Building a brand requires a thoughtful process. Branding involves creating an identity around your company. To find success through your branding process, you need to create a brand personality by focusing on your brand values. This ensures that every piece of your brand lines up.
From there, you can initiate brand marketing. For this process you will likely include direct response marketing and inbound marketing to name a few. By the end of your brand marketing endeavor, potential customers will recognize your brand, bringing forth highly qualified leads.
Why is Brand Marketing Important for Your Product?
Brand marketing focuses entirely on building recognition and establishing trust in regard to your brand. Instead of advertising individual products, you market the entire personality of your brand. Then, once your brand becomes recognizable, customers will seek out your products. Essentially, this marketing strategy promotes the company instead of just the product itself.
Brand marketing also works to develop an encompassing perception of your business that spreads to your products. Many luxury brands engage in brand marketing, developing a reputation for goods of superior quality. Even though plenty of knock-off products exist from these brands with an identical style, consumers still seek the luxury product. This works because brand marketing has increased the value of the products associated with their brands.
When done properly, branding builds brand equity, awareness, advocates, loyalty, engagement, image and identity.
What are the 6 Basic Brand Marketing Strategies?
Brand marketing strategies are the specific approaches your business will take to promote its brand. They help define a clear path to take to find success through the marketing process. You can work with one of the many marketing companies to develop a strategy or do it all in-house. What you decide to do depends on your budget and business size.
Individual Branding
Many large businesses produce subsidiary products. In many cases, the variety of these subsidiaries makes it difficult to create a cohesive brand identity. Instead, each subsidiary becomes its own little brand. For example, Nestlé has Stauffers, Pure Life, Crunch Bar, etc, and tends to market these products on their own.
Attitude Branding
Many brands like to create a specific attitude or style around themselves. It works to attract individuals of a similar mindset and those who want to develop that mindset as well. For instance, lifestyle brands often engage in attitude branding. Consider the intensity of Gatorade commercials for an example of attitude branding.
Brand-Name Recognition
Many businesses spend their marketing efforts on building brand-name recognition. This works so that even those unfamiliar with individual products still have some sort of awareness regarding the brand. Consider Apple and Starbucks as brands with nearly universal brand recognition. The name of these brands alone attracts attention and draws forth new customers.
“No Brand” Strategy
The “no brand” strategy uses a minimalistic approach when it comes to creating a brand. In fact, many companies take the opposite approach as you might see with traditional brand marketing. Instead of relying on bright colors or fancy logo designs, the stripped-down nature of the products is the selling point. Consider the brands Muji and Brandless when it comes to creating a brand centered around not having a brand.
Brand Extension
This strategy works best for already established and existing companies. Many well-recognized businesses will decide to create a new product or service in order to expand their target audience. During launch, they increase the likelihood of success by putting the brand behind that product. Instead of pushing the new product by itself, the brand might create marketing materials featuring new and old products alike.
Crowdsourcing
CrowdsourcingWhereas brand extension works best for established brands, the crowdsourcing strategy is almost exclusively for new brands. When considering launching a brand, a company will seek assistance from the public for that brand’s creation. The public will help decide on the brand name, style and aspects of the identity. It helps to create a set of brand values before jumping into crowdsourcing.
Effective Tips in Developing your Brand Marketing Strategy
What do they say about the best laid plans of mice and men? Just because you pick a strategy does not mean you will automatically find success. Any kind of business strategy, including marketing, requires the ability to adapt on the go. Sometimes a process just will not function as intended in the drawing room. The trick to not letting these setbacks overwhelm you is to remain as prepared as possible.
Keep the following tips in mind to increase the success and effectiveness of your brand marketing strategy.
Understand Your Brand
First and foremost, you have to know exactly what kind of brand you want to develop. Consider how you want the public to perceive your brand. Do you want to be fun, serious, kid-friendly or revolutionary? Where you decide to take your brand depends entirely on the core foundations you set at the beginning.
You can always change the strategy or perspective before you launch your marketing campaign. But, once you do, you will have to maintain that already selected course. Therefore, take the time to know what your brand stands for before going too far.
Identify your Target Audience
Think about the market you want to enter and how you plan on positioning yourself within that market. You need to define who exactly you want and expect to buy products from your brand. This generally includes most demographic information such as age, gender, location and income.
Keep in mind that your brand should focus on appealing to this target market. This means your marketing tactics should never alienate this core demographic. As your brand adapts and changes, you might wish to seek out a new audience. However, make sure that you can capture the new audience before jumping ship.
Define Your Story
The story you create surrounding your brand can help your audience identify with your products. Back to those old Gatorade commercials, we would consistently see an athlete grow tired after hours of training. They might try water, which simply doesn’t cut it. Then, the athlete drinks some Gatorade and it instantly revitalizes them, giving the athlete a second wind.
This kind of storytelling works to promote the intended function of the product. The audience immediately recognizes Gatorade as fuel for athletes to outperform their competitors. For your own brand, keep in mind the story that occurs every time a customer will use your product.
Know Your Enemy
No matter your industry, you have to keep an eye on the competition. Implementing the same kind of brand that already exists will make you look like a cheap imitator. And, nothing scares customers away like second place. You want to create a brand that stands out from the competition instead of copying them.
Additionally, keep an eye out on your competitors’ marketing campaigns. If they launch a campaign specifically targeted at your business, you may have to adapt.
Be Consistent
Once you launch your brand you need to stick to that brand identity as much as you can. An unexpected change in how you want the public to perceive your brand leaves them confused. It also makes you look indecisive. Switching horses in the middle of the river will always lead to disaster.
When you develop an identity, stick to it. You can always create updated advertisements, but they should all carry that established brand identity. For instance, a kid-friendly brand should not introduce advertisements geared toward a more adult audience.
Create and Follow Your Brand Guidelines
Similar to remaining consistent, you want to create brand guidelines as hard rules you will always follow. These guidelines can include your core values, the purpose of your brand, marketing positioning, etc. They basically encompass all of the earlier tips.
With a solid foundation in place, you can better achieve brand recognition. Staying on track keeps the brand from losing its original form. Once you veer away from that form, you had better have an entire rebranding strategy in mind.
Brand Marketing Examples From Successful Companies
Before you intend on launching your brand, keep these success stories in mind. It helps to analyze an existing brand to develop your own ideas on how to successfully create a brand. You do not want to follow these companies beat for beat. Instead, they offer inspiration and a template for the steps you should take as well.
Supreme Streetwear’s Collaborations
Since its inception in 1994, Supreme has become one of the more sought after streetwear brands for millennials and Gen z. While streetwear typically does not try to enter a luxury market, Supreme finds great success within this niche. They owe that success in no small part to a number of collaborations.
Supreme decided to collaborate with luxury designer brands after realizing its customers paired the brand’s clothing with these designers already. In 2012, they teamed up with designer brand Comme de Garcons. The collaboration instantly increased Supreme’s profile. The following collaborations with companies such as Nike, Timberland and Louis Vuitton increased Supreme’s status even further.
Additional collaborations with popular hip-hop artists such as Kanye West and A$AP Rocky continued to increase the brand’s value.
Amazon’s Brand Positioning Strategy
Amazon’s Brand Positioning StrategyIn fewer than 20 years, Amazon went from an online bookstore to most Americans’ preferred place to shop. Founder Jeff Bezos had the idea for an online general store way back from the start of the company. But, he started with books instead of jumping into the “everything” business.
Once Amazon launched, the company had to determine a way to develop and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. We see the results of that today with their incredibly wide collection, convenience of access and super-low prices. Amazon started its journey by keeping those three focal points in mind just for books.
Its positioning strategy as the place to go for tons of cheap books whenever you want worked flawlessly. Now, it is the place to go for cheap everything whenever you want.
Swatch Watch’s “Innovation, Provocation, Fun, Forever”
In the 1970s, quartz watches took the world by storm with their unbeatable performance. Unfortunately, 10 years later that style was universally outdated once quartz became the standard. Previous watch champions Seiko saw up-and-comer Swatch capitalize on the fashion side of watches. Truly, fashion over function became all the rage.
Instead of boring timekeepers, Swatch helped watches become fashion accessories. No longer would one watch suffice. Now, consumers started adding multiple watches to their wardrobes based on specific outfits.
Swatch’s unique designs gave customers something eye-catching they could use to build a look around. From that point on, watches cemented themselves as fashion accessories as much as tools for keeping time.
Dogecoin’s “MemeStocks”
The last decade saw the rise of memes as an integral part of internet culture. Memes have transformed from online inside jokes to a common part of the cultural zeitgeist. They range from absurd comedy to advertisements and now even to cryptocurrencies.
Launched as a joke based around the Shiba Inu dog meme (known as “doge”), the Dogecoin exploded in value. The creators promoted it through the use of the already popular doge meme. For just a few pennies, anyone could get in on the joke. But, anyone who has seen their MemeStock portfolios explode in value recently are laughing their way right to the bank.
Zoom’s User-Friendly Nature
Video calling has existed for well over a decade now. Skype quickly became the top video chat service for computer and cell phone users. But, during the covid-19 pandemic, a new player took the throne: Zoom.
As tons of people suddenly found themselves working or studying from home, the need for video calling skyrocketed. Many individuals without a good deal of computer experience suddenly had to adapt very quickly. Zoom helped them out immensely. Instead of requiring log-in credentials to join a call, all a Zoom user needs is a code. From there, they can jump right into a call without remembering a username and password.
Because of their ease of access, Zoom quickly became the first choice for anyone looking to start an online meeting.
Building your Brand
Reach out to Selling Revolution and turn your brand into a success story of its own creation. Schedule a no-obligation 20-minute call today, and start laying the foundation for an immensely successful brand strategy. The time for branding is now.