Trying to Make it Easy: The Brief Guide to Building a Brand for Newbies

A type of product manufactured by a particular company under a specific name. If you ever google the definition for a brand, that's what it says, simple? Right? Any product by any company can be a brand. A soap can be a brand and so can be a restaurant, a TV can belong to a particular brand and so can a piece of shirt,?so as long as you are a business which is offering a product or a service, you are a brand.?Regardless of the size of your business, in fact, branding has transcended to personal levels now. Personal branding has been a thing for the past few years now (Where do you think the influencer culture came from?)

Alright, so let's assume that you are an entrepreneur (SME or large doesn't matter)/ a brand manager/ a marketing head/ a marketing executive/ an agency; you have a product, and you need to sell it. The sales team has given you a brief regarding the product and the?Unique Selling Points?(USPs) of the product. Don't be afraid of the fancy term; in layman's words, your USPs are why your product is different than XYZ's product in the market and why customers should buy it.?If you are a Bangladeshi person in brands, you can also assume that the product has no USP at all, so you will have to create some, but we will get to that.?

Now, as the marketing person, your job is to create the promotional strategy for the product and ensure sales keep coming and the product is recognized. Now, what do you start off with? Well, you start with brand development, which is a sequence of items I am going to painstakingly explain cause it's a holiday, I have a lot of time, and I felt like no one should struggle like I did when I started out.

Alright, so this is what the brand development process looks like:

• First things first, we Analyze the Market:

Market analysis has a few steps involved in it and I will go through the processes briefly.

# Market Research:

Market research is simple; you get a holistic idea regarding the viability of the product or service you will launch. You talk to people who you think may be potential customers of the brand and understand whether your product is required or not. Find out about your competitors and the history of brands that have succeeded and failed with the same product. Find reasons for each. Peak sales times and off-peak sales times in the year. Raw Material availability. Market research is a "whatever you can find out" survey regarding your product and service.?

# Brand Audit

A brand audit is?a checkup that evaluates your brand's position in the marketplace, its strengths and weaknesses, and how to strengthen it. A brand audit should cover three areas: Internal branding — your brand values, mission, and company culture. (Source: score.org)

#Competitor Analysis:

Find out who your competitors are, their weaknesses, strengths, market share, promotional strategies, and historical campaigns they run. Find out everything about your competitors, market leaders, and market followers.

#Customer Analysis

Create surveys with Potential customers; remember that audience segmentation and pinpointing comes at a much later stage of the brand development process. At this stage, marketers can assume potential customers and run physical/online surveys which ask them about their pain points regarding the product or service, their current options, affordability, region, age, gender, educational qualification, etc. But make sure that the surveys are not too long and give you the necessary information. Remember that Survey response rate is directly correlated to survey length or duration; we've seen,?on average, a 17% drop in response rate when a survey has more than 12 questions or takes longer than 5 minutes to complete. (Source: Pointerpro)

• Define your Brand Goal:

This part is simple, your organization should have a mission, a vision, and a goal for whatever product or brand you are starting or whatever problem you are solving. Figure those out and set out your brand mission, your brand value, and your goal.?

Source: L Global

Figure out the 3 P's and then simply put forward values which align with your P's such as:

Source: Canva

Define your core values first and then break them down to attribution values that align with your core values. Make sure your core values differ from your competitors, but it's not a must.?

• Customer Segmentation

One of the most nightmarish segments, but I believe that any marketer who has a good knowledge of the socioeconomic traits and psychographic traits of a particular geographical region or has an idea regarding its distribution can crack it. So Customer segmentation is basically breaking down your audience into as many divisions as you can:?

The first two are pretty easy since most brands have sales teams determining geographical penetration over quarters. Demographics can be assumed from the competitor analysis, product type, research behind the product, etc. However, psychographic and behavioral traits are what you need to be worried about. Nowadays, thanks to digital behavioral characteristics, you can track people who order online regularly and target them or target people who purchased from your website or your store and retarget them. There are plenty of ways to retarget an audience once they engage with your brand, and intent can also be found by how much they interact with your brand. For example:?1 Like- Less intent; A random comment- maybe no intent; A random comment tagging a friend-high intent; Inboxing the page- super high intent.???

Source: I made it for yall. YAY!

For Psychographic evaluation, however, I have seen surveys to be the most effective. Especially online surveys, ensure you have a good sample size (at least 500 People for national brands) or 50-100 regional samples for SME brands. Questions will be based on their lifestyle, education level, hobbies, passion, preference, favorite time pass activity, and pop culture relevant questions.

Create audience personas out of each segment to know them better, for example:?

Source: Hootsuite

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

Cause in the digital age, where there's an advertisement everywhere you look, which only keeps increasing, you need to connect with your audience. Audiences are 82% more likely to engage with content when they connect with it in terms of values, lifestyle, interests, and state of life. Remember that you may have more than one audience segment; you may have a luxury segment aged 24-28 while an upper-middle-class segment aged 42+; make sure you keep the segments separated. So that you can do a targeted campaign and produce content for each segment, and your communication is most effective.

# Build Your Brand Identity

Okay, so I promise to get back to this later in a later article where I will detail it since it's a significant segment on its own, and it's tough to explain them all here. Basically, building your brand identity has a few parts involved in it:

* A Brand Story: Tell a compelling narrative that connects your brand to your core audience.

* A brand Archetype: Every brand worldwide is divided into 12 archetypes. Find out your fit.

Source:https://marchbranding.com/buzz/brand-archetypes/

* Brand Positioning: What do you want your consumer to think when they think about your brand? That's brand positioning. Remember that Brand positioning has three basic rules:

Source: InfluencerMarketingHub

However, it can just as usually be represented by a matrix of Price and Quality. Usually represented by a simple graph:

Source: Visme

* Brand Tone: How you communicate with your audience has a lot of impacts. I love connecting with people in regional dialects via marketing channels when we target a specific region for a client.

* Brand Persona: All of the above will create a personality for your brand; think of your brand as a personality. What does it wear, what does it eat, how does it talk, what does it listen to, how old is it in terms of a human being, etc.

* Brand Guideline: This involves fonts that you use, color palettes, color schemes, logo usage guidelines, design themes, etc.

I will use just an image to show the type of research that goes on to just deciding on a color palette:

Source: RightHat LLC

And this is just one aspect of the brand guideline.

REMEMBER HOW I SAID SOME BRANDS DONT HAVE USPs and MARKETERS NEED TO MAKE ONE? ONCE YOU HAVE REACHED THIS PHASE, YOU CAN CREATE YOUR OWN USPs.

• Activation:

Voila! We have Reached the last phase! Now we take our product or service to the market through ads, activation campaigns, BTL communications etc. But first things first, before wasting your ad budget, find out your consumer touchpoints.

Source: Studio1

Once you know your consumer touchpoints, you will know which media to use in order to reach out to them in each phase of your marketing funnel. For example, whenever we create a brand, the first thing that we do is we create awareness.

Source: Digivizer

Social media is excellent for creating a brand or product awareness, and you can use metrics such as views, clicks, likes, reach, and impressions to quantify how many people are aware of your brand.

If you have read to this point, I thank you, and I am honored and humbled that you have given me the time to read this article. I sincerely hope that this helps you in your life. I am always open to queries or questions, just comment or inbox. Criticisms are welcome too!?

Lastly, let's clarify that this is a brief guide, more like brand building for amateurs, if you start your career in brands and marketing. I have tried to briefly squeeze in the ADSIA (Analyze, Define, Segment, Identity, Activation) process that I follow for brand building. This article will help you learn a lot of the nuances and give you an overview of the processes. But to truly master brand building, you will need extensive study of the techniques.

Other Sources that I used for illustrations and quotes, if I have missed any, kindly inbox me, I will make sure to add it to the article:

* Positioning: The Battle for your Mind

Book by Al Ries and Jack Trout

* Digital School of Marketing

* Think Owl

About the Author:

Hi! I am Sabbir Islam, I started my first business when I was 15, it was an online magazine called Youthsparks, we ran it for four years, and at its peak had 100k visitors worldwide per month. Then I ran a food cart called Cinnamon Sugar where I handled the digital marketing and branding. Then I worked in a digital agency as a project manager alongside being a freelance writer and an undergrad student; throughout the last six years, I have run my digital agency, Wire (www.wiredmm.com ), and helped build, nurture, and grow sales of 200+ SMEs and nationwide brands. We have a 50+ people team HQ in Dhaka with regional operations in Chittagong, Sylhet, Australia, and India. Brand building and strategization are the core of what I do in Wire and most of Wire's success has been based on the fact that we even brand SMEs as multinational corporations do. That's our forte and our data-centric marketing allows sales increment within months of retainers for most clients. We believe proper branding, witty campaigns, catchy copies, statics, and exciting creatives can generate much more ROI than extensive budget campaigns.?