The concept of brand is present in our vocabulary when we want to identify a particular product or service. It is the name we assign to organizations or companies that bring together multiple products and/or services under the same umbrella. Building a brand , therefore, represents the process in which companies develop their entire conceptual scheme, in which they direct all their advertising strategies.
That is not a brand
Although the concepts of branding and advertising can be confused with each other, the process they refer to is not the same. Advertising products is only one major aspect of branding, that is, it represents a direct action that unfolds within that core identity.A brand (in this corporate context) should be considered as the conceptual reflection of an institution within the market.
On the other hand,Nor should brand be confused with company or business. While it is true that one depends on the other, they do not necessarily have the same meaning.Companies represent legally constituted institutions that provide a good or service to a specific public. Brands, on the other hand – according to Philip Kotler’s concept – represent a name, symbol or design that a particular business idea acquires for the purpose of differentiating itself from other projects.
A company can have multiple brands and in fact assign a specific business model to each of them.Consumers buy brands, not companies, so what we must focus on and devote all our attention to is building brands that manage attractive value propositions for audiences.
Below, we invite you to learn some elements that will allow you to understand what it means to build a brand today and what are the elements that characterize a brand as such.
After the economic crisis, also known as the Great Depression, occurred in the United States in 1930, mass production and brand positioning (basic marketing principles) became the solution and an essential element for the development and growth of the country. That is why after World War II, the great world power began to be the United States (replacing the imposing England) thanks to its consumer ideals and technological and industrial advances.
On the other hand, Naomi Klein in her work “No Logo: The Power of Brands” establishes that the growth of the wealth and cultural influence of multinational companies that has occurred in recent years has its origin in a unique and apparently harmless idea that theorists in the management of successful companies created in the mid-1980s: that successful companies must produce brands and not products. From this moment on, companies began to take ownership of the intangible values that the brand gives to consumers, turning them into a competitive advantage that paves the way for communication and relationships with their target audiences.
In this sense, brands have somehow decided to take advantage of the neuronal and emotional stimuli that are present when a person decides to relate to or want to be part of a particular brand. That is,There are brands that powerfully influence the decision-making power of their audiences (in their favor), either through the experiences they convey or the quality level of their products and/or services.Successful cases include Starbucks, Adidas, Apple, among others.
Now, what does it mean to build a brand today?
Building a brand , as we have already observed, requires a strong emotional and experiential aspect that runs through the bridge between consumers and companies. In order for brands to position themselves in the market, as Naomi Klein so well stated, they must offer much more than goods and services. However, building a brand requires implementing a series of technical aspects that allow the standardization and projection of a specific idea that represents the brand during its lifetime. Therefore, building a brand currently means:
Develop a clear mission, vision and objectives
The first thing you should do in your effort to build a brand is to establish the mission and vision that it has (or should have).Start by asking yourself: What do I want to achieve with my brand? How do I want to project myself in 5 years? And what are my short- and long-term goals? Of course, financial ambitions come into play here, but you need to think much further than that. Think about the values you want your brand to convey to your consumers, how they should identify with you and why they will do so. All of these questions draw a fixed line in relation to your goals and how you want to value your efforts over the years. Here is an example of how you can create these basic principles:
The Futuro Presente Foundation is an organization that develops training programs for young people in leadership, social entrepreneurship, marketing, public policy and business.
Mission
Promote training, civic exercise and social action, through the recruitment, training and organization of young people willing to contribute to the comprehensive progress of the country
Vision
To be a nationally and internationally recognized organization in the training of leaders in any space of political, social and civic participation of youth.
Goals
Promote political and civic participation of the country's youth.
To train young people to exercise leadership with democratic values.
Promote local, regional and national youth leadership.
Establish youth networks to carry out local projects.
Disseminate democratic values to encourage citizen reflection and action.
Using this example, we can understand the broader picture that brands represent. Although a foundation is not the same as a company, the latter can perfectly accentuate a brand that defines its capabilities and skills to the public. In this sense,Brands are not exclusive to corporations; we can also find this term to refer to other organizations that similarly manage a graphic identity and a consolidated value proposition.
Knowing the ideal consumer or buyer persona
Building a brand requires previously established content and context. While your mission, vision and objectives establish a target audience to address, knowing in depth how the mindset works within your ideal consumers is a vital component to correctly orient your brand's messages and values. Beforehand, these must connect with the interests of your buyers personas and serve as an identifying reference. This public analysis is key for large corporations when launching their marketing or content campaigns and wanting to generate correct and monetizable receptivity.
Brands must be built, which are the best communities that relate to them. In this way, all japan whatsapp number the effort that is carried out (from the construction of the corporate identity manual to a market launch campaign) is fully utilized and yields great results.When you create a brand manual, establishing who the consumers will be should be a task to be carried out in parallel, so that you can work on a graphic identity that is much more appropriate and in line with them.
Create a corporate identity manual
Corporate identity manuals bring together the basic and previously thought-out tools for the correct use and graphic application of the brand. In these manuals we can find the conceptualization of the logo and its symbols, the color palette used for it and in turn, for the brand's products, the typography to be used within the logo and the visual pieces that accompany it. HereIt is important to create a logo that represents at a glance the value proposition or central idea of your brand and to choose the correct colors for it (color psychology at this point can help you with this purpose).
Within these work guides, the projection of the graphic elements visualized in POP materials such as t-shirts, notebooks, letterheads, business cards, uniforms, among others, are also present, with the objective of standardizing the creative process of the brand. That is, no matter how many campaigns and marketing strategies are launched around it, there will always be a recurring pattern in each one, regarding the regulations established by the manual and its functions for the brand.
The advantage of creating a corporate manual for your brand is that it allows you to maintain visual consistency across all your communication channels.A company's corporate image is its letter of introduction, its face to the public and forms part of its identity.In this sense, it is of utmost importance to create a manual that allows you to build a brand that is visible and recognized globally.
Analyze the competition
Finally, analyzing your competition is vital if you want to build a successful brand . Doing so is not about copying exactly what others are doing, but rather understanding why other brands do what they do and visualizing how you could do it much better. Benchmarking is a management tool that can help you in this process because it provides you with comparison indicators to relate the conceptualization of your brand with the others that exist in the market and that in some way or another, have the same target audience as you.
Analyzing the competition and the market behind it will always be one of the most important actions that an organization must carry out to identify how the public has been receptive to a certain proposal, in order to infer how the new brand will perform in this environment.
In short, building a brand today means bringing all these actions together and making them customizable to the brand's objectives. Each brand has a background of professionally developed efforts and ideas for its broad development in the market. To be successful, a brand must transmit trust, authenticity and positive values in society. As Naomi Klein suggests, this has been the case since 1980 and will continue to be so until new paradigms are established.