Brand Building: What it Means and How to Do It
Building your brand is critical to the success of your business. You already know this; otherwise, you wouldn’t be here reading this article. But when it comes to brand building, what is it exactly, and why is it so important?
The process of branding is often distilled down to simple brand strategy development and a visual identity design. The reality is that branding is more than just your positioning logo, and colors; it's the entire identity of your business and how people perceive it. On the other hand, brand building is the process that connects your brand strategy and visuals to a comprehensive brand marketing strategy.
The goal of building your brand is to establish a strong recall of your brand through small symbols and phrases while providing value to your target audience. This process, when done correctly, will generate lasting market share in your industry and create loyal, raving fans.
TL;DR Why Brand Building is Important
Your business will be more recognizable and memorable to the right people.
Proper branding actually builds trust with consumers and helps with future-proofing.
When a business is branded properly, customers become your unpaid PR and influencer teams.
Now, let's walk through how to build your brand.
Define the Purpose Behind Your Brand
Why do you do what you do? This essential question, when defined, can provide context to developing your brand mission and vision. Creating a mission and vision statement can powerfully explain what, how, and why it is that you do. In order to grow correctly, the goal is to have as much clarity around the purpose behind your brand as possible. Check out our article, Critical Elements of Effective Vision and Mission Statements, to learn more about how to craft strong brand statements.
Also, at this stage of discovering the purpose behind your brand, you'll want to invest time into research and analysis, including:
Target audience analysis: who are you trying to reach? Primary, secondary, splash?
Competitor analysis: who are you being vetted against by your audience?
SWOT analysis: where can you manage opportunity and blind spots?
Focus groups: what stories can you capture and repurpose?
Surveys: what data can help you define your offering?
Doing this research, even at a surface level, will provide valuable data and context to develop a brand strategy for building your brand. If you'd like to learn more about creating and using your brand strategy, check out our article: Effectively Use Your Brand Strategy with the 7 Ps of Marketing.
Top Tip
Don’t let this become too complicated. Distill down these insights into a simple at-a-glance one-pager or Notion page.
Craft a Brand Story
Creating an authentic brand story will build connections and trust with the right potential consumers and develop loyal fans. To create a powerful brand story, craft it with a personality that articulates the whole purpose of your brand and can be sustained outside of just that clever intern or the talented agency you hire. Customers are savvy and can tell the difference between what’s real and what’s been crafted to convince.
If your brand story leads with product, make sure your follow-up story is human-driven and compelling. If you lead with storytelling, make sure your product features are clearly defined and accessible. If you’re not sure what to lead with, go back to the research stage and figure out what your customers want and find the overlap with what is true for your business.
Consider what the potential customer is thinking: “Why should I buy from you? Why should I let you in my inbox? Why should I put you on my feed?” Build your story around answering those questions. Keep it simple and include:
Who you are (and why they should care)
What you offer (and why they should care)
What you’re asking for (and why they should care)
A great brand story allows you to communicate on a real human level, making a direct emotional connection with your consumers. People like buying from people, not businesses, and they like to buy a part of the story, not just participate in a transaction. Developing a human connection is essential to gaining more customers, keeping them when you get them, and developing a brand that garners affection.
Top Tip
Trust your instincts on the story. Don’t fall prey to trends or ‘shoulds.’
Develop Your Logo and Tagline
There’s too much to say on identity design in a single section of a single article, but our advice is not to overcomplicate this part too much. Get in touch with your brand personality and develop a logo and a few tagline options to help it come to life.
Doing the work to discover the purpose behind your brand will help with this evolution because you’ll have more clarity about who you are and, most importantly, what you’re not.
Don’t strive for perfection in developing your logo, but remember these Five Elements of Designing a Logo that Resonates.
If you have limited resources in both time and investment, follow this quick guide:
Choose a design style: classic or vintage, fun and quirky, or modern and minimal.
Pick out a font you like from an OpenType source like Google Fonts.
Decide on colors using the 60-30-10 rule: The primary color you will use 60% of the time, the secondary color 30%, and a third color 10%.
Apply your colors to your logo simply; only use the dominant color and maybe one other being the secondary color.
Define your logo with or without an icon to pair it with.
When it comes time to create a tagline, it should come fairly easily since you've already done the work to craft your brand story. A tagline should convey a message that your target audience cares about and understands. Make it memorable and keep it short so your audience can immediately understand who you are. To learn more about finding your target audience and why it’s so important to know, then read our article: Understanding Your Brand's Target Market.
Differentiate and Position Your Brand
Your brand's unique value proposition is the core of your competitive advantage. It is a short statement that clearly describes why a person should buy from you instead of a competitor. It's not just describing your product or service; it's offering the potential customer the specific solution you provide and the promise of value. To create a robust and unique value proposition, you'll want to address:
What product or service you're selling?
Who is your target audience for your product or service?
What is the benefit of using it generally?
What is the benefit of buying from you specifically?
What makes your brand better than other options?
The best unique value propositions clearly define what your brand offers, who it's for, and how it benefits those who use it. Don’t be afraid to make some big claims here — as long as you can back them up.
Construct Your Comprehensive Brand
It's easy to confuse all of the elements that make up your visual identity, your brand strategy, and all the creative assets that go along with it. It’s even easier to go through all the effort to create these elements and then let them sit stagnant while you chase customers and handle actually running your business.
This is where developing a thorough brand book or brand guidelines document can be a helpful exercise. Make sure that each page that shares your creative asset also includes instructions on how someone can utilize it in practice. For example, don’t just showcase your unique value proposition but also include a paragraph on how someone can use it.
Essentially, these creative assets are all the elements that help build your brand — but only if they are used consistently, accurately, and authentically. Brand building is less about the individual actions you take but more about thoughtfully using what’s developed in every display of your business, from customer support messages to social media posts to press mentions. Building your brand is all about ensuring this cornerstone is evident at every interaction point for customers, competitors, and employees. When you build your brand this way, you build people's trust, which creates brand equity, which creates brand longevity.
Keep in mind the brand-building process never ends; it is a constant pursuit and cultivation of brand truths.
Always follow your brand guidelines, as they are your road map for creating consistency. You don’t want to get caught in the brand gap where you’re brand strategy doesn’t align with real-life experience and perspectives.
