I find myself saying this a lot: a brand is more than just a logo. Many entrepreneurs believe that branding their business only involves hiring a graphic designer to create a logo and theme. While the visual representation of a brand is indeed important, a comprehensive brand strategy is what truly makes a business matter to customers in the long run.
A brand is a promise you make to your customers, and your business’s success depends on how well you fulfill that promise.
In today’s world, everyone has a social presence across various platforms, leading to ad saturation and over-targeting. Every brand is vying for attention and trust from customers. Along with competing for market share, you also have to compete for mind share. Establishing your brand in the minds of your customers is essential, which is why standing out is so important. It goes beyond what customers see; it also involves what they know and believe about you, and why it matters to them.
You can stand out by standing for something. When people know what you stand for, the world can follow
In this article, we will examine Three Ways to Craft Your Brand Strategy
A product-centric brand strategy focuses on marketing the features of its products and how they will benefit the customer. In summary, product-centricity espouses an “if we build it, they will come” mindset. This is very common in the big tech industry, where engineers often think features win all the time.
However, crafting a great product-centric brand strategy requires thinking from a place of empathy. Understand your own attributes through the minds of your customers. It also requires ensuring that your product or service is based on consumer needs. Ask yourself: Is it an experience they will love? Does it address pain points people want to solve? Most importantly, how is your product superior to your competitors’?
If your product doesn’t have a compelling benefit, you need to create one and make it believable. Succeeding as a product-centric brand also requires continued innovation and upgrading of your product offerings. This involves gaining insights from your products’ and business’s performance and, most importantly, your customer feedback. This can help you improve and discover more customer needs you can address, thereby expanding your business.
A customer-centric marketing can be defined as the practice of prioritizing the customers’ needs and interests in every interaction with your business, such as delivery, promotion, advertising, and more.
Where is the best place to begin with customer-centric thinking? The customer. The person. The Human.
This brings us to one of the fundamental concepts in marketing – the persona. This approach helps you understand types of customers based on specific goals for your business. It’s a structured process that involves creating customer profiles, which are detailed characteristics of your ideal customers. It involves examining your customer’s preferences, behaviors, motivations, and challenges. Conducting customer research is essential to validate your customer profile and needs, enabling you to craft your “ideal customer”.
An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) serves as a blueprint that describes your target customer who will benefit the most from your product or service. Your ideal customer is who you want to talk to; it might be fictional but it will an anchor for all your ideas. This is why it is important to rely on credible data from your research and avoid drawing unsubstantiated conclusions from hunches.
Creating a solid customer-centric strategy connects your product truth to the unspoken human truth. The human truth captures the tensions or aspirations shaping the lives of your ideal customer. Your product truth is how your brand turns a positive ideology into objects or services that people can touch or experience to change their reality. By buying your products, they bring into their own lives an idea that the brand upholds, and that they want to believe in.
The interaction between these elements will give your brand its strength, rooting it in human reality. Your strategy should drive your content creation, marketing messages, and buyer journeys as well as your business decisions.
Purpose-centric brands tend to become some of the best-performing in both market share and mindshare. Their customers rally behind them, and they recruit the best teams to work for them. A purpose-centric brand starts with a vision and mission that contributes tangible value to the world.
To craft a vision for your business, think of finishing this sentence: “A world in which…”. It doesn’t require corporate jargon; aim to motivate yourself and others with simple, interesting language. You want your customers to envision an advanced world made possible by the effort and impact of your business. Next is your mission, which outlines how you are going to bring this vision to life. It will shape everything you do, from the products you create to how you interact with your community.
In crafting your purpose-centric strategy, think carefully about your vision and mission to ensure your brand purpose resonates with your ideal customer. Consumers support brands whose corporate purpose aligns with their own values. When you nail your brand’s purpose, it can provide advantages that include differentiating your brand from competitors, building long-lasting customer loyalty, enhancing your brand’s reputation, attracting and retaining top talent, driving innovation and creativity, and creating meaningful impact for your business.
Building a brand that will last requires a comprehensive brand strategy that embodies elements of product-centric, customer-centric, and purpose-centric strategies. This allows your brand to be what it needs to be at any moment in your business journey while maintaining a consistent ideology, ensuring its longevity and success in the marketplace.
Let us help you build a brand that not only stands out but also stands for something meaningful. Visit our website at https://weco.agency or call us at +2348141110266 to schedule a consultation and discover how we can help your brand reach its full potential. Your brand’s future starts here.
