How to Build a Brand How to Start Your Own Brand From Scratch in 7 Steps
What exactly is a “brand”?
A brand isn’t just a recognizable name and logo that
distinguishes you in a crowded market.
Your the brand is how people perceive you wherever they interact with your business—both
the impressions you can control and the ones you can't.
When you think about it, people have brands too. We
each has a name, a face, a style, a way of communicating, different
impressions we make on different people, and what they say about us when we’re
not in the room.
Likewise, businesses have names, products, logos, colours,
fonts, voices, and reputations to manage that makeup who they are and affect
how they’re perceived.
You can't build a brand without being consistent and maintaining
that consistency as you extend your brand to every part of your business. But
it all starts with establishing what that
consistency is going to look like and the feeling you want it to evoke.
How to Build a Brand
Building your own brand essentially boils down to 7 steps:
1. Research your
target audience and your competitors.
2. Pick your focus and
personality.
3. Choose your
business name.
4. Write your slogan.
5. Choose the look of
your brand (colours and font).
6. Design your logo.
7. Apply your branding
across your business and evolve it as you grow.
While you might revisit some steps as you pivot your brand, it's
important that you consider each aspect as you shape your brand identity.
Let’s start with laying the groundwork to inform the way you go about
building your brand.
1. Figure out your place in the market
Before you start making any decisions about your brand, you need to
understand the current market: who your potential customers and current
competitors are.
There are many ways to do this:
·
Google your product or service category and analyze direct and
indirect competitors that come up.
·
Check subreddits that relate to your customers and eavesdrop on their
conversations and product recommendations.
·
Talk to people who are part of your target market and ask them what
brands they buy from in your space.
·
Look at the relevant social media accounts or pages your target audience
follows and are receptive to.
·
Go shopping online or offline and get a feel for how your customers
would browse and buy products.
As you go about your research, make a note of:
1. Who your “lowest hanging fruit” customers are—the ones you could
most easily sell to.
2. Who your top of mind competitors are—the brands that are established and
known in the market.
3. How your customers speak and what they talk about—the interests they
have and the language they express them in.
It’s important to have a handle on this before moving forward as it will
inform what your brand should focus on and how it can position itself
apart from competitors.
2. Define your brand’s focus and personality
Your brand can’t be everything to everyone, especially at the start.
It’s important to find your focus and let that inform all the other
parts of your brand as you build it.
Here are some questions and branding exercises to get you thinking about
the focus and tone of your brand.
What's your positioning
statement?
A positioning statement is one or two lines that stake your claim in the
market. This isn't necessarily something you put on your website or business card—it's
just to help you answer the right questions about your brand.
Your unique value proposition is the one
thing you're competing on. Find it, go in on it, and make it a part of your
brand's messaging.
Alternatively, if the company you want to start has a cause at its
core (e.g. if you're starting a social enterprise), you can also
write this out as a mission statement that makes a clear promise to your
customers or to the world.
What words would you associate with your brand?
One way to look at your brand is as if it was a person. What would he or
she be like? What kind of personality would your customers be attracted to?
This will help inform your voice on social media and the tone of all
your creative, both visual and written.
A fun and useful
branding exercise are to pitch 3-5 adjectives that describe the type of brand
that might resonate with your audience. I compiled this list of traits to help
you get started.
Thinking about your brand as a metaphor or personifying it can help you
identify the individual qualities you want it to have.
This can be a vehicle, an animal, a celebrity, a sports team,
anything—as long as it has a prominent reputation in your mind that summons the
sort of vibe you want your brand to give off.
For example, if I wanted to create a brand targeting entrepreneurs I
might choose to use the raccoon as a starting point: They’re scrappy survivors
that will do anything to thrive.
If your brand was an animal, what animal would it be and why is it like that animal to you?
3. Choose a
business name
“A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet. But Nike by
another name would be seen on fewer feet.”
Shakespeare (sort of)
What's in a name? Depending on the kind of business you want to start,
you can make the case that your name matters very little or it matters a lot.
As we've said before, a brand is so more than a name. The personality,
actions and reputation of your brand are really what give the name meaning in
the market.
But as a business owner, your company's name is probably one of the
first big commitments you have to make. It’ll impact your logo, your domain,
your marketing, and trademark registration if you decide to go that route (it's
harder to trademark generic brand names that literally describe what you sell).
Ideally, you want a business name that’s hard to imitate and even harder
to confuse with existing players in the market. If you have any plans to expand
the product lines you offer down the road, consider keeping your business name
broad so that it's easier to pivot than if you chose a
brand name based on your product category.
You can use our Business Name Generator to brainstorm
some names, or try one (or a combination) of the following approaches:
·
Make up a word like Pepsi.
·
Reframe an unrelated word like Apple for computers.
·
Use a suggestive word or
metaphor like Buffer.
·
Describe it literally (caution: easy
to imitate) like The Shoe Company
·
Alter a word by removing letters,
adding letters, or using Latin endings like Tumbler (Tumbler) or Activia.
·
Use the initials of a longer a name like HBO (Home Box Office)
·
Combine two words: Pinterest (pin
interest) or Facebook (Face + Book)
·
Turn a string of words into an
acronym: BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke)
Since your brand name will also affect the domain/URL of your website,
be sure to shop around to see what’s available before you decide. Check out our
guide to choosing a
good business name.
It's also a good idea to run your name by a focus group of close people,
if for no other reason than to make sure it doesn't have an unintended meaning
or is too similar to something else that you might've missed.
4. Pick your
brand’s colours and fonts
Once you've got a name down, you'll need to think about how you'll
visually represent your brand, namely your colours and typography. This will
come in handy when you start to build your website.
Choosing your colours
Colours don't just define the look of your brand; they also convey the
feeling you want to communicate and help you make it consistent across your
entire brand. You'll want to choose colours that differentiate you
from direct competitors to avoid confusing consumers.
Colour psychology isn't an exact science, but it
does help to inform the choices you make, especially when it comes to the colour
you choose for your logo.
This infographic offers a nice overview of the
emotions and associations that different colours generally evoke.
It’s important to consider how legible white and black text will be over
your colour palette, and how the colour text might look over white and black
backgrounds. Try using a tool like Colours to
brainstorm colours that work together, grab the hex codes to keep handy, and
sift through different shades to find the ones you like.
Choosing your fonts
At this point, it's also good to look at fonts you might want to use on
your website.
Pick two fonts at most to avoid unnecessarily confusing visitors: one
for headings and one for body text (this doesn't include the font you might use
in your logo).
You can use Font
Pair to browse from a wide selection of fonts that go well together and
download them if necessary.
For inspiration, use Stylify.me on
your favourite websites to see their visual style at a glance.
5. Write a slogan
A catchy slogan is a nice-to-have asset—something brief and
descriptive that you can put in your Twitter bio, website the headline, business card, and anywhere else where you've got very few words
to make a big impact.
Keep in mind that you can always change your slogan as you find new
angles for marketing — Pepsi has gone through over 30 slogans in the past
few decades.
A good slogan is short, catchy, and makes a strong impression. Here are
some ways to approach writing a slogan of your own:
·
Stake your claim: Death Wish
Coffee—"The World's Strongest Coffee"
·
Make it a Metaphor: Red bull—"Red bull gives you
wings."
·
Adopt your customers’ attitude: Nike—"Just do
it."
·
Leverage labels: Cards Against
Humanity—"A party game for horrible people".
·
Write a rhyme: Folgers Coffee:
"The best part of wakin' up is Folgers in your cup."
·
Describe it literally:
Aritzia—"Women's fashion boutique"
Try our Slogan Maker to brainstorm
some ideas or play off of your positioning statement to generate some
potential one-liners to describe your business.
6. Design your logo
A company logo is probably one of the first things that come to mind
when you think about building a brand. And for good reason. It's the face of
your company after all, and could potentially be everywhere that your brand
exists.
Ideally, you'll want a logo that's unique, identifiable, and that's
scalable to work at all sizes (which is often overlooked).
Consider all the places where your brand's the logo needs to exist, from your website to your Face book Page's profile the picture to even the little "favicons" you see in your current
browser tab.
If you have a text logo as your Instagram avatar, for
example, it'll be almost impossible to read. To make your life easier, get
a square version of your logo that has an icon element that remains
recognizable even at smaller sizes.
Notice how the Walmart logo has both the "sparks" icon and the
wordmark, which can be used separately.
The following are some of the different logo types you can choose to
help you communicate with designers and find a style that makes sense for your
brand. Keep the colours and fonts you chose in mind to make sure they work
together with your logo to convey your brand.
Abstract: Google Chrome
An abstract logo has no explicit meaning. It’s just a shape and colours
that you can't easily tie back to anything in the real world.
The benefit of an abstract logo is that it has no innate meaning—you can
make this up yourself and bring it to life in your customers' minds.
Mascot: Wendy’s
Mascot logos are often represented by the face of a character. They may
humanize your brand, but be aware that they are an antiquated style now
and only recommended in certain contexts (e.g. you’re deliberately going for a
retro look).
Emblem: Starbucks
Emblem logos are often circular and combine text with an emblem for
a bold and regal look. If the design is too complicated, however, they can
lose their impact when you shrink them down. But done right, they can make for
a memorable style of logo.
Letter mark: IBM
Letter mark logos turn the initials of your full business name into a
logo. If you chose a business name with 3 or more words, this might be a style
you'd want to consider, especially if the initialise is catchy.
Icon: Twitter
An icon logo is your brand represented as a visual metaphor. Unlike an
abstract logo, an icon logo suggests something about the product (Twitter's the bird is suggestive of the frequent short "tweets" on the
platform).
As an unestablished brand, you should stay away from using an icon logo
by itself. However, if you're not sure about the kind of logo you want, pairing
an icon logo with a wordmark is usually a safe bet.
Word mark: Face book
Word mark logos turn your brand name, colours, and font into a visual
identity. The problem with wordmarks is that they're often hard to create in a
scalable square design and easily lose their legibility when shrunk.
However, you can fix this problem by simply getting an accompanying icon
logo or turning the first letter of the wordmark into a separate-but-connected
logo, like what Face book does with the F.
Combination: McDonald's
As a new business, and you don't need to choose an icon over a wordmark
when you can get the best of both. This makes it easier to satisfy the
condition of creating a scalable logo while still putting your brand name front
and centre. McDonald's, for example, can use their iconic golden arches wherever
the full wordmark doesn't fit.
Unless you've got design chops of your own, you'll probably be
delegating the creation of your logo. You can outsource it for a low cost
on Fiverr or run a
logo contest on 99Designs.
Check out Seek Logo for even
more logo inspiration or use our Hatchful
logo maker to start generating some ideas. There's also our a comprehensive guide on how to design a logo where
we walk you through the process step-by-step.
7. Apply, extend,
and evolve your brand as you grow
Building a brand doesn't stop with creating a logo or slogan, or even
with your brand launch. Your brand needs to exist and remain consistent wherever your customers interact
with you, from the theme you
choose for your website to the marketing you do to customer
service to the way you package and ship your products.
You'll continue to shape and evolve your brand as you expose more
customers to it and learn more about who they are and how to speak to them.
It's important to appreciate that you will never
have 100% control over how people perceive your brand.
You can tug customers in the right direction, make a great first
impression, and manage your reputation, but you can’t control the individual
perceptions that exist in each person's mind (say, if they had a bad customer
service experience).
All you can do is put your best foot forward at every turn and try to
resonate with your core audience. But hopefully, at this point, you have the
tools, knowledge, and resources to start.
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