Building a brand is not just about designing a logo or an icon or choosing appealing colours or using beautiful fonts and creating some graphical elements for your brand to attract your target audience. It is also about the experience you create for your customers. Whether you’re starting a new business, re-inventing an existing one or re-branding, building a foundation for your brand is extremely important to make it successful and a sustainable one.

We know that brands generate higher profit margins but it is not only because they use the best available materials in the market to develop the best quality products or offer the best possible services or have designed an amazing logo and use the most appealing colours. No! It is because the experiences they create for each consumer that makes them feel comfortable and worthy. In addition they also tend to attract the right audience, have more repeat business and are much more resilient to the competition.

While most business owners focus on their products and/or services, they miss out on the opportunity to generate tons of business. Having an amazing idea in your mind can push you build the best product and/or service in the industry. However, a business owner also needs to think about whom the business is going to offer these products and/or services to, how is it going to help the customers and why will the customers buy your product and/or service.

Apart from this the business owner also needs to think about the message it is going to convey to the audience that will create awareness about its products and/or services and ensure to attract the right target audience. This is exactly where building a foundation to create a strong brand identity becomes essential.

Building a strong foundation for a brand uses the powerful elements of branding such as brand story, brand purpose, brand identity, values, beliefs and more. The goal is to bring immense clarity in your business to be able to define the ‘why’ i.e. the reason for existence of your brand and the experience you want to create for your customers. These elements of branding along with the core message that you want to send out creates a connection between the business and the customers.

Identifying your own story is a great start when you want to build your own brand, as it allows you to learn a lot about yourself. It helps you bring light to who you really are; what do you like and dislike; what are your interests and what are you passionate about. It establishes your achievements, challenges you faced, reasons for success, what are your intentions, goals and objectives and the vision of what you want to achieve.

Stories are an integral part of our lives because we learn, discover and connect with one another when we share. So it would only make sense to first take a deep dive into ourselves and identify our own story.

When you are building a brand it is really important to create your purpose. A purpose is the reason for your brand to exist beyond just making money. It is also known as the “why” of your brand. When you identify your story it will give you a sense of what the purpose could be and acknowledge the fact the brand stands for.

A brand purpose helps you connect with your audience on a deeper and emotional level giving them a reason to buy from you and in return gain trust and loyalty. It also aligns your employees, partners, directors and stakeholders to the greater cause of the brand. A brand purpose also differentiates you from your competitors.

A target audience is a specific group of consumers that you would like to target your brand message to. Discovering your target audience is really about creating an ideal customer profile. The question to ask here is who would be your ideal customer?

1. Demographics define customer’s age, gender, marital status, nationality, education, occupation, income, family size, etc.

2. Geographic defines the location/s of where these customers exist like city, region, state, country, type of area, climatic conditions, population etc.

3. Psychographics tells us more about the customer’s personality, their likes, dislikes, hobbies, interests, what are their values and beliefs and what is their behaviour and the kind of lifestyle they live.

Discovering your target audience helps you not only understand the problems or challenges they may be facing but what are their needs and expectations as well. This will also ensure the brand you are creating is going to have an impact in their lives as your customers.

The last and the final step to building a foundation for your brand are to define your position in the marketplace. This is the position in the mind of your consumers that defines how do you want your brand to be perceived as.

The answers to the above questions together will form your brand positioning statement. This states how you are different from your competitors and becomes a reason for the customers to choose you over others in the marketplace.

A well-defined foundation for your brand is fundamental for making it successful and sustainable. It aligns people, communications, decisions and actions that send out a unified message creating the impact and experience you want to when serving your customers. Hence, it is essential for business owners & entrepreneurs to understand the value of building a strong foundation for their brand.