How to create a brand

A brand is a quality perception. Usually, you know the name of the company and hence you associate their products as high quality. When you have not heard about a company’s name, then you are not sure about their products. Most of the time a good brand corresponds to good popularity or in other words everyone has heard the name of the company.

A brand is also what uniquely identifies one product from another with respect to a customer’s desire for ownership of that product. When there are many products in the market, then a brand name is what helps influence a customer’s purchase decision.

Influencing a customer’s quality perception to a product and persuading them with a desire to own that product is called branding.

Branding by popularity

In one of our closed group studies, we learned that people associate the popularity of an item to a good brand and high quality. If a person sees more ads, more social media mentions, or more discussions about a particular product, then he or she inherently assumes the product is trustworthy.

Search engine optimization, search engine marketing, generating leads, converting into sales, word of mouth, advocacy for your product, etc. are all signs of popularity. This popularity in turn reinforces the mission of branding i.e. influencing a person’s quality perception and desire for ownership. Out of the same sample users we surveyed, about 90% of them confirmed that all new products they bought in the last 30 days were from brands that they saw somewhere or heard from someone sometime in the past 30 days.

Putting your brand name in front of your target audience aggressively builds their trust and sometimes even influence them to search more about it online or may even buy it and try it out of curiosity.

Branding by strategy

A brand strategy what market winners do. Anyone can simply pay google, Facebook, etc. and run ads 24×7. Bombarding a user with too many ads too many times can generate an impulse purchase.

Impulse purchase: 
a sudden decision to buy something with no valid reason. For example you purhased an item because the price is £9.99 (one digit number and hence not expensive), your friends have the same product, many people are talking about this product online, you are just curious to know more about this product. 

Your branding strategy must be a research based approach where you continuously learn what is going on around the market and your target audience. Based on your learning you craft action items to execute in order to earn and build a name for yourself and you products.

Before you start your strategy you need to fully understand what you are offering. The below questions can help

• Why you?
• How you justify the “why you”?
• Why not others?
• If not you then who?

The key is to answer the above questions without overlapping each answer. It is important to unambiguously state every statement concisely. Everything you say must be non-refutable and must corroborate with facts. Everything you state must substantiate with solid logic and verifiable numbers.

Your response CANNOT be the below

• Why you? Because we are different from others
• How you justify the “why you”? Because no one is doing exactly what we are doing.
• Why not others? Others do not do exactly what we do.
• If not you then who? Amazon, eBay, google search the item.

Your response MUST be similar to the below

• Why you? Over 50 years in the market constantly improving. Hold 3 patents for what we are selling. We have an online customer satisfaction rating of 4.9/5.0.
• How you justify the “why you”? Since we are very established in this field, we have got the time and plethora of experience to make all our products more desirable i.e. made of recyclable materials. Our patented manufacturing equipment has a very low carbon footprint. Since we offer 100 days no questions asked return with free shipping, free under warranty replacement within 24 hours, 24×7 customer support, etc. we are very highly ranked online.
• Why not others? No one is in this business for long as us. Company A, B and C all use our products for their daily tasks. Product review websites recommend our product and not other’s products. Only we exclusively offer this product.

Here exclusive is the key word. Many brands struggle to make this mark. It is hard to stand out by being the only company to offer something. Especially in a market that does not allow monopoly, it is hard to claim exclusivity. But working towards that keeps you on your customers mind.

• If not you then who? some-shop-online.com and another-niche-website.com

All because Amazon sells what you are selling Amazon does not become your competitor. Your competitors must be comparable in terms of revenue and services offered. You start from the bottom and work your way up until you reach comparability of the likes of amazon or ebay.