Marketing,
Brand Development,
Content Marketing

How to Build a Strong Brand?
 
What is a Strong Brand?
A brand exists in the mind of the consumer and it’s a powerful influencing tool. A brand is a combination of images and ideas that embody your product, service, or business. Name, logo design, slogan, and graphic design can contribute a lot to your brand identity. Creating a strong brand image around your product can help build customer loyalty and encourage your customers to talk and recommend your product or business to their friends and family.

Who can deny, that a strong brand is a value-added aspect of products for many consumers? Often consumers will buy a product, even at a premium, luxury brands simply because of the associated strong brand name. For example, consumers are willing to buy an iPhone and pay much more extra, rather than buy another smartphone, because of the strong brand associated with the legendary Apple name.

However, brand values should constantly evolve to suit changing market conditions and should also reflect your forward-looking business strategy. Once these are established, it’s important to ensure that your customer experience reflects these values in every aspect of your business. This means creating every element of the marketing strategy to underline your brand values – from the staff you use, the products you produce, the messages on your advertising campaign. Building a respected brand can take a lot of hard work and you’ll need the commitment from your employees/team to make it happen. What is associated with a strong brand and good marketing positioning?

How you would like to be Perceived?
When designing a brand strategy, the first question you should ask is: “What is your unique selling proposition?” Examine what makes your business unique and attractive to the consumer? If these factors lead to a competitive advantage then you have determined your unique selling points. These are major contributory factors to what makes your business successful, so should form the central theme to your brand name, advertising and marketing strategy.

Your brand name is important. If you've already settled your company name, changing the name midstream won’t be a good idea. Good, memorable brands have short, easy to remember and easy to spell names. If your company name is long, try to shorten it by using an abbreviated form in your marketing communication. Such a name will be easier to remember.

Slogans are an important part of a company’s brand but have less permanence than the company name. Often, companies will change their slogan in an effort to “re-brand” their company with a new image or create a new slogan for each marketing and advertising campaign they run. Most brands concentrate on several of the most powerful and easily communicated proposition benefits in order to create a clearly understood brand message. The slogan should reflect your main marketing message.

It’s extremely important the position a brand occupies in a market in the minds of consumers. Strong brands have a clear, often unique position in the target market. Marketing positioning can be achieved through several means, including brand name, identity design, service standards, product guarantees, packaging and the way in which it is delivered. In fact, successful positioning usually requires a combination of these things.

Image and Logo Design
A logo and company image is the most important part of your brand identity design. A good logo design should be distinctive and simple in form, easy to read, memorable, appropriate, versatile and conveys an intended message. The logo should be easily reproduced in a multitude of formats (i.e., on a sign, on flyers, in advertising, brochure design, on business cards, bags, t-shirts etc.).

Your company’s identity design should have a unique colour scheme that matches your logo design and will be used consistently across your marketing communication. It’s important to unify all the aspects of your brand image and make your brand more memorable to your customers. A brand is being represented tangibly by branding, which allows the customer to easily identify a product using an identity which sometimes formalized in a corporate identity document. This can include the colour scheme, logo, slogans, typeface and can go into the depth of how these all work together in the marketing campaign. Strategic marketing and successful branding focus on the company brand values which should be obvious from the promotional materials.

Benefits of Building a Strong Brand
A brand can be a very powerful influencing tool, but only once it has been established – and it can take time to build up the necessary trust. When a customer has made up their mind it’s often very hard to persuade them to think differently. It is the intangible sum of thoughts and feelings about a particular company, service or product.

Quality is a vital ingredient of a good brand identity. Remember the “core benefits” – the things consumers expect. These must be delivered well, consistently.

There are two core elements of a strong brand – emotional value and practical value. Reach these two things and your brand will quickly grow!

The benefits of a strong brand are obvious:

1. It will add value to your company
2. Requires less persuasion for consumers to use other products from your brand
3. Can ensure a lasting customer relationship due to trust
4. It aids recognition in a crowded marketplace
5. This leads to the perception of quality

This leads to another important factor in building a brand: the need to invest in the brand over the long term. Building customer awareness, communicating the brand’s message and creating customer loyalty takes time. This means that management must “invest” in a brand, perhaps at the expense of short-term profitability.