business ¡ branding
Business attraction through consistency written by Karolina Barnes
Building a brand takes time. It's hard work. One of the critical elements while building your brand is customer's loyalty. Only when your customers or clients feel connected, comfortable and in sync with what you do, only then you start to see the hard-earned rewards. But how can you gain customer's confidence, trust and loyalty? Apart from customer service and after sales experience, your messaging and communication between you and the outside world is absolutely crucial. I see many brands who underestimate the power of such activities. As they "try everything" in desperate need to grow their brand, their messaging gets weaker and weaker. With each collection, product launch or new project, their brand's core message, or story, gets diluted, resulting in creating confusion to everyone around them; the market, customers and sometimes themselves too. To help you with consistency, here are some points to consider: 1. Define your brand Decide what kind of brand you want to become. How do you position yourself in the market? Are you an innovative brand, a brand with a purpose, a disruptor? Who are you? Consider your values and mission to define your brand's purpose. 2. Have a slogan or tagline Brainstorm on 3 to 5 words which define and sum up your brand's mission (and values). Tell us what you're about. Think about the customer's experience and how do you want them to feel when they purchase your product or service. Use mind mapping and thesaurus, if necessary. 3. Pay attention to graphic design You may not be aware of this but every time you produce a portfolio, lookbook, brochure or leaflet, or update your website and social media, you are sending messages about your brand. Hence, it's very important that you always use your corporate identity - your brand's colours, fonts and tagline. Keep it simple and only use graphics and imagery which support your brand's message. This applies to visual merchandising, too. 4. Tell stories Support all the above with strong stories that can be only told by you. No one else has your experiences. You might think that you don't have any but trust me, everyone does. So let your customers, market and press know about them.
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