New companies are emerging globally, offering better, cheaper, and faster solutions. This intensifies competition, making the business landscape an endless battlefield where companies either thrive or fade away.
However, creating a great solution is only half the battle. The next crucial step is ensuring the market knows about it. Right now, millions of potential customers might be searching for the exact solution you offer—but if they can’t find or distinguish your brand, they won’t choose you.
This is where branding becomes your greatest asset. A clear, strategic branding approach enhances your company’s value and differentiation. To understand why branding is essential, refer to our previous article here.
The Power of Strong Branding
A well-established brand structure can lead to numerous business advantages, including:
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Price Premium – Consumers are willing to pay more for brands they trust.
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Customer Loyalty – A strong brand fosters lasting relationships with customers.
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Licensing Opportunities – Recognizable brands can expand into new markets with ease.
Think about Apple—despite selling an Apple Pencil for $99 and a simple leather case for $25, customers continue to buy them. Why? Because of the brand value Apple has built.
Here's What We'll Cover:
- Choosing Brand Elements
- Aligning product and services to marketing activities program
- Piggybacking & Leverage Secondary Associations
- Secondary associations comes from four things
Branding Shortcuts
Initiating brand-building can be time consuming, and resource exhaustive. However, there are three shortcuts to leverage your brand equity, the start of your brand-building journey!
1. Choosing Brand Elements
What and how is your brand trying to communicate with the market? Choosing the right brand elements will allow consumers to create initial perception. Here are the list of features that build up brand elements:
- Brand Names
- Logos & Symbol
- Characters
- Slogans
- Jingles
- Design and Packaging
But what is the deal in building your brand elements? It should be:
Offensive:
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Memorable: Avoid complex design, make it simple. Check your smartphone and look into your most frequently used apps, do they have a complex design? Most of the time, no
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Meaningful: Create something of value in your brand, ONLY for your target market. Meaningful brand elements will gain your brand favorable perceived value.
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Likeable: Avoid a bad design and message, make a logo that people will love and will be proud to share with their friends or colleagues.
Defensive:
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Transferable: Your business is set to expand, ensure that your brand is suitable if you launch a new product within or beyond the product categories.
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Adaptable: People change, technology change, and brand should adapt accordingly. Take a look at KFC’s logo over the time. It changed, but the core value stays.
- Protectable: If you have a great brand elements, protect it. You will never know when will competitor attempt to copy your brand elements. T-Mobile protects it’s color, it can sue you if you use it, be careful, folks!
2. Aligning product and services to marketing activities program
Take example of starbucks where in every of its retail shop across the globe have the same or similar brick and mortar design, friendly baristas, same packaging. This will provide a stronger associations of your brand from consumer’s perspective
3. Piggybacking & Leverage Secondary Associations
The mainpoint here is to transfer other favorable associations from other brand to link between host brand and your brand. Until recently, big brands transfer favorable associations from its brands to the other entities. Transferring favorable associations creates a desired image in just a short period of time. The theory is that even if you have little to no knowledge about a brand, you often will associate them with a well known brand, such as Apple. Yes it’s true.
Remember when Nike cut ties with infamous golfer Tiger Woods after his alleged scandal? Nike also terminated Manny Pacquiao’s contract after his anti-gay comments. Nike avoids any form of unfavorable associations, and so should you.
Secondary associations comes from four things:
- Other Brands: brand alliances, ingredients, extensions
- Places: Country of origin, Point-of-sales
- Things: Events, causes, third-party endorsements
- People: Endorses and employees
When I showed you this and a word "home furnishings" what comes to your mind?
Yes, IKEA.
If you are not familiar with Supreme brand, what do you think Supreme is selling? Well, it is a skate brand. Transferring lux feeling from Louis Vuitton.
Validate
Brand-building requires continuous checking. One way to validate your desired outcomes of your brand elements and the actual consumer perception towards the brand is to ask consumers what they think about your product. You can use brand health studies to measure it. Always remember to do it either quarterly or twice a year and to treat your brand like a human-being.
