The 1-2-3 Guide to Building Your Brand
Building a brand is an intimidating prospect, and you might be tempted to plunge in without spending time on some careful consideration and research beforehand. That’s a mistake. Here’s a handy guide that should help you (fairly easily) identify the three core aspects of your brand - your audience, your brand values, and your tone of voice.
Define Your Demographic
Until you know who you’re designing for, it’s very difficult to create a brand that’ll be successful.
This is a stage that should be taken at a nice gentle pace, because it’s the best time to experiment. If you only start thinking about your audience halfway through the branding process, you might find yourself having to go back and change things that no longer work - which is a bit of a waste of time! Start by making sure your demographic is really specific. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to do research into what that specific audience wants: which products do they buy? Do they prefer colourful or minimal design? What sort of things do they find ugly, or cliched? Asking your audience as many questions as possible at this stage is the best way to ensure you’re moving onto the next stage with plenty of research in your pocket. The more you know about your demographic, the more successful your brand ought to be.
2. Define your Emotional Appeal
Lingerie designers make their customers feel sexy. High-street banks try to make their customers to feel safe. High-end automotive companies want their customers to feel powerful. Goddammit, Coca Cola have hijacked ‘happiness’.
Now you know who your audience consists of, what do you want them to feel when they interact with your brand? A designer will ask you questions to whittle the options down until you have a list of three emotions that feel like a good fit for your brand and your demographic.
Eliciting these emotions in your audience is your brand mission. Write it down, like this:
We want to help
[demographic]
Feel
[emotion]
when they interact with our
[product]
Patagonia
We want to help
[outdoor enthusiasts]
feel
[proud, caring, ethical]
when they interact with our
[environmentally-friendly products]
Savage x Fenty
We want to help
[all genders, all body-types]
feel
[sexy, fun, fearless]
when they interact with our
[inclusive lingerie]
It can seem a bit fluffy, but spending a decent amount of time thinking about this will be incredibly helpful when it comes to defining your brand values––the qualities that align you with and distinguish you from your competitors.
3. Define Your Personality
Now you’ve established your demographic, and your brand values, you’re in a great position to define your personality. Every brand has a personality, even if it’s not immediately obvious. Brands like Innocent and Tesco Mobile have a sassy, cheeky personality which means they’re allowed to make jokes and interact with their audience on social media in a playful way.
More serious brands, like Nike or The Financial Times have a lot more gravitas, and that comes across in the way they speak to their audience. Finding the right voice for your brand can be tricky, but a really great method is to try and identify public figures who align with your brand values, and imagine them writing your marketing copy for you.
If your brand spokesperson was Stephen Fry, for example, how would he sound? Warm, friendly, with an intelligent sense of humour.
If your spokesperson was RuPaul, would it sound different? What if it was Oprah instead? They actually have very similar speech patterns - they’re both bright, reassuring and confident, but RuPaul uses more pop culture references and double-entendre than Oprah, who takes herself more seriously, and never uses bawdy humour.
Simply by exploring your social media feed, you should be able to find a celebrity spokesperson who aligns with your brand. Write down the features of their speech patterns, and whittle them down to four simple rules your brand should always follow when communicating with your demographic, like this:
Brand Spokesperson:
James Bond
Highly Intelligent
We spend time crafting our copy so it reads beautifully and can never be faulted. Our grammar is impeccable and our vocabulary is impressive - but never obnoxious. We don’t need to show off, so we don’t use words people won’t have heard of.
Calm Under Pressure
Our stress levels actually drop when we’re under pressure - so we never appear agitated in our marketing copy. We’re always cool. You know what isn’t cool? Exclamation marks. So we don’t use them.
Persuasive/Seductive
We know what we’re doing, and we want our demographic to be as confident in our skill as we are - but we’ve left arrogance and conceit in the past, where it belongs. We use short sentences to drive home our expertise. It’s subtle. But it works.
Independent
We don’t need friends, so we don’t waste time trying to be chummy with our demographic - our audience are intelligent, and they might find that condescending. Instead, we win them over with our self-assured and comfortable use of technical language.
Which sort of brand would this tone of voice be suitable for? The automotive industry? Maybe wealth management?
Once you’ve established your rules, go back to your research. Ask yourself whether your demographic will respond well to the tone of voice you’ve created. Ask yourself if the personality aligns with your brand values. Once everything matches up, you should have established an incredibly strong foundation for your brand - a foundation that will help to inform every decision you make as your company evolves.
