Branding Mastery from Ancient Marks to Modern Market Leaders
Tracing the Evolution of Brand Identity and Strategy for Market Dominance
It may come as a surprise, but branding’s origins can be traced to the 1500s when branding cattle with a heated iron became a common practice to signify ownership. This practice quickly caught on with businesses, who adopted this approach to create distinctive marks, leading to the inception of the modern logo. The importance of early-stage branding cannot be overstated, as it fundamentally shapes how effectively a company communicates with its audience. Drawing from a decade of experience in nurturing businesses from early seed stages to private equity-owned enterprises, I’ve honed the art of crafting brand identities, launching new products and markets, and sometimes guiding expansion across new regional frontiers. Below, I’ll share vital strategies to catapult your brand to the forefront of your industry.
Brand Marketing vs. Product Marketing
For companies with a diverse portfolio, it’s crucial to establish a unifying brand concept that overshadows individual products or services. This becomes particularly pivotal once a startup secures its product-market fit (PMF) and begins to introduce new offerings. At this juncture, the power of a cohesive brand strategy becomes evident. To illustrate this point, consider the following chart that delineates the contrast between B2B brand marketing and individual product marketing.
Goals of Brand Marketing
1. Crafting a Brand Identity
Forge a distinct brand identity by deploying consistent and memorable visual elements — such as logos, videos, audio, and communication style — that become synonymous with your company.
2. Raise Brand Awareness
Level One: Zero Awareness
For new enterprises, the initial goal is to cultivate brand awareness from the ground up, starting at a point where customer numbers are minimal and brand familiarity is low.
Level two: Brand Recognition Phase
Employ visual identifiers like logos, mottos, color palettes, packaging, and targeted campaigns to enable instant recognition of your brand among consumers. Surveys can serve as a tool to gauge public recognition levels, providing insights into your brand’s visibility.
Level three: Brand Recall Stage
Brand recall is achieved when your company’s name becomes the default thought associated with a particular need or service. For instance, when craving a burger, the immediate recall of brands like McDonald’s, Burger King, and Five Guys is an indication of their brand recall status. Measuring brand recall can be done through specific surveys and questionnaires designed to assess brand recognition.
Level four: Top-of-Mind Awareness
This ultimate awareness stage is reached when your brand becomes the first one consumers think of in relation to a product or service category. Achieving top-of-mind status is a testament to a brand’s prominence and is a vital factor in fostering customer fidelity.
Steps to Develop a Brand Marketing Strategy
1. Develop your Internal Brand
Just like a house on sand won't last, it doesn’t take long for a brand without a solid foundation for the cracks to appear. So start with the basics, brand purpose, mission, vision, and core values — the “Why” of your brand, and define the internal “Who” of the brand.
2. Determine Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Your USP is what sets you apart from competitors. How is your offering different from everyone else in the market? Your USP is your main selling point and is what you should emphasize in your messaging. The importance of a USP can be summed up in 4 bullet points:
- Defines the position of the brand in the market
- Targets prospective customers
- Guides internal teams in a company
- A critical part of marketing strategies
HubSpot is one of the best examples of a company that does a lot yet still sums up its USP succinctly. In a market saturated with different tools and integrations, having robust yet easy-to-use software is rare.
“Powerful, not overpowering.”
What makes their USP effective?
- While short and sweet, it conveys a lot of information.
- This product addresses both a pain point and a fear many people have when using products like it.
3. Define Your Target Audience
For your business to thrive, it must have something of value that a group of people with similar attributes or interests want. This group of people is the brand’s target audience. Emotions are the key to effective branding, and understanding your target audience’s challenges and pain points will be vital in uncovering those emotions.
Kick things off with a psychographic and demographics. This should give you enough grounds to carve out a silhouette of their circumstances and behaviors. Then, use that research as the foundation to build your buyer personas—fictional representations of the individuals you are targeting.
4. Map the Competitive Landscape
Do some market research to understand what your competitors are doing and brainstorm ways to set your brand apart. Then, list ways to differentiate based on your target audience and unique selling proposition.
5. Uncover Your Positioning Statement
You have a clear map of your market landscape when you know your audience and what they want, your competitors, and what they offer. Ask these questions to identify the keys to differentiating from competitors:
- What does your audience want that they’re not getting from your competitors?
- What do they want more of?
- What do they want less of?
- Where do they want an alternative or a better way of doing things?
- How can you do things better?
- Can you save them time?
- Can you save them money?
- Can you save them stress?
Answer these questions to identify gaps and opportunities for your brand to take advantage of, and then boil that down into a positioning statement.
Here is an example from Tesla:
6. Shape Your Brand Personality
Your brand personality humanizes your brand. It’s a set of personality traits that defines your business. Think of it as creating a character you can use to connect with prospects and customers. Identify the characteristics your audience is most attracted to and develop a brand personality in alignment with those characteristics to maximize the impact of your message.
7. Identify Your Tone of Voice
Once you’ve identified a brand personality that is most attractive to your audience, you must create brand alignment by enhancing the believability of the character with a tone of voice to match.
8. Develop Your Messaging Strategy
You’ve defined “How” you will deliver your brand message through your personality and tone of voice. Now is the time to define the “What” message you want your audience to receive. Use this messaging matrix below as a template to create variations of messaging based on the audience and channel and test to see what message works best for each audience and channel.
9. Craft Your Brand Story
It is human nature to be attracted to stories, so using this opportunity to strike an emotional chord with prospective customers is essential. Talk about where you were founded, why you started making the products that you do, what the brand means to employers, testimonials from customers, etc. Then, pull together your beliefs, promises, and stories to weave a coherent brand story and use that to communicate effectively with your customers.
10. Develop Your Name and Tagline
Your name and tagline are brand communication, so this step is much later in the brand development process. This is vital to your audience remembering your brand and recalling why it’s essential. At this stage, you clearly understand what your audience wants, why you’re different, the value you offer, the characteristics you want to display, and the message you want to deliver. You should have a lot more insight to strategically name your brand at this stage.
11. Design Your Identity
Strategy is as important when deciding on your visual branding as when crafting your messaging. Based on the characteristics you’ve defined your business, create visual elements that reinforce that look and feel. Your brand identity includes:
- Logo
- Color Palette
- Typography
- Images Style
- Iconography
- Graphics
12. Craft Your Brand Collateral
Brand assets, or collateral, are vital in showcasing your company’s identity. These range from business cards to digital assets such as social media imagery and website icons. To guarantee cohesive branding across all platforms, it’s beneficial to walk through the entire customer journey. An example path a customer might take is: LinkedIn Post > Blog Article > Product Landing Page > Demo Request. My colleagues and I have formulated these Brand Guidelines for 150birds.
- Website
- Social Media Pages
- Brochures
- Business Cards
- Flyers
- Shopfront
- Posters
- Stationary
- Point of Sale
- Car Wraps
- Promotional Items
13. Define Your Brand Awareness Strategy
Your target audience development sets the groundwork for your marketing strategy. And the brand awareness strategy is the first campaign. At this stage, you already have a clear picture of your audience, including what they like and where they congregate (e.g., forums, magazine sites, meetups, social platforms, groups, etc.). However, identifying where your audience congregates is only half of the battle. A great strategist also recognizes the potential effectiveness of each of these congregations, prioritizes efforts based on this potential, and then develops the messages for each direction. In other words, you need to know where they’ll be most open to your branding messages and create the most appropriate messages for that environment.
14. Launch Your Brand
Now that you have your collateral, a plan of attack, and brand messages, it’s time to launch. Depending on the size of your budget will determine how quickly you make an impact and raise your level of brand awareness. If you have little budget, focus on guerilla tactics such as visiting forums and groups to answer questions and contribute to conversations.
15. Create and Maintain a High-Quality Blog
Blogging is an effective way to communicate your company's unique personality and intent. A well-maintained blog will bring many benefits to your brand, including increased online visibility and generating more leads. Create a content strategy that consists of relevant topics for your audience and solves the pain points of your buyer personas. Include images in your blog posts to hold attention and improve user experience.
16. Unify Social Media Accounts
Besides your website, social media accounts are your business's most easily accessible representatives. In other words, your accounts provide a prime opportunity to distinguish your brand from the start of a potential customer’s engagement with you. Therefore, consider brand characteristics and values while customizing messaging for each social media channel.
Why Startups Have the Edge
As a startup, you must leverage your nimble anatomy and take a creative stand to differentiate yourself against legacy incumbents. As a Challenger or Niche Player, you are naturally closer to your customers, being able to act quickly on an insight and a feedback loop to identify what works and doesn’t. You’re digitally savvy, enabling you to deploy a growth mindset to get an edge over large incumbents with classic campaign structures. Lastly, you have passion, which has a force multiplier impact.
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant
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