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Every business owner wants their brand to be strong, memorable and impactful. But what does it take to reach that level of branding legacy?
Well, it involves living up to authentic core values, building meaningful differentiators, and strategically leveraging consumer and market data.
In this guide, we’ll look at the concept of brand strength — what it is, why it’s important and practical tips to help along the way.
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Why is Brand Strength Important For Your Business?
7 Ways to Build A Strong Brand
Brand strength is tied to the concept of brand equity. The two terms are technically interchangeable, but brand strength is easier to understand in terms of a living brand. That said, a brand must be strong to have good equity; weak brands won’t reach equity levels that legacy brands enjoy.
When a brand is considered strong, the name is well-known, the products sell easily at high prices, and consumers choose it regularly over other brands. Associations between a brand and its customers are built at every touchpoint, no matter how small. A strong brand identity creates positive connections that deepen the emotional response of the consumer.
A brand doesn’t need to be global to be strong. Small, niche brands have the potential to be stronger than any large international brand. It all depends on a concept called “Meaningful Difference.”
It’s not enough to be just different from other brands; that difference also needs to be meaningful. This is what stands at the core of a brand’s strength and its power in the market.
A big part of building brand strength is implementing marketing and advertising techniques that appeal to consumer emotions. In the video below, Mike shares 23 types of advertising appeals with examples of brands using them.
Having a strong brand will propel your business to an optimized market position. It will also improve your brand in several other ways. Let’s take a look.
A loyal customer base is one of the most valuable assets for brand strength. The more loyal customers a brand has, the more often a brand name comes up in conversation. Once a brand name becomes the go-to word for a product, regardless of the manufacturing brand, that’s when brand strength is cemented.
On the flip side, having your brand name turn into an ordinary word can hurt your trademark. That’s why it’s important to protect your brand name early on.
For example, the word Kleenex is the common word for tissue. The widespread use of the words as a simple noun instead of a brand name, at first was a sales propeller for the brand, but now it’s simply interchangeable. Nevertheless, Kleenex is a strong brand and won’t be going anywhere any time soon.
An additional aspect of customer loyalty is more people choosing to buy from a specific brand over another. For example, Coca-Cola drinkers will always buy Coca-Cola instead of Pepsi and vice versa. The same applies to cars and sports apparel.
Loyalty and brand strength bring about an important possibility for brands to charge higher prices, knowing that their products will sell no matter what. A plain white t-shirt with a Gucci tag can sell for up to $400, while a generic brand can go for as low as $5.
A brand might be strong enough to charge high prices, but it can also fall towards the side of being an oligarch brand that ends up with a bad reputation. Your brand should be unique enough to charge premium prices without having to use unethical manufacturing practices.
That said, have you noticed how normal it is now for sneakers to cost $1,000? A few years ago, it sounded ridiculous, but now most big brands — not just exclusive designer brands — are selling limited supply sneakers for $1,000.
When you’ve reached a certain level of brand strength, you gain the freedom of innovation with less risk. Being innovative is important for a brand’s meaningful differentiator, even at the beginning of the journey.
But what brand strength imparts is a higher level of freedom to innovate beyond the expected and know that your customers are so loyal, they will respond positively to your new ideas.
Remember when Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone 7? That was a bold, even risky move. But because it was such a strong brand, Apple was able to pull that off successfully.
Nevertheless, it’s still important to know your target market intimately, and even if you innovate, the results must be in the realm of what they want from you.
Many brands have innovation as their core values and purpose, and as their brand strengthens, their customer base will always expect bigger and better from them.
With brand strength comes growth, and with growth eventually comes a higher market share. When your business has a high market share, there are more sales and more profit for less effort.
Market share is a business metric that measures how well your campaigns, marketing initiatives and branding strategies perform. Most importantly, it’s a measure of how positive results are in comparison to your competitors.
Additionally, it’s much easier to recover from unexpected downfalls, both internal and external, when your brand is strong. COVID-19, for example, was a huge downfall for many brands that had to file for bankruptcy due to the massive hit to their profits.
The brands that survived were the ones that knew how to pivot in a different direction; the ones that eventually helped COVID relief efforts or took a good look at the change in the market and adapted.
Foodpanda, for example, introduced contactless delivery during the pandemic to build trust with customers and make them feel confident when ordering food from outside.
This ability to pivot or even restructure is a result of brand strength and fuel for more. Internal downfalls are a bit different as they are unique to each brand, but when a brand is strong enough, it will survive and come out the other side.
Maybe it will take a rebranding, a merger or an acquisition to pivot — but in the end, the brand will come out on top.
Finally, the last reason on our list of why brand strength is important is the ability to secure a future for your company. This is closely tied to the fact that a strong brand has an easier time recovering from unexpected downfalls but involves a bit of planning ahead.
As long as your brand’s strength has powerful foundations in core values and purpose, you’re able to plan for any eventuality, securing a future for your brand. Instead of simply pivoting because a surprise situation pops up, you’re able to keep going because pivoting and adapting is part of the process.
Having a strong brand is all about giving the consumer what they want and need from a product or service. It’s not enough to simply offer great products, it’s also about the communication the brand representatives have with consumers. Brand strength grows through emotional connection and association.
Remember, to build a strong brand, it’s important to be true to core values and purpose. Without these, profits will be hard to come by, and your customers won’t reach loyalty levels.
If you’re interested in learning more about strong brand identities, Visme collaborated with Crowdspring to bring you this eBook.
Here are 7 tips to help guide you in your branding journey.
When it comes to brand strength, brand equity, or any aspect of a brand strategy and legacy, your target market is at the center of everything. Your customers, clients, followers and ambassadors are who your brand works for. Brand values and purpose are based on the solutions you bring to the market.
You always need to listen, get to know them, and figure out how things are for them. What makes them feel good and what doesn’t? Is your brand following through on its promises?
When you know your customers, you’re able to create personalized campaigns that get great results, which in turn will inspire customers to recommend you to their friends, making your brand even stronger.
An additional aspect that relates to your brand and target market is your choice of color. There must be a cultural and sociological analysis behind choosing the colors that tell your brand's visual story. Psychology of color is an essential part of visual communication and you shouldn’t put it aside.
Reducing churn is an essential step towards increasing brand strength, and the best tool to use is data analysis. Not only does it help brand strength to keep customers and see them turn loyal, but it’s also less expensive than constantly campaigning to find new clients. Once a consumer has gone through a few touchpoints, there’s data that can be analyzed.
Looking at consumer data will help your brand create personalized campaigns that will keep current customers interested and keep buying from you. Get Thematic has a great article outlining 5 ways that data analysis can improve customer retention.
Touchpoints are channels of communication where your brand and target market meet. The number of touchpoints your brand has depends on strategy and budget, but the touchpoints increase as your brand grows. Your brand voice and purpose must be front and center on every occasion.
The most common communication touchpoints are your website, emails, social media, the sales team and customer support. But further on from those, touchpoints expand to flyers, event booths and even apparel tags.
Make sure that your customer finds a good and positive way to communicate with you at every touchpoint. When a touchpoint is not a person, add QR codes on print assets, and chat options in digital interfaces. Make it easy for them to talk to you.
Pro Tip: Visme offers you an easy solution for staying on brand through all visual touchpoints. Using our AI Brand Wizard, you can generate 30+ branded templates that can be used to communicate with your audience in many ways.
Communication, as you’ve seen in the points above, is essential for brand strength. But there’s a deeper element to communicating with consumers; you must be honest, transparent and trustworthy.
Don’t trick customers into doing things they don’t want or need. You’re indeed solving a problem for them, but there’s no need to instill fear or desperation in them to buy.
Share backstories on social media about why your brand exists, don’t hide behind a facade, and be clear on core values. Stay true to your brand voice and guidelines.
Positive company culture will seep outwards into the consumer psyche. When your employees are happy to work for your brand, clients can tell. This is especially true for customer support representatives and the sales team. When employees and consumers trust a brand, they stick around and eventually become loyal, the perfect combination for improving brand strength.
We mentioned in the sections above that a strong brand can plan and pivot to survive a downfall or crisis. But there’s another aspect to it that has to do with your loyal customers. It’s not enough to simply pivot in a way that will save your profits, you must also look at possibilities of how you can show — and give — support in times of crisis.
During the first few months of the pandemic, the DownDog yoga app was free for everyone for months, Zoom took off the 40 min. limit, restaurants incorporated delivery services they didn’t have before, and chemical paint companies started manufacturing alcohol gel. There are many more examples of these brand adaptations that both help the company and the customer base.
According to Havas Group, 77% of Consumers expect brands to show support to people in times of crisis. There are immediate opportunities to forge meaningful connections in the short term across personal benefits; namely, to decrease life’s stressors.
However, this past year brought an increase in expectations in three specific areas: more connection, more care for the planet, and more monetary savings and growth.
There’s no excuse at this point not to try and be a diverse, equitable and inclusive brand. These efforts must be present in the company culture, the workplace and all outward efforts like marketing, advertising and outreach.
Diverse and inclusive representation in company visuals is just the tip of the iceberg. Here's a diversity presentation template you can use to educate and train your employees.
Consumers also expect brands to be inclusive and diverse. According to eMarketer, an Adobe survey found that 62% of US adults said diversity in a brand’s advertising had at least some impact on the way they perceived that brand’s products and services, with 24% reporting it had a “major” impact.
More than six in 10 (61%) respondents said diversity in ads was somewhat important or very important, and 38% said they’d be more likely to trust a brand that showed diversity in its advertising.
Make sure to include your values on diversity, equity and inclusion inside your brand guidelines. Apart from being the source of truth about your visual assets, a brand guideline also must include aspects like brand voice, communication and tone. This ties in closely with DE&I, and everyone on the team must onboard and follow along.
Finally, one more tip for building a strong brand is to avoid becoming a “middle brand,” in other words, generic or average. When you’re a middle brand, you’re neither the underdog nor the legacy brand; you’re stuck in the middle with lots of other brands just like you and competing for the same attention.
Use your meaningful differentiator to stand out from other brands in your niche or industry. Leverage storytelling practices to become more accessible and relatable to the consumer. Find ways to stand out with visual marketing strategies and unique approaches to communication touchpoint branding.
Measuring brand strength is essential to know how your brand is performing and what needs tweaking or boosting.
The metrics used to measure brand strength are similar to those used for measuring brand equity, but lean more towards emotional data than financial data. In fact, brand strength measuring is about analyzing how emotional data affects financial data.
To measure brand strength, you must look at customer satisfaction and how it affects your overall market share. It’s all about assessing your brand positioning and if the communication you’re conducting results in both more sales and less churn.
Like any measurement or analysis activity for your business, the first step is to set goals. Since you measure brand strength in this case, the goals revolve around measuring metrics for brand awareness, meaningful differentiator outcomes, positioning, value and market share.
Choose the Key Performance Indicators — KPIs — for what you want to measure and continue to step two, where you’ll choose the measurement methodology.
The template below is part of a complete Brand Audit, where you can note down the main goals and then customize the questions depending on your KPIs.
To measure brand strength, you have several options — some you can outsource and others you can conduct yourself. Let’s take a look.
A straightforward solution for measuring brand strength is to use one of the available models created by large branding and advertising companies. Some agencies, like Brand Finance and Nielsen, offer these as a service.
Here are some examples:
If you want to measure the strength of your brand without resorting to complex models, you can conduct customer satisfaction surveys. There are several ways to do this.
For example:
Visme allows you to embed surveys from SurveyMonkey and then import the results to create a report. You can also edit one of our survey templates, like the one below, and share or download when ready.
Another measuring format for brand strength is social listening. This involves using a tool like TalkWalker or Agorapulse to follow hashtags, mentions and competing brands on social media.
A technique like this gives you instant knowledge about how your brand is perceived on social media compared to your competitors.
With the data you collect, create an analytics dashboard or interactive report to share with your team. Look at the positive metrics and take note to keep improving upon them. Assess the negative or disappointing metrics and consider ways to tweak or pivot in those areas. How can you turn those around?
Use Visme reporting templates and our integrations to create an interactive analytics document that everyone on the team can see and analyze with live data. Embed Google Analytics data from specific campaigns, data from listening tools or your custom spreadsheets.
Use a template like the one below to put together all your KPIs in one convenient place. Visme offers you the possibility of sharing this report as a live link with interactivity and live data features.
Are you ready to make your brand stronger? With all the tips and knowledge in this guide, you’re well on your way to building a legacy brand with loyal customers who appreciate your meaningful differentiators.
To concentrate on growing a stronger brand, save time on your visual marketing efforts with the Visme Brand Wizard. In just 2 minutes, our AI Brand Design Tool will pull brand information from your website and generate 30+ branded templates to use straight away.
We can’t wait to see how your brand grows and becomes stronger. We’re cheering you on!
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