How to Build a Strong Brand 2023

What is a Brand?

The term brand refers to a name, slogan, logo, design, or other feature that distinguishes a company's product or service from those of other companies.

A brand may also refer to a set of perceptions that a person or group has about a company, product or service. These are often based on a product's features, price, quality, and other attributes, as well as the company's reputation, values, and culture. 

Building a strong brand is an essential part of a company's marketing strategy as it helps to create customer loyalty and differentiate a company's products or services from its competitors.

What is Branding?

Branding is the process of creating and showcasing a brand. It involves developing a unique name, slogan, logo and other marketing elements that distinguish a company's products or services from those of its competitors.

Effective branding requires a good understanding of the target audience as well as the competitive landscape. It also requires consistency in messaging and visual elements across the marketing channels, including the company's website, social media, advertising, and other promotional materials.

Branding is more than just a logo or slogan – it's the overall experience that a customer has with a company, including the products or services themselves, the customer service, and the company's values and culture. A strong brand can create a positive emotional connection with customers, which often leads to increased loyalty and advocacy.

Why is Branding Important?

Creating a strong brand is essential in helping to differentiate a company or product from its competitors as well as establishing a unique identity and position in the market. This also helps to gain trust and loyalty in customers, which if done well, translates into increased sales and long-term success for the business.

Projecting a consistent image across all marketing, advertising and communication channels helps companies to communicate their values and mission to their target audience more effectively. This can help to increase credibility with potential customers, as well as help to establish the company as a thought leader or market leader in its industry sector.

In today's highly competitive business environment, the need for strong branding is more important than ever, helping companies stand out from their competitors, and create a strong, recognizable presence in the market.

5 Steps to Building a Strong Brand

1. Define your brand: Determine your brand's objective, values, and personality. This will make it easier for you to establish a clear direction for your brand and communicate effectively with your target audience. Having this defined early on will also help you to stay on track as well as keep all channels of communications aligned.
2. Develop a brand strategy: Create a plan for how you will communicate and position your brand in the market. This should include your brand message, target audience, and marketing channels. During this process, it helps to carry out research on your competitors to understand how your product/services compare. Areas such as pricing and quality can play an important part in defining where to position your brand in the market.
3. Create your visual identity: Develop a strong visual style for your brand, including your logo, colour palette, and typography. These key elements should be consistent across all your marketing materials. Creating a brand identity guide is a great way of communicating your visual identity across both internal teams and external partners and clients who may need to showcase or feature your brand.
4. Communicate your brand consistently: Consistency is the key to building a strong brand. Ensure your brand's tagline, slogan, messaging and visual identity are consistently applied across all marketing channels, including your website, social media, and advertising.
5. Engage with your audience: Interact and build relationships with your audience as much as possible. This often involves responding to customer inquiries, complaints and feedback, as well as actively seeking out opportunities to connect with your audience through events, sponsorships, or partnerships.

Where to Showcase Your Brand

There are a wide variety of ways you can showcase your brand and make it visible to your target audience. Some options include

Create a Website

In today’s digital world a website is a great way to showcase your brand and provide information about your products or services. You can use your website to share your brand story, showcase your products or services, and provide contact information.

Social Media

Being active on popular Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are great ways to connect with customers and showcase your brand. You can use social media to share updates about your business, promote your products or services, and engage with your target audience. Social Media channels also create a great reference point for customers to read reviews and feedback from others which can bring trust and credibility to your brand.

Events and Trade Shows

Attending events and trade shows can be a great way to showcase your brand to a large audience. You can always attend as a visitor or invest in setting up a booth or display to showcase your products or services and meet potential customers in person.

Collaborate with Influencers

Partnering with influencers is a great way to showcase your brand to their followers. Influencers can create sponsored content featuring your products or services, which can help to increase awareness of your brand. When considering which influencers to work with be sure to check that their audience demographic matches your target audience demographic. Also if you are selling products you can also consider creating a unique promo code for your influencer to help generate sales.

Content Marketing

Creating and publishing useful and informative content is a great way to showcase your brand and establish yourself as a market leader in your industry sector. It's also a great way to increase your website rank and brand awareness in popular search engines.

Effective types of content marketing include blog posts, infographics, articles, videos, and other types of content that showcase your expertise and provide value to your target audience. When writing content for your brand it is important to stay consistent in your writing style tone and identity. This will make your branding more recognisable and effective.

Advertising 

When it comes to advertising, brand awareness campaigns are often used as an effective way of establishing a brand's reputation, creating an emotional connection with customers, and driving brand loyalty. It can also help to increase the perceived value of a product or service, which can lead to increased sales and customer loyalty. From printed ads to online digital banners, there are many forms of advertising available for companies to showcase their brand these days. Before pursuing an advertising campaign it's always best to set out your objectives and goals as well as understand how these will be measured.

​​Customer Service

Incorporating your branding into customer service is a great way for companies to create a positive and memorable experience for customers that helps to build brand loyalty and drive business success. Providing customer service that aligns with the brand's promises and commitments, such as offering prompt and personalized support will help to keep your brand strong and memorable to customers.

Packaging 

Consider adding strong branding into your product packaging as an effective way to create a strong and positive brand identity. This can be a key factor in driving business success and can also help to increase the perceived value of the product, leading to increased sales and customer loyalty. When selling consumer products, the packaging is an essential aspect of branding because it is often the first thing that customers see when they engage with your product.

What Are the Biggest Challenges When Building a Brand?

1. Differentiating Your Brand: Being effective in making your brand stand out from your competitors in a crowded market can be a huge challenge for businesses today and can also consume a large portion of your marketing budget.
2. Increasing Brand Awareness: Depending on how established your business and brand are in the market and the size of your marketing budget, It can take a lot of time and effort to increase brand awareness and get your brand seen and remembered by potential customers. However good your product or service is, the early stages of growing brand awareness and gaining traction can result in many businesses failing at this hurdle.
3. Consistency: Maintaining consistency in the brand message, visual identity, and customer experience is crucial for building and maintaining a strong brand. Changing the direction of your branding can also lead to confusion both internally and externally resulting in a weaker brand identity.
4. Managing Your Brand Reputation: Companies must be proactive in managing their brand reputation, particularly in the age of social media where negative reviews and criticism can spread quickly. Slow response times and lack of customer support are common factors which often lead to damaged brand reputation.
5. Adapting to Change: In today's fast-evolving and innovative economies, Brands must be able to adapt to changing market conditions and consumer preferences to stay relevant.
6. Managing Your Resources: The process of building a strong and effective brand can be very resource-intensive, requiring a significant amount of time, investment, and manpower to achieve the desired results and long-term success.

Overall, building a strong brand can be a very complex process that requires careful planning, strategy, and execution. It takes time and effort to establish a strong brand, but the rewards can be significant in terms of customer loyalty, credibility, and overall business success.

How Can Vodus Help You Measure Your Brand Strength?

By having the largest online panel in Malaysia via our Vodus Media Network that has a combined sampling frame of 17 million consumers, Vodus is best suited to help you gather the most accurate and representative data to calculate your Brand Equity Score.

Vodus can help you measure and improve your Brand Equity with our Brand Health Tracker, Customer Satisfaction Research and Product Innovation Research solutions. We will survey your target consumers to measure your brand performance, consumer perception and customer satisfaction to diagnose the underlying issues with your brand and construct a strategy to improve your Brand Strength.

Contact Us in the form below to let us help you increase the strength of your brand.