What is Brand Development?
TLDR
If you don’t deeply understand your audience and their identity, you cannot form a brand identity.
When a brand seems to hit all the right notes, it feels like magic. It’s not really magic, though. Behind the curtain of a successful brand is a lot of thoughtful planning and constant fine-tuning, especially during a process known as brand development.?
Brand development is the formation of a brand from the ground up and the continual refinement, with the objective of connecting with customers. Your brand encompasses everything that makes up your company's identity — your offerings and audience, the content you create, the words you do and do not use, the overall look and feel, and more.
As brands, we ultimately cannot control how people feel about us — but we can work to influence our audience’s perceptions. Let’s explore the nuances of brand development and how it works.
Setting the Stage for Brand Development
Your brand represents what your company is all about, but should be formed with an audience-first mindset. You will need to fully understand who your audience is and form a strategy to connect and engage with them.
That means outlining a detailed brand strategy, or a long-term plan for how to build up reputation as a brand. The goal is to provide value and connect with your customers in such a way that they will continue to choose your brand over other brands with similar offerings.
Developing Your Brand Story
The brand development journey begins with exploring your brand story.
Your brand’s narrative helps communicate the purpose and better connect with your audience. Start by asking yourself basic questions to help guide your narrative:
Defining your brand story from the beginning will provide a strong foundation for brand development. When you answer questions like these your brand is better positioned to develop goals and strategies — and to confidently serve your customers.
Customer Research
Once you have fleshed out your goals and mission, it’s time to focus on your target audience. What do they care about, like, value, and need? If you don’t deeply understand your audience and their identity, you cannot form a brand identity.
To better define your audience, develop buyer personas — profiles of the “types” of customers you are working to reach. This includes researching your audience and segmenting customers into different groups based on their behaviors, demographics, wants, needs, and any other key characteristics.
When it comes to customer interests, don’t just guess. Get a sense of your audience’s actual needs and pain points that you can help them with by conducting specific consumer research. This may include observational studies, focus groups, and interviews. Customer research will help guide your branding choices and make more informed decisions and directions to take.
Brand Positioning
It is important to define your strategic market position early on in the process. You should know exactly what you do, who you do it for, and value-adds you provide. Be sure not to overlook what your customers already have access to. Think about a plan to differentiate your brand from others in the market. What gaps in the market are you filling? What makes your offerings unique from others?
Look at your audience and work to develop how you want to be seen by them. When they encounter your brand, what will they associate you with and how will they feel about you?
You should know exactly what you do, who you do it for, and value-adds you provide.
Developing a Brand
After exploring your goals and audience and gaining a strong sense of the general direction you want to take, it’s time to get into the finer details of defining your brand.
Brand Identity and Values
Now that you’ve defined your brand’s audience personas and considered your own purpose and position, you can further develop the foundation of your own persona to cater to your audience. A key part of that is forming your brand identity and values.?
Brand identity encapsulates what makes your brand distinct and special to your customers. When you develop your brand’s identity, you define how you plan to represent your brand to your audience in order to connect with them and their needs. You will need to outline who you are as a brand — and equally importantly, who you are not. What makes your brand different? Why should people care??
Your brand values are another core component of your brand identity. Brand values communicate your purpose, what you care about, and what you do to fulfill those values. Develop a mission statement to support the brand positioning you’re striving for. Your mission should be relevant to your audience, and it also needs to be something your brand is prepared to truly live and breathe.
People want to support businesses that sell more than just objects or services — businesses that go a step further to show what they stand for and the values they hold. It’s about connecting on a deeper level so that people get excited about your brand and keep coming back.
Naming Your Brand
A huge part of your brand identity is your company’s name — you’ll need to choose one thoughtfully.
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There are endless ways to go about it, and there is no single “right way” to name your company. However, there are lots of strategies and considerations, such as whether to make it more creative or straightforward, how many words it should be, what it will evoke, and so on.
Working in collaboration with an agency (wink wink) to develop your brand’s name can make navigating the name game easier and more organized. Doing so helps you fully explore different naming concept options — with an unbiased professional perspective by your side. You can then zero in on one that communicates your brand’s identity and resonates with your audience.
Before finalizing the clever name you came up with, ensure you’ve done due diligence on the availability of that name in the trademark registry and among website domains.
Messaging Strategy
Next, you should work on developing a strategy to convey your brand identity out in the market and build a brand community . Finding your brand voice and tone is another level of developing a brand personality.
Use your research and strategies to guide the development of your messaging strategy — the written content you’ll put out there and how you plan to communicate with customers. In other words, you are forming your verbal identity: the identifiable voice that’s unmistakably you.
On a high level, your voice complements your brand values and goals. Digging deeper, your brand should have a certain sound — a particular personality that’s consistent throughout all your messaging. You also will need to specify the nitty-gritty details of your brand voice: grammar style choices, words you can and cannot use, and other standards that set the tone of how your voice will be projected out to the world.
Every nuance of your brand identity and messaging should reinforce each other to deliver consistency and value. When done well, audiences feel a sense of connection and affinity toward your brand that they would not have otherwise.
You are forming your verbal identity: the identifiable voice that’s unmistakably you.
Visual Guidelines
After your voice is warmed up, you can design a visual brand identity through a strategic lens. Your brand identity and messaging plan should drive the development of your logo, colors, overarching visual guidelines, taglines, and so on.
Have you ever been excited to go on a date with someone who caught your eye… only to find them dull or tough to connect with? Visuals and assets cannot just look nice on the outside — they need to make sense for your brand, your customers, and help deliver meaning.
Your visual content is often what draws your audience in initially, but remember that your verbal messaging and actions are what keep customers engaged and compel them to action. Visual and verbal content should be complementary mediums through which you show understanding, address pain points, and speak to customers in a real and human way.
Launching Your Brand
Once you’ve developed your brand and its identity, now you can work on setting up the last pieces and marketing in an informed and strategic way.
Establish the Brand Online
Before you announce to the world that you exist, it’s smart to develop an online presence. This includes setting up a brand website and establishing your brand on appropriate social media platforms.
The setup of your website entirely depends on your goals, offerings, and audience needs. However, all brands should focus on accessibility, mobile-friendliness, and overall ease of use in their websites. The site should demonstrate your brand personality and deliver helpful, easy-to-find content for your customers.
Brands should also be present on different social media platforms to connect with their audience in different ways. Which platforms you choose depends on your audience and where they are best reached. It may take some trial and error to find the best platforms for connecting to your audience.
Launch Plan and Marketing Strategy
You’ve laid all the groundwork for developing a great brand — now it’s time to make your big debut with your brand launch and marketing plan . Here, you’re bringing everything together to create the perfect blend: your offerings, the channels through which to promote yourself, and the content and messaging to best reach your audience.
So, how will you actually get to your intended audience? Your customer research can help guide marketing in the channels that are most appropriate for your audience to reach them where they are. Consider all the steps in the customer journey for the products or services you offer and how they get to people.
Whichever platforms your brand incorporates into its marketing strategy, it’s important to keep your messaging aligned. In your strategy, you may also want to consider how to have a consistent voice across channels while recognizing situations and platforms that may call for a slightly different tone. As a person, you have your own voice — but will speak a little differently to your boss, a customer, your mom, and your buddy. Brands will also need to define how to use their voice in different circumstances while still staying true to themselves and serving their audience.
Evaluate and Adjust
We’ve said it before: marketing is all about experimentation. Brand development is an ongoing practice. Continually measure the results of your marketing efforts and evaluate areas that may need adjustments.
Think of it like developing a menu for a restaurant — your branding is your menu of offerings to appeal to your customers’ tastes. As you find what works well and what doesn’t, you’ll add a little of this, a little of that, and remove certain ingredients and menu items altogether. The menu not only needs to include dishes your customers want, but it also needs to look visually appealing to them and be easy to navigate. Sometimes it needs to be changed up a bit to deliver on what your customers crave or to keep up with evolving industry trends.
At times, you might strike just the right balance for your customers. Keep listening to them to understand their needs and what resonates with them. Always bring it back to the human side to appeal to what your audience is interested in.
Ready to develop your brand?
Whether you’re looking to build a brand from scratch or fine-tune your branding, we’re excited to start a dialogue with you. Our team at sōsh has helped many companies form brands and connect with their audience — it’s kind of our thing! We’ll help you explore your market and customer needs, then form a strategic brand development plan around that. Let’s get branding! Reach out to us today.
About Us
Founded in 1999, sōsh is a Milwaukee-based creative marketing and advertising agency specializing in data-driven strategies for small to large brands. Sōsh focuses on a wide range of disciplines such as creative services, social media, digital marketing, web design, advertising, and our trademark events. Sōsh creates meaningful connections between brands and their audience and does so through strategic communication, captivating creative, and thoughtful engagement. We are a collection of strategists - creatives dedicated to adding value to both our client’s brands and their consumers’ lives.