How to Make Customer Love Your Brand

The power of branding is undeniable. To maximize the power of your brand you’ll have to take several crucial steps, a gist of which is given below.

Create Value

Know what a Brand is

Creating and maintaining a brand is no easy task. Branding inspires you because you remember several successful brands while quickly forgetting failed brands. Read up on what a brand is, its characteristics and what makes brands tick with its targeted market. Also, bear in mind real life examples of brand failure and success.

Decide Brand Essence

Experts say that a brand is an idea and a promise. The more focused the idea, the sharper the brand becomes – just like a knife. For example, Coke stands for happiness while BIC stands for disposability. Decide what your brand is about – individuality, portability, low-price, glamour?

Create a Brand Persona

After you have decided your brand essence, try to personify the brand you’ve created. Try how your brand would act and look like if it was converted to a human. What would be the gender, age, education, hobbies, strengths, aspirations, etc?

Select Brand Personalities or Characters

If possible select a celebrity who matches the brand persona well. There are several pros and cons of having a celebrity associated to your brand. A safer and less costly option is to create a brand character, like a cartoon and make your brand come to life!

Tell Brand Legends

Decide the stories you want to spread around concerning your brand. They can be real life stories such as those of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or Richard Branson. You can also create interesting tales revolving around brand characters such as Cheetah from Cheetos.

Deliver Value

How to Deliver?

Brand value is first delivered when the values created are communicated to the current and potential customers through different media channels. The second step of brand delivery is when the product/services are delivered.

Use Relevant Media

Know who your customers are and select the media that can be used to approach them. The core mediums thorough which you can communicate include above the line communication, below the line communication and electronic marketing.

Integration

You have to deliver the values created in an integrated way. The concept is called Integrated Brand Communications. It means that a brand’s every poster, video, campaign activity, TVC, etc must have a consistent message and graphic theme for a given geographic area and time period. Lack of integration among your branding practices will cause confusion to your targeted audience.

The Point where the Customer Falls in Love

The Brand Value Pyramid consists of the three levels of brand communications - Attributes, Benefits and Values. When you launch a new brand, most of the time you begin by communicating your brand’s attributes and benefits. Later, on you communicate the values of the brand more often. For example, Ben and Jerry’s started off by stressing the attributes and benefits – rich and tasty ice-cream that causes you absolute happiness. Later they started stressing their values, i.e. their green practices. This is the point where the customer falls in love with your brand so much so that stressing on the attributes and benefits is no longer that crucial.

Andrew is a business promotion consultant, specialising in custom promotional clothing and custom promotional bags. Andrew has helped hundreds of businesses with their promotional activities.