It seems like every day you face new competitors and the online world gets noisier with each brand fighting for eyeballs from consumers. Do you want your company to stand out from the rest? Maybe you just want to make some digital noise to stand out in your little niche but you’re not quite sure where to start. What you need is an appealing and memorable brand that consumers clammer to buy.
Crafting an appealing and memorable brand is challenging and different from the strategies covered on other pages of this website. So, if you’re looking to spice up your brand, we have everything you need to get you started right here.
What is a brand?
According to Forbes, a brand originally represented ownership and ranchers branded their cattle to identify what belonged to them. Once branded, if some cattle wandered off to join those owned by a neighbor, the mixup was easily resolved. In those days, products were pretty much the same, giving consumers no reason for buy, for instance, Farmer John’s cattle over Farmer Dan’s. We call these undifferentiated products. Marketing undifferentiated products is really just a matter of ensuring your products make it to market. Every product is like every other product, sells for the exact same price (in fact, trying to get more for your products often means you sell none). Pretty unexciting.
Later, when producers differentiated their products one from another, the word brand evolved as a shorthand regarding the distinct differences between products. And, consumer marketing was born out of the necessity of motivating consumers to choose your products over your competitors. Brands developed images and personalities based on marketing efforts that included the design of packaging and logos, the brand’s personality developed by the messaging developed by the firm and the characters used to promote the brand, and other marketing communication efforts such as social media posts. Here’s a graph showing options for brand personality.
On a more serious note, brand also represented the suitability of products for groups of consumers. For instance, brands acquired a patina of luxury or economy based on pricing. Brands represented a commitment to quality or to fashion or innovativeness or other attributes. Marketers developed strategies to guide firms in developing their brands in a manner that set them apart from their competitors. For instance, we used a perpetual map to identify opportunities. Below you can see an example of a perceptual map for cars.
Start out with a good sense of humor
Building an appealing and memorable brand means you do more than follow the herd. Don’t be afraid to stand out by using tools like humor to promote your brand.
Have a little fun with your fans, if possible. Tell a funny story or try to push the envelope if you want by being wacky. Look at the Super Bowl, for instance, the Doritos franchise chose to create a flying pig commercial that made customers laugh every time they saw the advertisement.
Humor is a bit of a two-edged sword because when it doesn’t make consumers laugh, your messaging doesn’t position your brand in a positive light. Humor also doesn’t translate across culture effectively, so this isn’t a tactic to employ without careful thought and testing with your target market.
Colloquial language
Nothing will kill your customers’ interest in your brand faster than if you use jargon or overly complicated language. Consumers don’t want to listen to you speak an industry-specific language. Words like “best practice”, for instance, irritate your customers and drive them away. To avoid this, you need to try and speak to your customers as if they were people using language commonly used with each other.
Different groups, based on demographics such as age and region, use different words to express the world around them. Craft messaging specific to each specific persona to highlight your fit with their lifestyle.
Blend your experiences
Businesses often find they must wrestle with how to blend their online presence with their offline presence. One good strategy would be for you to try and create an offline experience. We talk about integrated marketing communication to reflect the seamless blending of your message across various channels so consumers get a clear, understandable message when they see your brand on various platforms.
A recognizable brand name and creative, abstract logo design as well as other elements of a style guide such as colors and typography go a long way toward integration across channels.
Own up to your mistakes
If your start-up makes a mistake, you need to own up to it and be transparent with your customers about how you are working to fix the mistake. Coca-cola, for example, made the decision to change the formula for their drink making it sweeter in response to survey results incorrectly interpreted. The response was catastrophic, to say the least. They received tons of complaints and resorted to the old formula once more.
By listening and responding to customers quickly, Coke used the millions of dollars in free advertising produced through the many news stories about their shift to increase sales and profits in the years following the debacle.
Get Personal
Think about it, who posts your Facebook notices, your blogs, or anything else of the sort? Tech made digital and social way more convenient for you to engage with your target market as if you were meeting at a bar for drinks. Crafting digital communication in the same impersonal way you did your advertising in traditional media, like newspapers, just doesn’t work. Instead, show your personality and share behind the scenes updates. For instance, a friend works for a quick-service Mexican restaurant and users her social platforms for everything from getting input on menu items to sharing updates on key executives’ personal lives.
Conclusion
Today we discussed some strategies to build an appealing and memorable brand. I hope you found this valuable and commit to giving one or more of these tactics a whirl. Good luck.
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