Forget branding, focus on brand building.

Building up your brand in social today is more than a communication matter. It’s an essential aspect of your digital transformation and the business’s future ability to launch digital services.

The amount of brands created today is growing exponentially, each digital service and startup needs some sort of brand. There are never been so many new brands. 

Can those brands be designed using the methodologies we used to use to create brands that were built through advertising?

Branding has changed, it is no longer a mystic process owned by the few. It has become more open and accessible. One would argue a tool like the Logo Maker App would make any brand expert cringe as never a brand been so unnecessary if it all it boils down to is a logo.

But that's the world we're in.

Today, the game starts. With that many brands in the making, businesses don't have funds to launch those new service brands through paid media.

Marketing teams are under the pressure  to develop a new approach to branding that builds-in the potential for connectivity and digital engagement right from the get-go.

If the components below are designed as part of your brand, they will act like as a launchpad and sales engine as much as a traditional branding function.

The 8 essentials of service brands:

1. Trusted. When there is no mass media to tell the world you are big and sage, you need trust to be build through reviews and NPS score.
2. Data intelligent. Your brand needs a process to derive intelligence through data and engage it as a source of business insights.
3. Championed. When you are starting fresh, having inspired influencers who want to share your success and be part of the innovative solutions you are bringing to the word is key to success.
4. Endorsed. When reach can’t be bought, word of mouth is your best option, fostering a community of brand advocates, endorsing your purpose and wanting you to do well is the way forward.
5. User-centric. Teams need a deep understanding of what users need, experience, like, hate, expect so they can design solutions that delight and reduce their pain points.
6. Scalable. A service contrived by a technical environment is a risky approach, instead your business should be designed as a suite of micro services that can scale based on opportunities.
7. Polythetic. We have been designing brands as entities strongly associated to a particular product, distribution and team. Technology has displaced this monolithic view of the brand and today, you want your brand to be polythetic and have a modular architecture that enables the business to pivot and scale. The traditional brand architecture principles or portfolio approach are no longer suited for a digital-led context.
8. Design-led. The organisational chart of BBVA below shows the innovative structure of a  service-led organisation. In particular, the regrouping of customer solutions, talent & culture and new digital businesses under the same "new core competencies" function. That's the ground for innovation you want to create.

Designing around those 8 essentials, your brand becomes both a launchpad and test environment, a more tangible asset for the business. Once in market, you instantly assess performance and efficiency through metrics like growth potential and velocity. This is the intelligence the business needs to decide where to invest in paid media to gain exposure and scale - or not.

In today's environment brands are built on social validation and the safest way to achieve this result is to be make your brand social today so it can translate to being a “service” brand with the social capital it requires to succeed in a digital-led market.