How Companies and Businesses Build Brand: How a Brand is Created

According to the Nielson Consumer Survey, just about 59 percent of the consumers prefer to buy new products only from the brand they have bought earlier or are familiar to them. In other research on consumer behavior, people buy from a certain brand because they are trying to identify themselves with the lifestyle the brand is trying to portray.

If you are a small entrepreneur, it might be very difficult to expand your business because you are facing tough competition from big brands. The big brands have devoted customers, who are even doing free marketing through word of mouth. Without building your own brand, it is hard to find a foothold in the market. If you want to survive, you have to differentiate yourself from other brands and build solid branding.

If building a brand is the only way to do business, how do you build a brand as a small business?

Here are a couple of things that you need to understand about branding.

Branding is not just about creating a cool logo or slogan. Branding is not just about doing aggressive promotion, or some celebrity endorsing your product.

In order to build a brand, you need to promote an idea. For instance, you are not just selling a bathing soap, you are actually selling “beauty.” You are not just selling male deodorant, you are selling a lifestyle where young girls are attracted to the man using your deodorant. Therefore, branding is about finding your target audience, reaching your target market segment, doing research on your competitors and much more.

Simply put, your brand is your consumers’ perception of your company, business, or products. Branding is a way to create a perception surrounding your company, business or products. The brand communicates with the consumers by portraying a lifestyle they are trying to incorporate.

Now, that you know what a brand is and what brand building implies, do you think you can now build your brand. Well, to be precise, branding does not happen overnight or even months. Building a brand is a long, continuous process. Building the brand means developing a long term relationship with your customers.

The first step of building a brand is finding your target audience. You need to find people who can identify with the idea you are trying to sell through your product. You need to learn the lifestyle and behavior of your target consumers. Once you know your consumers, you will have to find marketing methods that connects with your consumers. You will have to develop a brand identity that your consumers can relate. You do this by creating a brand mission statement. Your brand statement is the ultimate reason why consumers should buy your products.

In order to build a brand, you will have to research on the brands on your niche. However, you should never imitate other brands even if you are trying to sell similar products or idea. The main idea to research your competitors is to find things that can make your brand unique and give consumers the reason to choose your brand over the other.

The second step of branding is to create a brand logo and tagline and help your target consumers connect with your brand visually. Since the logo and tagline will appear on everything from the product package to the promotional materials, you need to be very careful about the logo design and slogan. You are infact packaging your entire idea on the logo and slogan.

Now comes the methods to promote your brand and products to reach your target audience. You will have to find a medium that reaches your consumer base.