If you are just setting up your new business, don’t forget to invest some effort into your brand creation process! This is very important before you build that website and start reaching out to potential clients. In fact, if you have already finished company creation process but are currently not seeing it make too much impact, this might be why.
Here’s why it’s so important – this process is what defines your brand’s identity and helps locate it in your customers’ mind. It forms the foundation of all your branding and marketing efforts going forward. And it’s not just something that’s ‘good to have’ – when done right, it actually leads to faster returns.
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Breaking down the process
Let’s see what are the steps involved in brand creation process and the results it drives.
1. Brand name and positioning
This outlines exactly what your brand is all about. A clear and appealing name helps you offer the right kind of brand experience to your audience from the get-go – and in fact, it helps you reach the right target audience in the first place.
If you are catering to a young demographic, a fun and trendy name can make that immediately evident. If you are targeting people from all segments of society, a name that includes a word in Hindi or any other local dialect might help.
We recently used this insight to craft the brand name, EntrepreNaari. This is a community specifically for women entrepreneurs from all over India – and the brand name makes that amply clear. But beyond being descriptive, a brand name can also be emotive.
For example, you may have come across the brand Aazol, founded by ex-media mogul Apurva Purohit. The term ‘Aazol’ refers to one’s maternal grandmother’s home – which is extremely apt as the brand offers traditional, locally sourced spices and snacks from Maharashtra. The term is immediately relatable in the local dialect, and evokes memories and emotions in the consumer.
Important things to keep in mind when thinking of a brand name
2. Brand strategy
Next, it’s time to craft the brand strategy. To put it simply, this helps you identify where you want to reach with your brand in the short and long term. Once you have your destination or goal in mind, it becomes easier to streamline all efforts in that direction.
For example, for a young brand, the goal might be to start breaking even in a couple of years. Sales then, is of utmost importance. But without a proper brand building strategy, their efforts might involve endless ads and communications across multiple platforms, urging people to ‘Buy Now’. Effort-intensive, expensive – and ultimately ineffective.
A well-designed strategy on the other hand, will focus on creating awareness first, then building credibility to gain the trust of the audience and only then providing motivation to purchase the product through offers, discounts etc.
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3. Brand guidelines
This is one step that young businesses often skip – with the result being that all their communication and brand assets end up looking and feeling different, with nothing tying them all together.
Based on the Brand creation strategy that is decided, the guidelines will usually be put together in a comprehensive document or ‘Brand Book’. This will include everything from visual guidelines, content and tone guidelines, communication guidelines and more.
Going forward, this will serve as the cornerstone for every asset for the brand – thus ensuring a solid, immediately recognisable identity.
Here’s an example – when you come across a post with a tomato red background, a food-related imagery and a witty copy, chances are you’ll immediately think of Zomato. The brand has strategically created this association in your mind.
They would never confuse you by using unfamiliar hues like blue, green, yellow etc. Likewise, they are also not likely to use orange in their communications because that’s a colour associated with their competitor, Swiggy.
Some Must have base guidelines for every brand
4. Crucial brand assets
At this stage, the marketing team will chart out the consumer journey and identify any gaps in the current user experience. The idea is to convert audiences into paying customers – and any gaps will prevent this from happening seamlessly.
A small accessories boutique, for instance, may be operating only on Instagram, with the founder accepting orders through direct messages. But this requires a lot of manual intervention, and without a website or an e-commerce set-up, the orders remain limited to only the number that the founder can personally handle.
It is the marketing team’s job to then fill the gaps identified – in this case, create a website and get an e-commerce set-up up and running. The gaps filled may also include creating a social media presence, bringing in social listening tools, adding a customer response management function to the flow and more.
Minimum brand assets to expect success
5. Communication strategy
Finally, it’s time to actually reach out and talk to the audience. Here, the team will figure out whom to talk to, how to talk to them, which platforms to use and so on.
Do keep in mind that a communication strategy will never be universal. When you set out to address everyone, you end up addressing no one – that’s a marketing reality.
Having a robust social media communication strategy may be a great plan in general, but not if you are an organisation targeting underprivileged children for example. Likewise, having fantastic email communication is great – but that doesn’t help if they all land in your audience’s spam folder.
An experienced marketing team will help you figure out these needs and chart out a brand communication strategy accordingly.
Ready to start your own brand creation process? We’d love to put our experience to work for you. Reach out to us here.
This piece was collaboratively written by multiple members of the We Think North team, bringing you perspectives from across the branding, marketing, content and tech verticals.