What’s a Brand?
A brand is a set of features that distinguishes an organization from its rivals. A company is best identified by personality. It should have defining characteristics that make it stand out from the crowd. This is the company’s brand. Its name, tagline, logo, and designs are all part of its brand.
What is Branding?
This is the internal corporate process of researching and developing the features and attributes that make your company unique. It also involves the effort to cultivate your company’s name and reputation so that consumers associate your brand with certain products and services.
Apple, for example, has mastered the art of branding. Its logo has been recognized the world over—to the point of becoming an icon. People associate Apple products with IT gadgets of the highest quality. Coca-Cola is another company that is good at branding. The classic red and white lettering is a mainstay of popular culture, and its name has become synonymous with fizzy drinks.
The bottom line is that branding is an iterative process. To do it successfully, you must know the people in your target market and get to the heart of what will capture their desire, titillate their senses, and satisfy their needs.
The Importance of Branding
You may have created a sound and high-quality product that will satisfy the needs of many people. This is not enough to make your company succeed. To sell your products, you must connect with people. And the only way to do so is to give your business a strong identity—something for people to relate to.
You must invest in research, development, marketing, and other basic business operations. You must also invest in branding. You will make your business memorable. It will help people distinguish your company from other companies.
Good branding also supports your marketing and sales campaigns. It will enhance your company’s recognition, making it easier for your marketing team to do its job.
Branding also cultivates a sense of pride in your workforce. People like feeling as though they work for a company with an excellent reputation that sells popular products to the general public.
Importance of Brand Voice
Brand voice is one of many elements in your branding process. It consists of how your company communicates and interacts with an audience. The words, inflections, and sentence structure of the talks and writings that come from your company matter. They provide the groundwork for developing a brand personality. They can influence the way your company is perceived and understood by customers, employees, and other stakeholders.
Customer voice in branding is the first and most important thing to remember. The latter is subjected to thousands of images, messages, and advertisements daily. You must strive to differentiate your company’s voice from all the others. Otherwise, your messaging will melt into the general background noise of everyday consumer life.
A good brand voice can do the following:
1. Engage Customers
Most people will trust a company that speaks to them naturally & authentically and will shy away from a business that looks like they are putting on a show.
2. Foster Trust
Part of branding is making promises you know you can keep. If customers believe you can deliver what you say, they will most likely trust your products.
3. Sets Expectations
The kind of language you use will give your customers a sense of who you are as a company. If you lean into peppy sentences with pop culture references, people will view you as hip and fun-loving. If you use more formal speech, then you will be seen as more professional and serious. The former may seem universally appealing, but this is not the case. If you run a law or accounting firm, it may be better to take a more serious tone.
How to Create a Brand Voice?
Here are some of the essential steps that you will need to take:
1. Consider Your Target Market
You must zero in on a target market. You can do so by conducting in-depth research into the people who are most likely to purchase your product. This should include gathering hard data on the demographics of your prospective customer base. Once you have this information, you will be able to craft targeted guidelines for the structure of your brand voice.
2. Develop Your Brand Archetype
Brand archetypes are similar to personality archetypes. The latter idea was developed by the famous Swiss psychoanalysis Carl Jung. They are concepts that have existed for thousands of years and are immediately recognizable in every human culture and language. Having a brand archetype will, like its forerunner, help your target audience connect to your brand and message.
For example, Disney leans on the Magician archetype, which is associated with fun, imagination, mystery, and reassurance. Most luxury brands lean on the Ruler archetype in that they project an image of power, exclusiveness, and confidence.
3. Write a Copy of Your Brand Voice
Your aim in this exercise is to develop keywords and phrases that you want to include in your communications with the public. The best way to do this is to write drafts of the kinds of statements you want to make. You should begin with mission statements and then move on to content that involves your company’s values and the impact you want to have on people’s lives.
Brand Voice Examples
The best brand voices are easily recognizable. They are simple, clear, and direct. They create connections to customers and grow the company’s consumer base.
We have mentioned a few of the strongest brand voices above. Here are a couple more.
1. MNML
This is a streetwear company that is all about minimalism and simplicity. The company communicates in very short sentences and uses sharp and pithy language to convey its ideas.
2. Huel
This is a meal prep and dietary supplements company. The company speaks in an authoritative yet relatable voice. Like a friend who understands the difficulties of preparing a healthy meal. The brand uses humor and self-deprecation to get its messages across.
Conclusion
The development of a brand is not something that can be done hurriedly and haphazardly. Establishing a brand takes a great deal of work, investment, and patience. Your brand voice is an essential element. The way that you speak to and interact with your customers will determine how they see you and how much they come to trust your products.
Finding the right voice for your company is hard, but following the guidelines above will help you hit your mark.
Some organizations provide high-level access to information for better brand products such as Biz-Buzz. This tight-knit community of B2B-like minds collects relevant data for brands through paid surveys. Surveys often trigger thought strategies that sharpen your focus to better products, and critical subjects are added to the sheet.
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- Marketing Decision Makers (MDM)
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