you know that are instantly recognizable: the BP flower, the Nike swoosh, the red Coca-Cola can, McDonald’s golden arches, and Apple’s…apple.

Image via www.apple.com

For any entrepreneur or startup, a well-designed logo can become a powerful hook for your brand. It’s your brands identifier and like a tattoo, not something you easily or readily change once you start establishing it – so it needs to given some serious thought and investment from day one. In short it needs to be invested in properly as does all the rest of your brand collateral be that your website, brochures, PowerPoint or Keynote Presentations, packaging, direct mail, advertising, social media presence and videos etc. Your brand collateral is the tangible evidence of your brand and it must be designed to congruently reflect and tell your brand story, its values and personality properly. Every single touch point or piece relating to your brand must be consistent and properly designed. They are the tactile materials of your brand, an extension of your reputation and part of your branding strategy.

3. Dare to be Different

Every business has competition, and as an entrepreneur, your startup must stand out from not only the established companies in your industry, but also the thousands of other startups launched every year. This means that having absolute clarity on what your brand stands for, what your ‘big why is’, and how you’re going to communicate your message and that distinction to your customers, is crucial to your brands’ potential success.

Distilling your brand values, what it stands for, its personality, the do’s and don’ts of how it will behave and the experience it will create for your customers through all the various ‘touch points’ of its interaction with them is critical to its potential success.

It can be challenging to properly and fully develop your ‘brands’ profile’, but once done becomes vital to the fundamental success of your business and part of your ongoing business strategy and plan. It’s integral to your business model.

As an example, many entrepreneurs around the world have built their success through a brand profile that has been strongly rooted in the provenance of their unique geographic location. The hospitality and restaurant industry is particularly crowded, but with enough differentiation from other restaurants in the same locality and an authentically lived and experienced brand story, you can attract a loyal customer following.

The world you create around your brand must be authentic with an almost theatrical piece of escapism, from a customer experience perspective. From the moment they stand outside your door, metaphorically speaking, to consider a purchase from you, your brand must offer them something they can’t get or experience anywhere else. It must richly express its own personality in a way that’s truly relevant and compelling to your target audience.

Image via www.letoile-restaurant.com

One restaurant owner in Madison, Wisconsin, USA, not only created success with her brand proposition, but also used it to elevate her status from entrepreneur to icon. Odessa Piper’s vision led her to launch a fine-dining establishment, L’Etoile, in the middle of a large farming community, which became successful due in large part to her brand vision and commitment to serving only the highest quality, locally sourced food. While sustainable dining may be nothing new today, it’s important to note that Piper opened L’Etoile in 1976, making her a pioneer of the farm-to-table movement and earning her the title of “First Lady of Cuisine” in Wisconsin.

4. Brand Promises: Make Them and Never Break Them

Every successful brand comes with an unshakeable promise—in fact, your brand promise is a core part of your brand. You don’t have a meaningful brand without a brand promise. Having a brand means that your customers can and should expect certain rewards whenever they interact with your company. Whether that promise is incredibly great quality ingredients “using only the really good stuff”, exceptional customer service that “goes beyond just the good to an exceptional and unforgettable experience” or “social distinction in a class of its own”, the key to sustaining your entrepreneurial business is to deliver on your brand promise – every time congruently and consistently without question. Your brand promise must be non-negotiable in its delivery and fulfillment all the time.

Image via www.rubyhammer.com and www.debenhams.com

International makeup artist and successful entrepreneur Ruby Hammer understands and capitalizes on her brand promise. Hammer co-created and launched the now-discontinued Ruby & Millie makeup brand in partnership with Boots—but she’s also responsible for the launch of other successful brands in the UK, including Aveda, L’Occitane and Tweezerman. She was awarded an MBE in 2007 by the Queen, and she’s recently launched a new line called Ruby Hammer Recommends.

In an interview with the Female Entrepreneur Association, Hammer states that promising and delivering quality is vital to the success of a brand. “The key to developing a successful brand is first, you’ve got to have something worthy of success,” she says. “You can’t do it with a bad product.”

Successful brands not only give customers the expectation of a unique perspective and a valued experience, they deliver on that promise to provide something undeniably and irresistibly desirable.

5. Branding: A Solid Foundation for Startups

The majority of new businesses may fail, but yours doesn’t have to be one of those sorry statistics. Strategic branding with a clear message that communicates the unique experience and attributes of your offering can help you win and sustain your business from day one. Commit to building a strong brand foundation to attract and underpin a loyal customer base. This will in turn inspire your brand advocates who in turn will help you spread your brand name and reach much further, and most importantly, help you build an ongoing profitable empire.

What do you think?

• Does your business have a strong brand profile? If not, how can you create one?

• Do you understand what your target audience wants, and exactly how you can meet their desires?

• Does your logo really stand out in its uniqueness and distinction, capturing the essence of your brands’ mission, vision, and qualities of your business at a glance? If not, how can you improve it?

• How can you measure the effectiveness of your startup’s brand?

• What channels are you using to spread your brand, both visually and conversationally?

Drop us a line and share your thoughts in the comments, we’d love to hear from you!

Top 7 Tips for Creating a Compelling Brand Story

1. Know Your Brand’s Big “Why”

3. Tie into Your Provenance

4. Build a Brand Hero

5. Keep Your Brand Promise Consistent

6. Be Authentic

7. Make Your Brand Story Shareable

You may also like:

1. Know Your Market

2. Define Your Brand Personality

3. Create Distinction for Your Brand Profile

4. Develop or Refine Your Brand Story

5. Develop a Strategic Direction

6. Maintain Brand Consistency

Top 20 Branding Trends for 2015

1. Authenticity Drives Success

2. Mobile Matters More

3. Metrics Turn Toward Revenue

4. Segmentation is Key

5. Brand Targets are Ultra-Personalized

6. Packaging Goes 3D

7. Streamlined Naming Conventions

8. Brand Stories Take Centre Stage

9. The TMI Line Blurs

10. Cross-Channel Integration is Crucial

11. Customers will Not be Sold to

12. Brands as a Consolidated Experience

13. The Video Explosion

14. Brand “Smarketing”

15. Brands Mobilise with Click-and-Collect

16. CSR Packs a Bigger Punch

17. Green Brands

18. Big Data Delivers Brand Insight

19. Social Brand Success is Pay-to-Play

20. Facebook Fades for Millennial Brand Audiences

Top 4 of today’s most important rules for social media branding success.

Rule 1: Be Consistent

Rule 2: Be Active

Rule 3: Be Engaging

Rule 4: Be Social

Understanding the Different Types of Brand Names

Top Ten Brand Name Creation Categories

1. Founders’ Names:

2. Descriptive Names:

3. Geographic Names:

4. Personification:

5. Evocative Names:

6. Alliteration or Rhyming Names:

7. Derivative Names:

8. Neologisms (new made-up words):

9. Hybrid Names:

10. Acronyms and Initials:

A. Brand Naming Methods: Strategic Brainstorming

B. Brand Naming Method: Name and Word Lists

C. Brand Naming Method: Puns and Plays on Words

What do you think?

Key Ingredients for a Compelling Brand Personality

1. Building an Emotional Response

2. The Bold and The Brave

3. Redefining a Niche

Brand Amplification Strategies for Spreading Your Brand Personality

What do you think?

Top 4 Personal Branding Tips for CEOs and Senior Executives

1. Understand Your Existing Personal Brand

2. Define Your Niche

3. Elevate Your Personal Brand By Association

4. Own Your Brand

What do you think?

What is a Product Brand?

What is a Personal Brand?

Product and Personal Brands: What They Share, What’s Different

Establishing Your Own Personal Brand

What do you think?

1. Root Your Brand Identity Through Your Business Story

2. Highlight Your Brand Differentiation at Every Opportunity

3. Remain Flawlessly Consistent with Your Brand Promise

5 Foundational Branding Tips to Support Your Brands Success

1. Start Early, Brand Consistently and Congruently

2. Create the Right Visuals

3. Dare to be Different