If this all sounds interesting to you, read on as we share the steps you can take to find your brand essence.
1 . Get To Know Your Customers
It all starts with knowing the person that you’re trying to help inside and out. Having empathy with your customer is crucial to brand essence.
You can first begin with your ideal customer demographics.
Investigate their:
• Age
• Gender
• Education
• Occupation
• Annual income
• Marital status
Then you begin to move on to your consumer’s psychographics. What are their personality types and ideal lifestyles? What are their interests and hobbies? How about their beliefs and values? What activities comprise a typical day in their lives?
You can then start thinking about their problems and pain points.
Their problems could be the challenges and obstacles that they face in daily life. On the other hand, pain points are the negative feelings that occur as a result of their problems. Are they frustrated and angry? Or do they feel fearful and anxious?
Lastly, what are their needs and goals in relation to their problems and pain points? What are the social and emotional benefits that they want to have?
2 . Be Clear on Who Your Brand Is
You also want to be clear on your offer. What exactly does your brand promise? What industry or category are you in?
You want to establish your brand’s north star or how you’re trying to solve your ideal customer’s problems. Think about the specific features or approaches that your brand uses to deliver results.
Once you have a better understanding of all these, you can now establish your core purpose. This is the exact reason why you are doing business, and it’s a motivation that is more than just about the money.
From this purpose, you can then determine your brand’s mission, vision, and goals. You can refer below to the strategic pyramid that you can use to form the building blocks of your brand.
HERE’S A QUICK SUMMARY:
- A mission is a goal that you want to achieve from your purpose
- Your vision is what you would like the company to become
- The goals are the milestones along your journey to achieving your purpose
As briefly mentioned earlier, you also want to know what makes you different from your competitors. Radical differentiation is not just about making an improved version of an offer. It’s about reinventing the solution to a problem. To make a great impact, a brand has to be disruptive. It’s not enough to create something ordinary and expected! Businesses shouldn’t be afraid of ideas that may seem unique and bold.
How can you achieve this kind of radical and meaningful differentiation?
A good first step is to understand your competitors well. What makes them stand out compared to others? What are their differentiating strategies? After all of these elements have become clear, you must then make sure that these align with your business goals. Only after you can identify all these can you have a brand that is strong, distinct, and memorable.
Final Thoughts on Finding Your Brand Essence
What if you would ask your ideal customer this one simple question: “How does our brand matter to you?”
What do you think their answers would reflect? Have they been impacted on a deeper level? Do they now feel more connected? Overall, are they more inspired and motivated?
The answers to these questions are crucial to know whether you have a strong brand essence.
If you’re unsatisfied with your customers’ current answers, there is still hope! With the key points that we’ve made in this article, we hope that you are now more ready to step up and rise above the rest.
READY TO BUILD UP YOUR BRAND? WE GOT YOU.
Pro’shank Design is a branding agency specializing in strategy, brand identity, and packaging. We help FMCG entrepreneurs create purposeful, impactful brands.
We can help you turn your business into a purposeful brand to make an impact on the right people from awareness to conversion to retention. Create a purposeful brand for this and upcoming generation.