Two Rules Every Business Should Follow When Creating Their Branding

As a marketing agency, we live to help other businesses grow.? We spend every day evaluating and refining brands and messaging, looking at market research, and developing strategies to help our clients accelerate their progress on growth, retention, and customer experience. Then we optimize and refine strategies to ensure our clients get the best ROI. We help brands become extraordinary and help them accelerate their growth through aligned strategy, branding, and customer experience.? We know exactly how to help clients achieve this success.

However, as a young and quickly growing agency, we have learned about creating a strong brand through trial and error. We have had the privilege to help amazing healthcare organizations, non-profits, businesses, and mission-driven entities to serve customers better.?

Through our failures and successes, we have learned two foundational rules needed to grow your business and ensure you remain competitive and relevant.

#1 Rule in Branding – It’s NOT about YOU the Business Owner.??

Our #1 rule in branding – is it’s not about me as the marketer, and it’s not about you, the business owner. It’s all about your customer. If your business is positioned with any other intention than to meet the customers' needs, you are spinning and spending a lot of wasted money.

Partway into our first year, we noticed a lack of engagement from healthcare organizations, a primary target in our work.? As it turns out when we dug in a bit and did some minor research, we learned that healthcare leaders, especially female leaders, were “completely turned off by our name” (their words, not ours…ouch!).

“Boss Lady” was an endearing term from previous staff members so, of course, I should name my business that. It was a heartwarming reminder of some amazing team members who have gone on to big and bold things.? Well, turns out the name “Boss Lady” is either loved (there are many, but I found out not in healthcare) or seen as an aggressive position. Even worse? Patronizing women. Not at all what we intended.

So, even though we still love the name Boss Lady and have stuck with it,? we learned an important lesson: to conduct proper research and A/B testing BEFORE investing in advertising, marketing, and design. We encourage our clients to do this and support them throughout the process.?

This leads us to…

#2 Rule in Branding – Do Your Research.?

So obviously, we know this. We do this with our customers, but again, as a business, we are guilty of “huffing our own exhaust” and forgetting the basics.??

Do. Your. Research.

To help us in this conversation, Sondra Brown, CEO of MDRG, an agency focused entirely on brilliant research, outlines why brand research is a non-negotiable and the components of smart brand research.

So why should you conduct brand research?

Industry disruptions, technological advances, and start-ups entering the market are constant, especially in healthcare – knowing when to take a closer look at your category and brand is crucial. It can be hard to recognize that it’s time to re-evaluate your company’s position in the market when you have your head down in the day-to-day activity of running a business. Nevertheless, keeping a finger on the pulse of consumer reactions to your brand is critical.

Your brand is the personification of your company. Its purpose is to create an identity for your company that people can relate to. As Sally noted, her target consumer could not relate. In the best of times, your brand is your biggest asset. In the worst of times, it is your biggest liability. To identify and maintain a strong and powerful brand, it’s important to identify a relevant and unique positioning before rolling out the brand identity and to conduct regular on-ongoing measurements and tracking of your brand’s health.

To get and maintain a good pulse on your brand, your strategic brand tracking should include the following 3 health metrics:

Brand Awareness and Perception

Above all, brand research should uncover the current awareness levels of your brand. Tracking aided and un-aided awareness will determine an initial baseline you will leverage for all future brand research studies. In addition, it’s critical you get a pulse on how you measure as it compares to your competition. Beyond awareness, how is your brand perceived? How are your competitors perceived?

Exploring consumer perceptions of your competitor as well as identifying unique positive associations with your brand will uncover white space from which your brand can create a stronghold in the market.

Emotional Engagement

With advances in behavioral economics and technology, we can uncover deep, emotional underpinnings of associations with your brand and category. We can understand how your brand makes a customer feel – and not just how they say they feel.

With methodologies like metaphor elicitation, facial coding, and biometrics becoming cheaper and more accessible, market researchers can tease out implicit feelings and attitudes that can be analyzed alongside the articulated emotions of a consumer.? With this new metric, we can uncover even deeper associations and attitudes that a consumer may not be able to verbalize on their own adding depth and richness to our findings.?

Customer Experience

Brand research should also provide intelligence about the role your brand plays in consumers’ lives. Traditionally, consumer journey mapping has been a study that brands commission separately from their brand trackers. However, what is a brand if not the products themselves and individual interactions with its customers?

To deep dive into your brand's health, you must also dive into your customer’s experience.

Brand research is a standard and critical component of market research. Whether you want to understand the impact of your marketing strategies, uncover new insights, or develop product innovations around unmet needs, it all starts with a fundamental understanding of your brand’s role in its customer’s life.

Staying in touch with your customers’ perceptions and experiences will allow your company to focus energy on the future and create pro-active growth strategies that align with your customers’ needs.

This is why research is essential to creating an extraordinary brand.

So, you see the brilliance in MDRG’s approach to brand, market, and consumer research.? To identify the baseline, your competitive position, and how you might align your strategy for market growth, requires insights. These are the things you need to be doing while creating not just any brand… but your extraordinary brand.?

Boss Lady Consulting helps businesses grow and expand through evaluating and implementing brand growth strategies, customer experience initiatives, and culture/engagement programs. Our team will work with your team to help you become extraordinary.?

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Let’s stay in touch!?

The Boss Lady Consulting team

This newsletter contains an excerpt from When Marketing Agencies Don't Follow Their Own Advice, co-written with Sondra Brown of MDRG