How to Build a Winning Brand

Can a brand be built overnight? Of course, the answer is no.

Building your brand requires an abundance of persistence, effort and market knowledge. The reward for creating a winning brand comes when customers give their loyalty to the brand.

Earning customer loyalty is an important factor in brand-building because it’s much less expensive to maintain these customers.?Loyal customers stand up for your products or services, which keeps marketing expenses relatively lower.

On the other hand, it’s much more expensive and challenging to grab customers of competing brands because they tend not to want to switch. Doing so is risky for them.

Based on my experience, there are three building blocks to developing and managing a brand that resonates with customers. Let’s take a look at each one.

CUSTOMER EMPATHY

Customers buy your product because it solves a problem. How well do you understand your customers’ headaches? Highly effective brands have a clear picture of the challenges their customers face and their marketing tactics clearly describe how the brand solves those challenges. This leads to brand trust and credibility over time.

Don’t be surprised if you have demand for your products coming from more than one customer segment. Remember that each customer segment has its own set of headaches. That means your product solves different problems depending on the segment. I see it all the time with my clients. And that’s a good thing! It reduces strategic risk in the long run. When one segment is in decline, the brand enjoys a strong presence in another segment that is flourishing.

PERSISTENCE

A client of mine has an impressive resume, loaded with major achievements in business operations. Give him a problem to solve on the shop floor or in the front office and he’ll solve it. Once fixed, he’s ready to close out that project and take on the next issue.

Marketing and branding aren’t like that. The “set it and forget it” approach doesn’t work. Successful branding requires constant care and feeding. I strongly recommend a continuous improvement mentality. Review the marketing tactics that support your brand on a regular basis and adjust your tactics accordingly.?Base your marketing content decisions on a review of the performance of the company’s digital marketing assets.

Fortunately, tools exist to support the brand that are highly measurable, economical and effective. There’s a page you can borrow from the quality management playbook.?They practice what is known as the?Deming Cycle. According to The American Society for Quality (ASQ), there are four separate, but interrelated steps in the cycle: Plan, Do, Check and Act.

UNIQUENESS

What’s different about your company and its product offering? In order to compete, your brand has to offer something that’s hard to get elsewhere. And great brands also factor in the company’s unique set of values as well.

Identify what is unique about your product or service.?If you want to grow market share, customers need a good reason to switch. The more unique your product or company is, the more likely it is that a prospective customer will find value in it.

To pinpoint what sets your product apart from the competition, think about how you would complete this statement, “unlike other products on the market, our product will _____”. If you feel that you’re too close to the product, preventing you from taking an unbiased look at it, bring in people you trust for this exercise.

CONCLUSION

Apply these three building blocks in developing your brand strategy. They lead to great things: loyal customers, greater engagement, improved margins and better allocation of scarce marketing resources.?