Organisations have a consistent impression that branding is very much about the visuals, and the look and feel. They spend less time thinking about the story, narrative and the positioning they want customers to take away. We share some points for brands to consider branding from a holistic perspective.
For many organisations, branding has long been simply about the look and feel of their entity name, and perhaps the tagline. Startups and older businesses that are being handed over to the next generation are often told to get a new logo, or change the colours, or add a tagline, or a favourite of mine, add your social media profile name.
These actions stem from a place of good intention. Many Business 101 articles tend to emphasise and reinforce creating memorable visual cues such that customers can associate the branding with the business. Such articles, like the one here, and here and this one often fail to point out that the business needs to even be discovered by a potential customer prior to any of the visual cues working.
A McKinsey survey shows that during the pandemic, customers were more willing to try new brands with “…big, trusted brands, which are seeing 50 percent growth during the crisis”. The same survey also pointed out that customers switched due to availability, convenience, and value being the main reasons for changing brands.
When an organisation is challenging larger, more established and recognised brands, it is critical that they start thinking bigger picture from the beginning of the branding exercise, the programme they want to run, or the campaign to get customers.
And it all begins with the customer.
We shared in a previous article that the customer and their preferences have always been changing and evolving, regardless of the pandemic. If nothing else, the pandemic has helped several customer segments get informed, educated and adopt different channels and formats of fulfilment compared to pre-pandemic times.
The important lesson here for any organisation is to determine whether they have a sense and understanding of their target customer, at this moment in time. It does not matter that in 2019, 80 percent of customers were a certain type. Does this still hold true for 2022?
And if the answer is no, or we are not sure, then it is time to do some research and find out who, what and how the customers are now, and in the next 12 months.
Understanding and creating customer profiles and mapping their journey to the organisation trumps creating a cool logo and selecting a fun pantone colour to go along with it.
We can help you fix and problem solve for growth and revenue scenarios such as market entry, market expansion, product and service launches through a strategic communications approach.
Send an email to connect@wearebrandutility.com OR book an exploratory consultation through this link OR complete this form and we will connect with you shortly.
We are Brand Utility is a strategic communications and business consultancy. Our principal consultant is a registered management consultant, certified and recognised by the Institute of Management Consultants Singapore.
We work with brands in the corporate, professional services, retail, travel, and technology spaces.
With understanding comes responsibility.
Once the organisation has worked out the customer profile and journey(s), the next step is to create a clear position and concise and specific messages. These express the value and difference customers get by buying from the organisation.
The position and messaging ladder up to a brand story, or narrative. Customers identify with the vision, mission and values shared in the brand story, and want to interact and engage with organisation.
The organisation, now a brand, has the responsibility to deliver their best product or service to the customer, consistently. Combined, the narrative, positioning and messaging serve as the take-away from the brand to their customers.
Now we start to think about the brand’s look and feel.
At this stage, brands can create a logo, preferred colours, tagline, hashtag and all the associated visual elements. Holistically, brands can work with an organisation-wide set of elements, or even create visuals specifically for products, services, programmes or campaigns.
The point is, the visuals including pictures and even video, serve the position and the message. The use of the visuals is tactical, for example, when they are used to populate the social media profile or company page. The elements, like images or colours, have to be consistent and different from competitors, to reduce confusion. The copy and placement should support the messages and remind customers about any points of differentiation between the brand and competitors.
It ends with the customer as well.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. - Peter Drucker
All the branding elements, that is story, positioning, messaging, visuals, need to be measured. They have to be measured in both efficacy and efficiency in getting a target customer to move from discovering your brand to making a purchase, and coming back to make more purchases, or even better, refer a friend.
The idea about measuring brand elements is to find out how much interaction and engagement each element has with a potential customer throughout the customer journey you mapped for them.
Assign a percentage or points and decide if other elements or actions can score higher in relation to the customer.
Experiment with, replace or add more elements.
There is no perfect formula that can be applied equally across all different brands and businesses.
When you find a formula that works, and can scale across your brands, optimise it as much as possible, and benefit from being relevant and adding value to your customers.
We are Brand Utility is a strategic communication and business consultancy business consultancy. We work with brands in the corporate, professional services, retail, travel, and technology spaces.
We offer strategy and tactics to support growth outcomes - revenue, scale, regional expansion, and market entry – for our clients.
Areas of support include:
Strategic communications: Approach to market, brand concept and map, positioning, messaging, story and narrative, thought leadership
Marketing: Campaign/programme planning, story-based marketing execution, digital marketing, community amplification, content planning and production, go-to-market execution
Lead generation and growth marketing: Digital advertising, social media advertising, social commerce, e-commerce
Integration of marketing with business operations: We plan and execute as a marketing and/or PR lead for your brand
Discover more about our services at our website.
Photo by Patrik Michalicka on Unsplash
Comments