Why brand matters in the age of disruption

In the digital economy, markets are more competitive, and more disrupted, than ever. With customer loyalty at a premium, brand experience has become a powerful differentiator.

Giving customers a coherent and consistent experience when interacting with your brand will drive a lasting connection with them – helping to forge lifelong relationships.

Of course, creating the right brand experience involves much more than designing a slick logo. Your brand amounts to the perceptions people have of your organisation as a whole: its objectives, values, offering, employees, customer service, and so on. It’s how it feels to do business with you.

Forming your brand

So how do you create a brand that conveys the image you want for your business to the marketplace?

I believe there are three key steps to success:

1. Frame the fundamentals

Carefully think through the underlying elements of your business, and answer the following questions about each of them:

• Your story
  What does your business stand for? What’s the big idea behind it? What are your vision, objectives and core values?

• Your offering
  What is your product or service? How does it work? What’s unique about it? What need does it meet? How will you deliver it in a way that works for your customers?

• Your audience
  Who is the target market for your product or service? Have you defined and researched your customer base? Why will your offering appeal to them?

2. Establish your brand personality

How will you reflect these fundamental aspects of your business in your customer channels and communications?

Do you want to appear serious and authoritative, or playful and fun? Traditional or fresh? Functional or more human?

How formal or informal do you want to come across? Do you want to tie your brand to the company’s founder(s), as Richard Branson does at Virgin?

The nature of your product or service offering will influence your brand personality to a degree. For instance, if your product or service is highly technical, then the light-hearted approach of, say, Innocent Drinks probably won’t be suitable.

3. Create your design principles

Design principles are your guidelines for creating your brand assets. They describe how to inject your personality into everything that makes up your brand.

They should inform every element of your communications with your customers, including:

• the ‘look and feel’ of your visual assets (logo, corporate colours, fonts, etc.)

• the tone of voice for your written communications (website, emails, social media posts, letters, etc.)

• your customer experience (channels, journeys, employee behaviour, etc.)

With this foundation in place, your brand assets will reflect your business’s personality in a consistent way, giving your customers a stronger brand experience. I’ll be looking at design principles in more detail in my next blog.

A guiding light

Building your brand isn’t easy. The three stages must be carried out thoroughly and carefully, and your design principles followed consistently, if your brand is to differentiate you in the marketplace.

At The Unit, we’ve helped countless organisations to create or revisit their brands. We can help by running a bespoke, facilitated workshop – one-on-one, or with a wider stakeholder group.

However you go about developing it, remember: a strong, stable brand isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s what will give you the best possible chance of success in a hyper-competitive market environment. Get it right, and it can be your guiding light through constant change and disruption, now and for many years to come.