Brand identity design is an extremely crucial part of your business which makes or breaks the perception about your brand to your customers. But, before you get it designed, you need to do some groundwork that helps in creating a design that best speaks to your audience.
Here are the 7 factors that you need to rectify before you get to the identity design of your brand.
Target audience
You need to know who you're serving. Where are they from? What age bracket do they belong in? What income bracket they belong to? These factors are basics to understand the consumer mindset thus helps you serve them the best way possible. If your business speaks to everyone, it becomes white noise.
Problem
What are their pain points? Now, this does not refer to all their life problems. Look for problems in their daily lifestyle that can be closely associated with your product.
For example, if you are a skincare brand, look for problems such as damaged skin due to pollution or dry skin due to harsh winter weather etc.
Benefits
Now that you know their problem, see which of these problems are solved best by your product/service. The solution offered by you is considered the benefits of buying from your brand and these benefits will act as one of the highest selling points to your customer.
Write down all the reasons as to why life would be easier for your customer if they buy from you.
Features
These are the technical aspects of your products and services. You may think it's the same as your benefits but not really. For example, if the benefit of your skincare product is removing hyper-pigmentation, then the feature would be the Vitamin C extracts in your product.
Features are often looked at when the customer pays attention to your brand and wants to confirm if your product really does have those benefits. So, consider it as another big factor in selling point. Features also play a major role in differentiating you from your competition.
Values
This factor is more of a sub conscious play in the mind of the user. Values are the deep beliefs that your customers hold in their life.
For example, their belief could be, having a smart watch is a symbol of efficiency and high economic status.
Thus Apple brand will appeal to that value of their target to hook them and make them believe that - With their Apple Watch, Users can achieve high status and efficiency.
Medium
We discussed who the target is and how to convert them into customers but the medium we use to reach them plays a crucial role. You need to make sure that your business is right where their eyes are at, because everyone is not looking at the same platform for all their needs.
A person who is 65 has different needs and uses different platforms for purchase and communication compared to a person who is 16. If you wish to sell to the 16 year old, you need to be marketing in the apps that they are browsing instead of showing your products on billboards.
Loyalty
It's as important to retain customers as it is to acquire them. Your product needs to exceed their expectations in order for them to return to you time and again. Find ways outside of selling the product to show up for your customers so they believe that you care. For example: Free service of the car they purchased for a year.
This is ultimately how brands turn audience into loyal customers or even advocates for your brand.
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Hope you have a better understanding of the pre-requisites of your branding now. Once you have these factors figured out, reach out to me here when you are ready to kickstart your brand identity. Looking forward to create an awesome brand with you. Yours,
Jayshree D.V