Every business needs to understand who they are, their place in the market and where they’re headed. Only 66% of businesses survive their first two years of operation, with just 33% making it all the way to their tenth. Successful brands like Amazon, Netflix and Apple continue to grow because they never stand still. They listen and learn from what their competitors and their customers are telling them and adapt their strategy accordingly.
If you’re just getting started with your business, it’s crucial you develop a strong brand with a unique offering from the beginning. Establishing a brand identity and a growth strategy that aims for continuous and flexible development is key, helping to ensure you remain relevant and appealing to consumers in the long term.
This guide includes everything your business needs to know about building a strong, unique brand that resonates with consumers. Learn how to create your own successful brand development strategy and why brand image is so important.
We also look at how strategic brand management can help your business succeed, share some of the tools you can use to monitor success, and offer examples of some of the most well-known brands who have established a powerful brand identity.
Brand development strategy
What is brand development?
Brand development is how you grow and nurture your brand after you’ve established it.Every brand relies on consumers, so you’ll need to listen closely to what your customers are telling you and keep an eye on how the market is reacting as you develop your brand.
There are a few building blocks that are key to developing any brand:
- Brand values – these are the core values that your brand stands for and does its utmost to uphold and represent. Try to define between three and five brand values as a first step
- Brand mission – this is the reason your business exists in the first place. Your brand development strategy should hinge on always attempting to achieve your mission
- Brand story – the best-loved brands all come with a great origin story. It can be a powerful tool in your marketing strategy and can strike a chord with customers
- Brand positioning – this is where your brand sits against the competition. You can benchmark your brand against competitors to understand your position in your industry
- Brand identity – this is how your brand appears to the outside world. It’s made up of everything from your logo to the colors and font you choose. Having a strong brand identity can bring your brand to life and helps consumers remember who you are.
What is a brand development strategy?
A brand development strategy is a plan of action to help your business create and grow everything that goes into developing a brand – from your values and mission to brand positioning and your identity.
First, you need to consider what you sell, how you’re selling it and who you’re selling it to. Then you need to bring this all together to establish a strong and clear brand that consumers will love.
Why is it important to develop a strong brand?
Your brand represents the entire experience your customers have with your business, and guides everything from your marketing to how your customer service team deals with complaints. On average, it takes between five and seven impressions for people to remember your brand – so all elements of your brand are crucial in helping cement your business in the minds of consumers.
A strong brand can:
- Build trust and credibility in your business
- Ensure your online and offline advertising has maximum impact
- Generate more business and help build brand loyalty to retain existing customers
- Make your business more attractive to new staff and potential investors.
How to create your own successful brand development strategy
Your brand development strategy will help you understand who you are as a business, where your brand sits in the market, what personality you convey in marketing and what your customers really think about you.
We recommend creating a brand development strategy that focuses on five key elements:
- Brand image
- Audience
- Company values
- Market positioning
- Messaging and identity.
Brand image analysis
Look at your current brand. Are you and your customers happy with what you see? Take the opportunity to reach out and ask your customers how they feel about your brand. Surveys are a great way to collect insights from anyone who’s interacted with your brand.
Depending on the insights you gain from surveying your customers, you may need to make a few changes. Use what you’ve learned to think about what you can do differently to connect more with your audience and develop a brand that people trust. 43% of people will spend more money on a brand they are loyal to, so it’s important to listen to what your customers are saying.
Understand your target audience
Knowing exactly who your target audience is can be critical for your business. Having a clear picture of who you’re selling to and what motivates them can help to grow your business quickly and develop a strong brand that resonates with consumers.
Customer reviews are a good way to understand your target audience. Feefo’s Customer Sentiment Insight tool uses artificial intelligence and sentiment analysis to read through your review content, helping you quickly identify new audiences, popular products and even potential issues.
Building accurate and detailed customer personas is the best way to help everyone in your business understand exactly who you’re targeting. It also gives you an indication of some of the key challenges your customers are facing and how your brand can position itself to solve these.
The final step is to establish how you’re going to communicate with each of your different customer personas, depending on how they like to communicate with each other and with your business. Options include proactive messaging through your social media channels.
Establish your company values
It’s important to establish the brand values you want to stand for and the mission you hope to achieve as a business. Whether you want to pride yourself on excellent customer experience or fast delivery, or you’re passionate about sustainability and the environment, you’ll want to reflect this clearly in your brand values.
It’s also important to understand what sets you apart from the rest of your competition. Having a strong unique selling proposition (USP) or offering strengthens your marketing opportunities and shows customers why they should choose you over the competition.
You should be able to condense everything about your brand down to a single purpose or problem you’re attempting to solve. This will keep your marketing focused and give everyone in your business a clear goal to strive for.
Understand your market positioning
Knowing where your brand sits in relation to your competition is another key part of your brand development. It’s important to know where you are now, as well as identify market opportunities to spot any areas for growth. Spend some time getting to know your competitors. Once you understand who you’re up against, you can identify what differentiates your brand from the rest. Your USP should be central to your branding, as it could help a customer decide between multiple options.
For many brands, their market positioning will be determined by their price. This is an important consideration for consumers too, with 70% of shoppers saying they bought a product because it was the right price. If you’re particularly affordable, then you already have that advantage, but your brand development strategy needs to consider whether you want to make this part of your overall image.
Get your messaging and identity right
The final element of your brand development strategy is creating the visual identity for your brand and the messaging that will accompany it. It takes just 10 seconds for someone to form an opinion of your brand from the logo, so you’ll want it to be memorable and make an impact. How you communicate with your customers and how your brand looks will define you, so it’s worth spending time getting this right.
You want your customers to have a seamless, consistent experience wherever they engage with your brand. That means that anywhere that your brand is visible will become part of your brand identity. Brand messaging is possibly the most challenging part of any brand development strategy. You’ll need to summarize your values, mission and story into concise and compelling copy that will convince consumers that you’re the brand for them.
Effective brand messaging should be adaptable to your audience and easy for the rest of your business to understand and communicate effectively. When building out your brand messaging, you might want to consider creating a slogan or tagline, tone of voice, boilerplate and website copy, as well as value propositions.
Brand image
What is brand image and why is it important?
Brand image is often confused with brand identity, but there are distinct differences between the two. Brand image is the perception that those not working in or with a business hold of it, while brand identity is the overall identity and messaging shared externally to try and form consumer opinion of that business.
Brand image relies on a consumer base’s opinions and their individual interactions with or exposure to a brand. In crowded consumer markets, brands need to do all they can to differentiate themselves. A successful, positive brand image can encourage consumers to purchase from your business instead of from your competitors.
How does a business develop its brand image?
Establishing a brand image begins with the inception of a business, but it might not fall into place straight away. Several elements of the work needed to form a brand’s identity can fit into this development, so when you look at how to develop your brand image, you may find there’s some crossover. Start with the basics to develop your brand image.
Determine your brand’s mission and values
Understanding your brand’s mission and values is critical. Everything your business does should align with its values and contribute toward its mission in order to ensure it is appropriate and relevant. It could also help your business attract employees, as employees who join a company with a mission they feel passionate about are more likely to show loyalty and continue working there for longer.
Identify your key audiences
While all businesses should be able to identify their ideal customer, your actual customer base may not entirely align. Your brand should be able to identify its preferred audiences, as well as the ones you’re currently serving, in order to find a way to appeal to (and continue to appeal to) both.
Analyzing and sorting your customer reviews by demographic alongside brand sentiment can help your business better understand exactly who is buying, what they’re buying, and how their experiences have been. Another source of information is your website and social media analytics, which can both offer insights into who your customers are.
Listen to consumers
If given the right opportunity, customers who have purchased from your business will usually provide feedback on their experiences and their perception of your brand. Feefo’s Customer Sentiment Insight tool can help your business build a picture in real-time of what consumers really think and analyze how that aligns with the desired brand perception and image.
When looking at how to develop (or redevelop) brand image, businesses often overlook customer feedback because it can be difficult to extract the insights required to turn it into tangible business actions. However, deeper details can be extracted if you’re using the right tools.
Continually improve
Once you’ve developed your brand image, you mustn’t become complacent. Take customer feedback onboard and work from it on a continual improvement basis to ensure you’re constantly enhancing your business and satisfying your customers time and again.
Can a brand image be changed or enhanced?
As your business grows, develops and matures, so too should your brand image. The key to enhancing your brand image is to look at the development of your image, and of customer service, as a cycle.
Using customer reviews as a focal point for business intelligence will help you understand evolving consumer behaviors. Incorporate customer insights into tailored marketing and business development plans to continually exceed your customers’ expectations. This improves customer retention rates, increases the chance of positive word-of-mouth marketing and maintains a continued positive brand image in the minds of consumers.
Marketing
What is a brand marketing strategy?
A brand marketing strategy is a long-term plan that guides your business to increase its brand position and perception with consumers. It can help build brand awareness in a competitive industry, bring more traffic to your website, improve customer reviews and help you sell more.
Your brand marketing strategy will likely include several media channels, campaign types and a range of tactics to achieve its goal. These can include anything from paid ads to SEO and social media marketing to video advertising. A successful brand marketing strategy will evolve over time, building on previous successes and listening to customer feedback to increase its influence among your target audiences.
What is strategic brand management and how can it help you succeed?
Strategic brand management is based on choosing a suitable growth strategy for your brand and updating or reviewing it regularly to ensure it remains relevant. It can help your business add value to your products and services, creating a unique identity for your brand by maintaining the mission, vision and values that your customers know you for.
There are many benefits to strategic brand management, such as enhancing customer loyalty and retention, improving perceptions about your brand and its products, enhancing the effectiveness of your marketing collateral, and more. Ultimately, it should support your business in improving brand recognition, helping you to achieve your mission and goals.
Branding analysis: how to monitor success
Brand image can be difficult to measure as it’s always reliant on the perceptions of third parties who reside outside of your business. It’s also possible that these third parties are inauthentic or struggle to articulate their perception of your brand. However, there are some tools to help with this.
Feefo’s Customer Sentiment Insight tool allows you to properly analyze customer sentiment and perception towards your brand, as well as your individual products, services, and themes. This can give you an overall assessment of your brand’s image, as well as the opportunity to further investigate areas that may need improvement.
A Net Promoter Score (NPS) gives you quick overview of a customer’s likelihood to recommend your business to others. It also categorizes their perception of your brand as either negative, neutral or positive, helping you identify any areas for development.
Customer experience surveys give your business the opportunity to thoroughly investigate customer perceptions and experiences and tailor the feedback as required. Send out surveys as a customer touchpoint at any point of the purchase journey to help identify and clarify development points with tailored and smart questioning.
What are some good examples of brand strategy?
Many companies have successfully managed their brand image to stand out and be instantly recognizable to consumers. We’ve included a few below, to help you understand what works best when developing your own brand strategy.
- Brewdog is known for its renegade and rebellious attitude toward beer and politics
- McDonald’s is well known for its ability to quickly serve food and, more recently, for its high-quality and free-range beef, meat and egg products
- Innocent Drinks is a favorite with consumers, known for its everyday, approachable tone of voice and marketing
- Louis Vuitton is recognized as a premium, luxury brand for wealthy individuals.
Consider any brand and ask yourself: what are the first five words that spring to mind when you picture their brand image? If these five words align with how the business intends and desires to be perceived, they’ve developed a successful brand image for their business.
Build a powerful brand development strategy with Feefo
Your customers should be your first stop when looking at brand development. Here at Feefo we’ve built a powerful customer review and insights platform, driven by genuine feedback from real customers. This means you can be sure that the insights you’re using to help create your brand development strategy are detailed and, above all, reliable.
