Branding: beginning to being in the market.

The Branding process is a systematic approach to promote a brand. It is ultimately a skill that allows you to shape and control everything about your brand.

My favourite advice to any entrepreneur is to build a brand, not just a business.

If you are competing against big brands with devoted customers and enormous marketing budgets, you must stand out using branding.

This is a detailed guide to the process of Branding. I have divided the whole process into five parts:-

• Conducting research
• Clarifying Strategy
• Designing Identity
• Creating Touchpoints
• Assets management

Let’s now talk about all these parts in detail.

The Process of Branding

Conducting Research

The Research phase of branding requires you to gather information and analyze the position of your brand. Ideally, it would be best if you started the research with a meeting of all the stakeholders.

An interactive session with these people will allow you to understand their vision and needs. In addition, make sure to ask questions about the brand personality and targeted audience. I like spending a few hours studying these answers and statistics to create a brand strategy.

If you want to take the Research one step further, you should consider creating a Brand audit. It can help you to recognize all the strengths and weaknesses of the brand. It is essential that you study the competition and find some way to stand out.

Finish the research with a detailed report and start working on developing a strategy for your brand.

Clarifying Strategy

Creating a Strategy is a crucial step that includes focusing on your values, business ambitions, and vision for the future. The goal should be to create a roadmap for your brand. While planning a strategy, you should keep the following things in mind:

• Know who you are
• Identify your targeted audience
• Understand the value that your goods and services offer.
• Position yourself among competitors.

Pro Tip: Whenever I am working on a strategic plan for any client’s brand, I put an extensive effort into narrowing the brand’s focus. Almost every leading company has a narrow focus, so you can also try to make the brand known with one key focus.

Designing Identity

The key to Designing your brand’s identity is to come up with unique and recognizable elements.

Many people think that designing identity is just about the logo, but that is incorrect. Things like Brand name, colour palette, graphical elements, typography, and brand voice also create a huge difference. If you want good branding, then it is vital to pay attention to all of these things.

You might think that this is a lot of work, but it only requires production, while previously mentioned steps required data gathering, which is more time-consuming.

“Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.” — Robert L. Peters, designer and author

Creating Touchpoints

Once you are done with designing the brand’s identity, it is time to create touchpoints. Touchpoints are any point of contact between your brand and your customers. Some examples of Touchpoints are:

• Website
• Advertising
• Social media handles
• Uniforms
• Vehicles
• Product Design

Touchpoints creation is the stage where you will test the identity that you have designed in real applications. Try your best to create a subtle, consistent, yet flexible look across all the touchpoints. Your outcome will need to work in all scenarios; Be it online or offline.

Assets Management

To maintain the long-term vision of your brand, managing your brand identity assets is necessary. Asset management requires a commitment from the company owners to support the whole brand.

Two Launches- Internal and External

I would advise you all first to launch the brand internally. An internal launch will make your employees understand the value of the brand. If you are into business, then you already might know the importance of having a healthy relationship with your employees or people around you in general.

After an internal launch, you can organize a public launch event that will mainly focus on the customers. In Public launches, most brands launch their products with detailed presentations and FAQ sessions.

Invent Branding Guidelines

Inventing specific guidelines can be helpful for a lot of brands. Your employees can work together on the project by following these guidelines together.

Designate Roles to each Employee

Give designated roles to your employees so that they can feel involved in the brand. Creating a competitive work environment with promotions and raises is worth it.

The Process is Continuous

Creating a brand is unlike constructing a building or writing an essay. This is mainly because the process of creation never ends when you are making a brand. There will always be room for improvement. Appreciate this beauty of creation and never stop learning. :D

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I hope you find this useful

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