Branding: how to create an essential brand?

Branding: definition

The Branding is a set of marketing actions aimed at establishing a distinct and memorable brand image. It is an ongoing process that includes the creation ofvisual identity of the brand (logo, colors, typography, etc.), the definition of its personality and values, as well as the management of its reputation.

In other words, branding is how a business presents itself to the world and how it wants to be perceived by its potential customers. The ultimate goal of branding is to create an emotional connection with consumers, to anchor the brand in their minds and to stand out from the competition.

Brand marketing vs traditional marketing?

Brand marketing is all the work that consists in developing and promoting your brand among consumers. It is a major component of strategic marketing. Most traditional marketing actions have an impact on the brand, but for it to be effective and positive, it is necessary to have worked on this branding with precision.

You should therefore not oppose brand marketing and traditional marketing, but you must understand that marketing without having really worked on your brand can pose a lot of problems in the long term

Brand marketing and communication: what are the differences?

The Brand marketing And the communication are two essential tools in brand management, but they have distinct roles. Brand marketing is mainly about developing and implementing strategies to strengthen brand image and customer loyalty. He takes care of the strategic and long-term aspect, focusing on creating a brand identity strong and consistent.

Communication, on the other hand, is an integral part of the execution of marketing strategy. She is responsible for disseminating messages and information related to products and services. It is the means by which the brand expresses itself, whether through advertising, public relations, social networks, etc. Communication is therefore a tool used by marketing to achieve its goals.

It should be noted that these two elements are complementary and must be consistent for an effective brand strategy.

What is co-branding?

The co-branding is a joint marketing strategy where two independent brands collaborate to create a new product or service offering. This alliance, which can be temporary or permanent, allows both brands to pool their resources and share the investment to generate additional sales.

There are various forms of co-branding, including:

• The functional co-branding, where allied brands add value to a product or service;
• The symbolic co-branding, which aims to combine the image of two brands without changing their products.

It is a strategic approach that requires a balance of “brand powers” in fact, if one of the brands is much stronger than the other, co-branding risks diluting the weakest brand. It will also be necessary to stage the collaboration by creating a good Storytelling around this association to maximize its impact!

Personal branding and brand content

💡 Note: Personal branding, sometimes confused with corporate branding, is about how a person develops their own brand image to stand out, build their expertise or create an audience. It is often based on regular speaking, expert or inspiring content, and consistency between personal values and the messages broadcast.

As such, it also mobilizes levers similar to brand content, i.e. the creation of engaging content that is aligned with a strong identity. However, this is not the subject of this article, which focuses exclusively on corporate branding, positioning, promise, brand identity, and content strategies that build solid and sustainable brand equity.

The fundamentals of branding

Brand positioning and promise

Brand positioning is the image you want to convey to your audience. It is based on the distinctive characteristics of your offer and must reflect both your values and the expectations of your target audience.

The brand promise represents the concrete benefit that the consumer will get by choosing your brand. It is your commitment and must be credible, attractive and differentiating.

These elements are so crucial that they warrant in-depth treatment in our article dedicated to marketing positioning. In the context of branding, remember the importance of their coherence with your global identity.

In practice, you will need to:

• Clearly define your positioning by analysing your distinctive strengths
• Formulate a promise that resonates with your target
• Ensure consistency between these elements and your overall brand identity
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Brand identity: Creation and meaning

Brand identity is what will “show” your positioning and your promise in the eyes of the world. It's how you're going to infuse these elements into everything your brand produces (website, social networks, articles, events, sales presentation, product).

The development of this identity comes after the definition of a strong brand positioning and promise. It consists in particular in choosing the visual elements, the graphic charter that will represent the brand: logo, colors, typography, etc. These elements must be consistent with the values of the brand and easily identifiable by consumers.

Another crucial aspect of brand identity is the Communication tone. It must be adapted to the target and consistent across all communication channels. Finally, brand identity is also built through experiments that the brand offers to its customers. These experiences should be in line with the brand promise and strengthen the relationship between the brand and its customers.

Brand identity allows the brand to stand out and create a strong bond with its customers. A strong and coherent brand identity is a major asset in ensuring the success and sustainability of the company.

Brand image: Perception and reality

Branding is the consumer's perception of the brand. It's the sum of people's ideas, opinions, and feelings about your brand. It is a perception that can be influenced, but never fully controlled. The reality of branding is that brand actions and behaviors define how a brand is perceived.

Consistency is key : all elements of the brand, from communication to design, must work together to create a unified and coherent image.

However, it should be remembered that the perception may differ from the original intention. A brand can have a negative perception despite the fact that you are convinced that you have done what is necessary to make it positive.

For this, it is crucial to regularly assess the perception of the brand among consumers and to adjust the branding strategy accordingly.

Finally, even if a strong and positive brand image is a major asset, it is important to be aware that consumer expectations are constantly evolving. It is therefore necessary to demonstrate flexibility and the ability to adapt to maintain a relevant and attractive brand image.

Understanding the concept of Brand Equity

La Brand Equity, or Brand capital, is a measure of the additional value that a brand brings to a product or service. This value is determined by the consumer's perception and experience of the brand. It is a complex concept that takes into account many parameters, in addition to the financial aspect.

• Consumer perception : If consumers have a positive image of your brand, it increases its value.
• Perceived value of products/services : The higher the perceived value of a brand's products/services, the stronger the brand equity.
• Brand reputation : A brand with a good reputation benefits from greater brand equity.

Brand equity can influence how consumers respond to your products, prices, marketing, and advertising. A strong brand can allow a company to increase its commercial margins, maximize its turnover and strengthen its business.

The value of a company in terms of terms is very largely linked to its “Brand equity”; it is something so difficult to create and so strongly anchored that a high level of “brand equity” is worth all the turnover in the world.

Create an essential brand in 5 steps

Step 1: Understand your market and its target

For an effective branding strategy, the first step is to fully understand your market and its target. This involves studying the characteristics, needs, and behaviors of your target audience. The two key techniques to remember here are:

• The Buyer Persona : To draw up a robot portrait of your targets and study their consumption behavior
• Les Jobs to be done : Understand in depth the motivations of your target from a functional, emotional and social point of view.

In addition, understanding your market will allow you to determine your posturing and to differentiate yourself from the competition. This involves an analysis of the market, the competition and current trends.

Finally, it is essential to identify your unique selling point (USP: Unique selling point), which is what makes your brand unique and sets you apart from others. It is this element that will allow you to stand out and attract the attention of your target audience.

To do this, it may be useful to:

• Analyze the demographics of your target audience
• Identify their needs and desires
• Understand their online behavior
• Evaluate the competition in your market

This information will provide you with valuable information to build your brand image and marketing strategy.

Step 2: Define your brand positioning and promise

After understanding your market and your target, you need to Define your positioning and your brand promise. Brand positioning is the place you want to occupy in the minds of consumers and in relation to your competitors. It is based on unique and distinctive elements of your brand.

There is no miracle recipe for “good positioning” and “good promise” since by definition there can be dozens of different ones that are relevant. But it is certain that you must align your brand promise with the needs of your target and their goals.

For example, you sell marketing automation software. Among the key needs of customers in this market are ease of use, the ability to finely follow the customer journey, the difficulty of producing content and personalized mailing campaigns on a large scale.

Each of these fundamental needs is an interesting axis to exploit for your positioning and your promise.

Example of good positioning and promise:

Positioning : You choose to emphasize the ease of use and deployment of large-scale campaigns for e-retailers.

Promise : Perfect campaigns in one click to develop your turnover

Your competitors who would choose to sell products made in France, or all in one, have nothing but their eyes to cry on. E-retailers will be for you when you have worked hard enough on your branding.

Step 3: Building your brand identity

Once your brand positioning and promise have been defined, it is time to work on building your brand identity. It consists of all the visual and sensory elements that represent your brand: logo, colors, colors, typography, images, sounds, smells, etc. Each element must be chosen carefully to reflect your positioning and transmit your brand promise.

Be careful, your brand identity is not just about design or logo. This corresponds to consumers' perception of your brand, which is influenced by all the interactions they have with you. To build an effective brand identity, make sure that all of your actions are consistent with your brand positioning and promise.

Step 4: Enrich, disseminate and capitalize on your brand

A brand does not exist when it is declared but when everyone who is not even looking for you knows who you are.

It's not just about design, communication, or advertising. All the content, everything you produce will work little by little to build and spread your brand. So work on all the levers to grow your business and its brand capital:

• Your website
• THEInbound marketing
• The Content marketing
• The natural referencing
• Les social networks
• Digital communication
• Les press relations (with the help of press releases)
• Vos commercial presentations

Time is your ally and it is also what makes a brand powerful, the sooner you work on it and the more time becomes your ally to capitalize on these investments.

Be rigorous, ambitious and regular in your brand marketing investments. In 10 years, you will become absolutely unstoppable in your market. The brand creates considerable value over time, keeps your customers loyal, simplifies your acquisition and reduces costs.

Step 5: Evaluate your brand image and innovate

Assessing your brand image is essential but incredibly difficult. It is not easy to assess the perception of a brand; you have to resort to expensive studies that are only of interest to very large consumer brands. It is the most frustrating “unfair advantage” for small companies, “you only improve what you measure” but measuring the competitive advantage that good branding offers is not possible when you are young and little known.

The reality is that just because it's hard to measure doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

However, you can use:

• Of your customer satisfaction
• The reputation of your brand on search engines
• The reputation of your brand on social networks and the commitment of your followers

But evaluating is not enough. It is also necessary toinnovating. The business world is constantly evolving, as are the expectations and needs of consumers. Thus, a brand that does not adapt and does not innovate risks losing relevance and attractiveness.

To innovate, it is possible to seek to improve your Brand value, that is, the perceived value of your brand by consumers. You can also consider a rebranding, that is, a redesign of your brand identity, if necessary. For example, this could be the case if you notice that your brand does not stand out enough from the competition, or if it is no longer in line with the values and expectations of your target audience.

To assess and innovate, you can ask yourself questions such as:

• What are the strengths of my brand?
• What are its weak points?
• What do consumers think of my brand?
• How can I improve my offer and my brand image?
• What are the current trends in my market and how can I adapt to them?

In short, evaluation and innovation are two essential approaches to ensure the sustainability and growth of your brand.

Include branding in your strategy in the age of beliefs

The era of beliefs: branding is an exceptional asset

Why talk about an era of beliefs? Because today the offer is saturated, the information is saturated. Most of the time “objectivity” or “the truth” are vague and not necessarily relevant concepts.

What is a beautiful/good website? There are dozens of good answers to this question.

What is a beautiful house?

Today we are looking for subjectivity, the one that resonates with our own perception of the world. And it is for this reason that creating a neutral and smooth brand is useless. Take the risk of assuming strong conviction, we will buy you for that reason.

Your beliefs are embodied in your branding and that's the secret. Software like Lemlist has had an incredible success story without raising funds when it was simply a tool that sends emails! But they created a brand based on strong beliefs:

Lemlist's promise: "The only cold outreach tool that helps you reach inboxes and get replies."

They've hammered home these beliefs everywhere: on their website, on social media, on Medium, on YouTube. Everywhere in their product.

Is it true?

Frankly, it doesn't matter. They're valued at several hundred million euros, haven't raised any money, and have always been profitable with a tool that sends emails.

To understand why branding is almost always the last straw in marketing today, you need to understand that we live in a cult of performance.

Everything must have an immediate ROI or almost, and for this we measure everything we can. Problem, when something is difficult to measure or takes time we skip it, so no data no problem. Moreover, we considerably overestimate the average level of our ability to analyze these indicators. You can't imagine the considerable amount of bias we are victims of when we “measure our performance.”

This leads to the emergence of two types of marketing: the one that gives immediate feedback, the one that pays later.

So we always favor whoever feeds our dashboards easily, regardless of whether this dashboard is full of partial information and hides an entire part of the marketing.

Michelin did not become Michelin by doing Google ads...

Impatience, an obsession with the short term, is the marketing of the weak. As we are afraid of tomorrow we try to get everything we can out of today, but that's what will make tomorrow much more complicated.

It happens to all businesses, even the biggest ones. When we see Carrefour liquidating half of these stores by transferring them to freelancers that it operates to cover up its losses and artificially inflate its short-term profitability. Shareholders see dividends but what they don't see (because that will no longer be their problem) is that in 20 years the Carrefour brand will have lost much more than it earned in the short term.

What is the branding strategy in today's world?

Today, having a branding strategy means first of all making the choice to exist for a long time. If you want to make “beatings” and think that you will disappear early, first of all you are right and branding will actually be useless to you.

If you think that branding is simply a nice logo and a trendy graphic charter. You can't really understand the tremendous value that true branding can create.

On the other hand, if you want to last, build a strong brand that will generate solid profits that will stand the test of competition and crises. Branding should be the priority of your business.

You don't have to invest $1,000,000 in a trendy New York agency for a black comma on a white background.

Nike is not Nike because it paid a lot for a logo. Understand your market, form a conviction, express it in your site, your content (essential today), your social networks, your products.

In 10 years you will be thinking about this article again. You will be able to calculate the ROI generated by having been convinced that it was necessary to follow it. And I bet you that if we're not working together yet, you'll think of Sales Odyssey for your next year's budget.