7 Principles To Building A Strong Brand: How strong is your brand? Let your logo be your cornerstone and then start building.
Excerpt:
Branding your business is one of the most important steps in building a company. It gives your company a unique personality, and establishes a differentiated position in the market that attracts the right customers.
But for many startups, this can pose a challenge. Without the funding to hire large branding agencies and with limited resources, startups often make common branding mistakes such as not defining clear brand guidelines, which in turn neglects to give potential customers a strong first impression.
Recently I chatted with ZeShan Malik, founder of Brandathon, a branding hackathon that brings some of the best creatives in a city together with some of the brightest early stage startups to re-imagine the core branding of each company. While working with up and coming businesses to rebrand their company, Malik shared some of the core principles they follow.
1. Audit Your Marketplace
Start by looking at what your competition is doing well and what they are struggling with. This will provide a good basis for you to find an angle that your company can leverage.
Start by identifying who your competitors are; and do your due diligence to identify the right ones. Looking at a broad spectrum of competitors can lead you to analyzing companies whose customer segment is vastly different than yours. And narrowing that spectrum too much can lead to excluding companies whose customer is essentially the same as yours.
Ask yourself whether or not a customer could end up in a scenario where they are choosing between you and the competitor. If the answer is yes, add that company to your list of competition.
Then review each competitor and identify their strengths and weaknesses. A great example of this was Gett’s anti-Uber campaign where they identified surge pricing as their competitor’s weakness and tailored their initial marketing campaign in New York City around this premise. It caught the attention of their target customers, offered a solution to a point of contention for Uber users, and yielded quite a bit of press for Gett.
Read more | 7 Principles To Building A Strong Brand | Forbes | https://bit.ly/2GYpFo1