5 Steps To Infuse Creativity Into a Brand Strategy
Brand strategy promotes more than just your product/service, it also stands for your organization, company moral, and its personality.
A thorough branding strategy helps your organization discover meaningful ways to approach business with the following factors for consideration: competitive positioning, pricing model, website(s), sales material & tools, messaging, corporate identity, customer relationship management, trademarks, copyrights, and company holdings.
In the initial phases of your branding strategy, it is important to allow yourself some level of creative direction to position your company in the marketplace.
Here is why!
In order to capture market share, your target audience must be able to identify with your company. Consider the following such as your competitors marketing/advertising presentation, sales materials, messaging, corporate identity…etc.
You should ask yourself the following questions:
- How have they creatively positioned the brand?
- Are they visually demonstrating their capabilities and core competencies?
- Is there a visual meaning you can find within their corporate identity?
- What about the color scheme, how does it relate to color theory?
Step 1: Developing your brand with emotional impact
It is human nature that drives much of our decision making, especially when it comes to selecting a brand name. For example, Apple’s innovative approach with the release of the iPod, iPhone, and the iPad. They single handedly designed a unique selling proposition, and conveyed advertising messages that created an emotional impact and benefit. How many people do you know that get excited about Apple’s latest product innovation?
Kick Start Questions: Why would my target market purchase our product/services? What is the emotional response I want them to have upon purchase?
Step 2: Define Your Brand
Your brand should consider the qualities that can define an individual. Such qualities include but are not limited to the following: personality, voice, character. traits, and mannerism. It is important to outline a positioning statement that can be utilized in various mediums for your company. Select colors, fonts, and visual elements that match the personality of your brand. Finally, decide how your employees will interact with prospects or customers to convey the personality of your brand. Depending on the business, brand personalities can be conveyed with uniforms, dress code, code of conduct, and training.
Kick Start Question: What are the personal qualities of my brand and how can I best convey these qualities to my customer?
Step 3: Create Unique Marketing Messages
Use steps 1 and 2 to craft unique marketing messages for your brand. The focus should convey messages that not only create an emotional responses but also portray the more human-like qualities.
At this stage, it is important to write a brand stylization manual. Take the time to document the requirements of voice, tone, style, and vocabulary – such that the marketing messages are consistent. Consider providing a few examples for reference.
Marketing messages include but are not limited to your elevator pitch, market positioning statement, tag-line/slogan, mission statement, as well as various marketing materials.
Kick Start Question: What tone, voice, style, and vocabulary are best suited for presenting your brand?
Step 4: Sales Process
In order to stay in business, you need to have sales to ensure both stability and growth. This measure should be evaluated in greater depths, than what is addressed in this post. This step serves as an introduction for your potential sales process.
Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, consider how your customer will find your product/service. A sales process is defined as a series of steps that need to be followed from initial contact to the point of purchase.
This process maybe as simple as the following example:
1. Prospect responds to campaign and requests more information about your product/service
2. A sales rep calls the prospect and furthers the discussion
3. An in-person meeting is scheduled
4. Your team submits a proposal
5. Your prospect agrees to your bid and and signs the contract
Kick Start Questions: How does your prospect go about a purchase? How do you want the shopping experience to be for your prospect? What are the touch-points that the prospect will interact with? What is your sales process? How can you innovate or improve your sales process to maximize revenue?
Step 5: Corporate Identity & Visual Demonstration
Your corporate identity is an extension of your brand, in addition to your logo, business cards, envelopes, letterheads, mailing labels, email templates, fax covers, proposal templates, invoice/statements, memos, signage, and promotional items. You get the idea.
Each of the aforementioned is a touch-point with your core market and should be carefully developed to address the company’s personal qualities that are to be carried out through a centralized message.
Kick Start Question: How can you effectively design each medium to communicate with your market, while simultaneously building brand equity?
Building a brand strategy can take weeks, because it must be planned carefully placing creative strategies as a priority. Companies often hire design firms or advertising agencies because of the creative nature that is involved. Contact Creative Intellects should you be interested in a proposal from our firm. We would be happy to discover new and creative possibilities for your business.
International Marketing Case Study Blunders & Tips to Prevent Them
If you follow marketing then you likely have seen brands make the sometimes fatal mistakes of branding an entirely wrong message. It happens more often than not, and even the most established brands have made a few blunders when it comes to branded messages in another language. If you are considering global expansion, then consider the following case studies before making that leap of fate.
Language & Cultural Differences:
Coca-Cola a brand that is recognized by many cross-cultural consumers, which ran into trouble with their brand name in its initial debut in China. Coca-Cola was rendered as ‘Ke-kou-ke-la.’ Unfortunately, this company didn’t make this discovery until thousands of signs has been printed, with the phrase “bite the wax tadpole” or “female horse stuffed with wax”, depending on the Chinese dialect. Coca-Cola then went on to research over 40,000 Chinese characters and found the closest phonetic equivalent “ko-kou-ko-le”, which can be translated loosely to mean “happiness in the mouth.”
Going along with the lines of carbonated soft drinks, in Taiwan, the Pepsi slogan “Come alive with the Pepsi Generation” was written as “Pepsi will bring your ancestors from the dead.” (Yikes!)
The most infamous of case studies, is when GM introduced the Chevy Nova in South America, they were clearly unaware that “no va” really means “it won’t go.” After GM figured out why they were not selling any of their vehicles, they went on to rename the car ‘Caribe’ in the various Spanish markets.
Ford also had a similiar problem in Brazil when the Pinto flopped. The company discovered that Pinto was the Brazilian form of slang for “tiny male genitals.” Ford pried all of the nameplates off the cards, and substituted Corcel, which means ‘horse.’
Branding
Whether you are a large brand or a start-up when you are going to take the leap for global markets consider the translation and its meanings. Here are a few tips to help you as you grow your business:
1. Make sure that you research every market and possible language translation meanings. You want to ensure that your market will give you a positive response versus a negative one. These types of mistakes can be really costly, and for a smaller enterprise it can be crippling.
2. Test your ‘slogan’ or ‘branded message’ in a focus group if possible in the proposed markets. When you come up with the messages consider testing them in markets that speak the same language, or in that particular country. Don’t just go in blindly.
3. Don’t just consider your slogan think about imagery, and the over all branded message. The simple asthetics such as color, the people in the background, or even the spokesperson should be taken into consideration. There are rules of engagements for each international country, the last thing you want to do is offend someone with a creative color scheme that works in the United States, but would offend others in another market.
These tips are simple and straight-forward, but there is more than what meets the eye. We take measures in working with our clients especially as it relates to marketing and branding. Before you begin your expansion into the global market, consider what we have outlined above. Happy Marketing!!
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