In our blog, we’ve covered different aspects of branding including how to translate your business into a corporate brand, what is a brand prism, and some other brand-related topics. But we haven’t touched upon a topic that really makes a brand click – brand attributes.
Right off the bat, we would like to specify that “brand attributes” go beyond brand personality. Nevertheless, there are many articles on the web that boil down the meaning of brand attributes to emotions that make up your brand personality and brand voice. Brand attributes are the various aspects of a brand that help to maintain and communicate a healthy company image.
This article is for those who have developed a brand prism or been on the market for a respectable amount of time. It is for those who strive to turn their products into something larger, for those who would communicate messages beyond “Buy my products!” or “Our services are the best!”. However, it is hardly attainable with a brand that is obviously lacking something.
It is most likely that after reading through this post, you will take a step back and look at your brand as a whole. We will help you deduce the problem based on your business by going through a brand attributes list that includes:
- Product branding
- Positioning strategy
- Brand image and pricing
- Brand personality and brand voice
- Consistent brand essence
- Branding & Marketing
- Brand perception
- Brand audit and rebranding
Product branding
The main and most important of the brand attributes is the actual product. No branding will ever bring you sales if the product is generic garbage. Learn more about your industry, the product on its own, and the story and culture behind it. Differentiate your product: make it exceptionally convenient, consider catchy design, add some specific features that will make your customers come back to your goods and services. Invest in product development before starting out with a sophisticated branding campaign.
Researching the buyer personas and their problems will definitely help you seek out the competitive advantage and differentiate among others.
Make a statement with your positioning strategy
After finalizing your offer to the customer, you should consider both competitors and customers to find where to fit in your brand. In a nutshell, positioning determines your brand and what is special about it. A close analysis of your industry competitors and the target audience has to put you on the right track to differentiation.
A strong positioning statement should answer these questions:
- Who are you?
- What do you do?
- Why?
- How are you different from your competitors?
Look at the example of a strong positioning of one of the most popular contemporary brands – Tesla.
“Tesla is a luxury electric car brand constantly pushing all kinds of boundaries taking the world closer to sustainable transportation. There’s little to know companies that are as agile, efficient, and innovative as Tesla”
If the answers to the mentioned questions are clear and original while matching the needs of your TA, then congratulations! You have created a reliable brand positioning.
The connection between brand image and pricing
Branding and marketing are all about creating, promoting, and communicating expectations about a product or service and matching them down the sales funnel. Therefore, pricing has to be carefully thought out due to it heavily influencing the decision-making process.
Pricing is an entire brand image of its own. Set the price too high or too low, and your product will be perceived totally differently. Whether you decide to tag your goods as a premium-class luxury product or a widely available one, it will demand a specific communication approach to match its price range. The product design, ads, logo, and other brand elements have to identify the product value.
The means of communication may extend even to post-sale services, as luxury brands are usually expected to provide customer support to match the highly-priced product.
What brand characteristics define brand personality and brand voice?
Having established a suitable positioning of your business based on market and competitive research, it is highly suggested that you develop a brand personality and a brand voice. Personal values and communicated emotions are the essentials of any modern brand. Statistics prove that relatable brand personality boosts brand loyalty, as 89% of shoppers stay loyal to brands that share their values. What is more, 64-68% of surveyed customers that have felt an emotional connection with a brand prove that emotions make products more memorable.
Take into account your buyer personas, competitors, industry trends, outstanding product features and think of the emotions you would like to convey with your brand, as well as the core brand values that shape your personality.
If you are a little short on ideas regarding the emotions that will be incorporated into your brand, try the IS/IS NOT exercise:
The selected number of adjectives will provide a decent base to expand and build on. Further development of the 10 chosen words will distance you from creating an emotionally generic brand voice.
Regarding the brand values, go back to your positioning and expand adding a short statement describing your mission, the impact you strive to make. The mission combined with emotions will transform into an image that is your brand personality.
Stay consistent with brand essence
In the world of branding, consistency is achieved by creating and following brand essence. It is a couple of words or a short phrase to guide both creative and non-creative brand development, strategy, and management.
The trends and markets are shifting at an extreme pace these days, which means that your messages need to change as well. Too many inconsistent changes in a short period of time don’t do you any good, though. Look at the case of the American beer brand Michelob that failed to create a consistent story and inevitably tangled its brand perception.
The promotional messages and slogans were changing rapidly without much consistency, which puzzled the customers. When is the right time to drink Michelob? I guess it depends on the year you are living in. This caused sales as well as the produced volume to drop significantly from 8.1 million barrels in 1980 to 1.8 million barrels by 1998.
If you think that your brand is outdated or simply irrelevant, don’t repeat Michelob’s mistake of throwing new messaging at the wall and seeing what sticks. What you need is rebranding based on creative research, a new brand essence.
The alliance of Branding & Marketing
Launching new brands and raising brand awareness has become easy like never before thanks to almost endless possibilities of the digital age.
If branding is the soul of your company, marketing is the body. One can’t exist without another. SEO and PPC bring visibility and recognition, blogging, email, and social media marketing are among the most effective methods for raising brand engagement. But it is just a tip of an iceberg.
Overall, there are other methods of growing brand equity that also bring you leads and maintain a healthy sales funnel. But it is worth pointing out that without a cohesive brand all of the marketing efforts look and feel like an inconsistent mess. Your brand is the glue that holds all of your communication together considerably amplifying the results. It is a fact proved by Lucidpress, as consistent branding is to increase revenue by 33%.
Measure and adjust your brand perception
At this point, after investing in brand development and growing brand equity, you would want to measure and maintain a positive (or negative if you please) brand image. For this, you will need to be aware of your brand perception.
It is done by:
- Monitoring the web reception and researching analytics
- Implementing social listening
- Conducting surveys
This way you could see whether your communication has the desired effect and adjust it (if needed). Understanding your brand perception helps you with identifying what your target audience actually thinks about you and your products, which is crucial to maintain any brand!
Implement professional brand audit and rebranding
This article should be enough to make you rethink your brand. But, it is hardly possible to build a sustainable brand without a professional touch. A through-and-through brand audit executed by a team of specialists will grant you a modern, authentic solution that will save you time and money in the future.
RGray branding team has experience in developing brands for different industries, providing creative naming, logo, identity, and strategic solutions. We understand that making a brand happen on your own is not an easy task. Give us a call if you feel the need for a helping hand.