A brand helps control business development, better understand consumers, and simply earn more. In this article, we will tell you what is needed to create a brand, how to develop it, make it strong and recognizable. And also, we will analyze common mistakes that companies make when creating a brand.
What is a brand: basic concepts
A brand helps a business stand out and earn more
Brand Creation. Stage One: Analytics
Stage two: creating a company brand platform
Step three: naming and product design
Stage four: advertising and brand promotion
How to develop a brand so that it meets business goals
Basic mistakes in brand creation
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What is a brand: basic concepts
Table of Contents
A brand is an image of a product in the consumer’s mind. For example, what company do you think of when you need to buy sportswear? Probably Nike. It is the first company that comes to mind because it has a strong brand that makes Nike associated with sports.
A brand appears after a business if its founder puts effort into it. We can say that the business itself is the entrepreneur’s energy, his vision of the world, and the brand helps to package this idea and sell it to consumers. For example, Nike sells the feeling that a person is able to overcome any difficulties and go for a run in the rain, snow and cold. And all this at 6 am. If, getting up at this time to run, you feel like the person who Just do it, then the brand works well for the product.
Just do it is a brand positioning, i.e. a short phrase that reflects its essence. Positioning is a part of branding.
The concepts of “brand” and “branding” are often confused, although they are different things: a brand is an image, and branding is the process of its creation and development.
A brand helps a business stand out and earn more
A brand distinguishes a company from its competitors, i.e. it works as an identifier. For example, here are two identical curds. Which one will a person choose in a supermarket?
The curds are the same, so it doesn’t matter which one you take. But if one brand appears, the choice will be obvious:
So a strong brand helps businesses earn more. The price of the first curd is made up of the cost of raw materials, packaging, and delivery to the store. And the price of the second one also includes the cost of the image. That is, a person buys not just a package of curd, but the feeling that he leads a healthy lifestyle, eats right, and lives with a sense of lightness. And he pays more for it.
The brand also determines the company’s development vector. For example, a company has been making regular yoghurts for 30 years, and then a new generation of customers appears who prefer yoghurts without sugar, gluten, and animal products. In such cases, the brand helps to understand whether it is worth modernizing production in order to make yoghurts according to new demands.
Globally, a company’s brand helps a business determine which direction to develop: to try new market niches or stay in the old one? To work for an adult audience or for teenagers? To produce a generally accessible product or an exclusive one? These are the questions that begin the construction of a new brand – this is the first stage, analytics.
Brand Creation. Stage One: Analytics
The creation of a new brand for a company is handled by a brand manager , and he always starts with analytics. At this stage, it is necessary to understand what opportunities the company has. To do this, they study the market capacity , competitors and consumers.
Market capacity
shows the size of demand for a product. For example, if a company wants to sell beach hats in Yakutia, it will most likely go bust. The market capacity is small. But if it chooses Sochi, it will also go bust, because a hundred companies have been selling hats there for ten years in a row, and everyone knows them. The market capacity is large, but it is completely filled by other companies.
The task of a brand manager is to determine whether a company is relevant in a specific market and whether it can make a profit. Reading studies, reports and various reports helps with this. For large businesses, they are provided by companies such as RBC, Nielsen, GfK, Romir, BusinesStat. For small and medium businesses, ordering a unique study may be too expensive, but this does not mean that you should abandon market research. Useful information can also be found in open sources:
Competitors
are companies that produce a similar product. New brands should not face existing brands head-on – this is an expensive and difficult fight for the audience, and young brands, as a rule, do not have the funds for it. Therefore, you need to find a niche and audience for which you will not have to fight with other companies. Or at least the battle will not be so difficult.
A brand manager studies competitors using their websites, social networks and YouTube. Here, his task is to understand what emotional field competitors occupy, and when creating a brand, to make it not exactly the same, but unique.
For example, if a meat products company is going to develop its brand, it makes sense to study a powerful competitor, Miratorg. Here’s what a brand manager will look at:
Facebook* – what tone does the brand maintain in relation to a mature audience.
VKontakte – what can a brand offer to a young audience, what arguments and communications are addressed to them.
Instagram* – how the brand visualizes itself, how bright and convincing it is.
Odnoklassniki – how the brand communicates with an older audience.
TikTok shows how a brand communicates with an audience that follows trends.
YouTube – with its help you can understand what language the company uses to communicate with consumers, what tone it uses.
For example, on the Miratorg YouTube channel you can see the slogan “We are one country”:
Miratorg is a large brand and positions itself at the national level. This means that smaller brands should think about a different positioning. For example, a local company could focus on the freshness of farm products.
Consumers are people who will buy the product. A brand manager must understand them perfectly: know what their tastes are, how they spend their time, who they communicate with, what they are interested in. Usually, in-depth interviews are conducted for this: a person is invited and in a conversation they learn about their expectations from the product and needs, and then they are closed with the help of the brand.
The analytics stage consists of these three blocks. At the end, the brand manager receives three simple proposals:
The market allows…
Competitors don’t give…
Consumers want…
Instead of ellipses, there is the result of research conducted to create a strong brand.
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Stage two: creating a company brand platform
Brand platform is a key concept in branding. The platform tells what values the brand has and what its character is. If the brand loses its values, it will change beyond recognition. For example, Nike will not be itself without courage, Rafaello – without romance, Dove – without tenderness. The character of the brand also follows from the values.
Each value can be developed in different ways. For example, courage can be aggressive, or it can be caring, when a person shows it to protect the family. That is, the value is one, but in different brands it is revealed from different sides. For example, three brands – Merci candies, Dobry juice and Nesquik chocolate. What do you think their common value is?
The common value of these companies is family, but they convey it in different ways. The Merci candy brand emphasizes gratitude to loved ones, Dobry — on time spent with family, Nesquik — on caring for children.
To make it easier to reveal values, the brand manager uses a system of archetypes. These are templates for defining the character of the brand through the characters of its consumers.
There are twelve archetypes in total: the Innocent, the Seeker, the Sage, the Hero, the Rebel, the Magician, the Nice Guy, the Lover, the Jester, the Caring, the Creator or Craftsman, and the Ruler. Each archetype is a set of values, behavior patterns, and approaches to brand building:
The values and character of the brand set the tone of communication, approach to naming, design and advertising.
Step three: naming and product design
Naming defines the brand name, and design defines its appearance. The main thing in naming and design is to maintain the unity of the image. For example, if a rebellious brand of rock guitars is called “Guitar for Mark” and the logo is a watercolor flower, then there is no unity here. Consumers experience dissonance between the product and its “packaging”, and this scares people away from the brand.
To ensure that naming and design are easy to read and coherent, the brand manager creates a metaphor for the brand, which he then works on together with the designer.
A metaphor is a holistic image that translates the analytical component of a brand into a figurative one. A metaphor is a whole world that helps a brand set the tone and reveal itself as vividly as possible. For example, the metaphor of the Bombora book publishing house is a wave:
For the Bombory brand, information and books are waves that overwhelm readers: it is both a danger and a drive. In order not to drown in the raging ocean of information, the publishing house selects and publishes only those books that are worthy of the reader’s attention, and also creates an atmosphere in which reading is an energetic process of development. The metaphor of surfing can be seen in communication, design, and even in the name.
Stage four: advertising and brand promotion
At the final stage, the brand manager determines where and when a person will come into contact with the brand. This could be online advertising, sponsorship at events, tastings and gifts, print advertising, radio and TV advertising.
For example, a person is hot on the beach and wants to drink lemonade. It would be great if a brand placed its ad somewhere nearby – then the person would not have to think about which lemonade to take: when he wanted it, the decision was already before his eyes.
Beer brands do the same when they place ads during breaks between football matches. Clothing branding involves placing print ads near shopping malls and their stores, cosmetics brands – at fashion shows, and shashlik producers – on the outskirts of the city during the summer season. To be closer to consumers, children’s product brands try to get into gift sets for parents – so a person can try everything in action right away.
The main task is to be near the consumer when he thinks about the product.
How to develop a brand so that it meets business goals
It is not enough to create a strong brand, you also need to make sure that it works for the business goals. To do this, the brand must meet three criteria.
Be manageable.
For a brand to fulfill business goals, it must be manageable. It is bad when a brand exists separately from a business, rather than helping it achieve goals, such as entering new audiences or markets. Any change in branding must solve some business problem, and not just create a beautiful image in the consumer’s mind.
Be efficient from an economic point of view.
A brand is an asset, which means that its efficiency needs to be calculated. A brand manager needs to know how much money a company spends on creating and promoting its brand and what results it brings in numbers — sales, revenue, profit. To do this, he works with the sales funnel and ensures that potential consumers go through it from start to finish. In this situation, the brand’s health indicators for the consumer — its recognition, desire to buy, loyalty, and others — become maximum.
It is also important for a brand manager to monitor economic indicators – they are what help a business move forward and achieve its goals:
brand profitability – how much additional marginal profit the brand helps to earn by increasing the price and increasing sales;
product turnover per point – how much of a product is purchased on average at each point of sale per unit of time, for example, in one day;
advertising effectiveness – how advertising influences the achievement of planned business indicators.
A communication campaign can be considered successful if product sales have increased by 30%. But it is important to remember that the effect of a brand and advertising cannot always be seen in the moment: they also have a cumulative effect. Therefore, a brand manager more often:
calculates the percentage of turnover that a company spends on promotion – 4–8% is considered the norm;
monitors the dynamics of advertising expenses, namely, investments in advertising for each ruble of products sold. Ideally, such expenses should decrease, not increase;
looks at whether the company is achieving its planned performance indicators.
Work for a long time.
And lastly: the brand must retain its essence for a long time. If one brand manager at the start suggests that the bakery focus on warm buns, two years later a second one comes and switches to an atmosphere of coziness, and a third one a year later – to care, then soon the company will no longer understand why they need the brand at all. To prevent this from happening, you need to remember the brand positioning and the company’s goals.
And although it is important for a brand to maintain its positioning, it must also be flexible and monitor what is happening in the world. For example, for 20 years a husband gave his wife the opportunity not to work and sit at home, and this was care. And now they will call this financial dependence, abuse, and say that it would be better for him to go on maternity leave with his wife so that she would not ruin her career. When values are transformed, the brand must also change so as not to become morally obsolete. A competent rebranding will help with this .
Basic mistakes in brand creation
There are six main mistakes in branding. And they are made not only by beginners, but also by brand managers with many years of experience.
Mistake 1. A brand is created for the sake of a brand.
Sometimes a brand is created without taking into account the goals and objectives of the business. It exists on its own and does not help establish contact with consumers.
Mistake 2. The manager creates a brand for himself.
The creation of a product brand should be based on research and statistics, not on the tastes of the manager. For example, a company produces tonometers, and a young brand manager comes and makes the brand more youthful: orders a bright design for boxes, develops social networks and YouTube. That is, he builds the brand the way he wants to see it, and not the way the consumer needs it. This can happen not only with tonometers, but with any product. For example, packaging for milk from the lower price segment has a youthful connotation, although it should signal a low price.
Mistake 3. Brand positioning is not unique.
A wide range of products, low prices, excellent quality – this is not positioning. It does not reflect the needs of the buyer, so it is impossible to develop a company brand on its basis.
Mistake 4: Naming and design don’t match the platform.
For naming and design to work for business goals—sales, recognition, or anything else—they need to support the brand, not pull it in different directions. If the brand is created for expectant mothers, then let its name and design reflect love and care, not businesslike and purposefulness.
Mistake 5. Communications are multidirectional.
This happens when a company speaks about different values and for different people in different channels. This is bad because the company’s brand voice disintegrates and is difficult to perceive as a single whole.
This happens when a brand uses different slogans and changes messages in advertising. For example, one of the largest bread producers in St. Petersburg talks about its brand “Karavai” sometimes as ideal bread, sometimes emphasizes delicious sandwiches, sometimes turns to family traditions:
To maintain the brand’s voice, a manager must constantly keep its positioning in mind.
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Mistake 6. Trying to pull out a bad product with branding.
If a company resells replicas of Gucci bags, branding will not help them get as much money for them as for the original. If the product is of poor quality or simply unnecessary, you will have to first deal with these problems, and then engage in branding and develop your brand.
