Everyone wants to look unique. But just how unique is your brand compared to the competition? By researching the marketplace thoroughly, you learn the behavioural language your consumers use and soon find out the answers to your branding strategies. It’s no fun spending a great deal of time, effort, and money on your new look, only to discover you look like a clone of your nearest rival. So, invest the right amount of time upfront to yield more satisfying results at the end. 

Staying up to date with your behavioural changes in your target audience cannot be undervalued.  Just keeping the status quo & repeating the same tactics over and over, will not lead to breakthrough for your brand and it’s a short-sighted strategy. In almost any market it’s very easy to get put off by over-saturated industries’ full-on competitors or to take the easy way out by just copying your rivals. However, even if you ‘clone’ marketing and branding techniques their originality is diluted and, as a result, the impact is often much less than the original campaign concept.

Everyone wants to look unique. But just how unique is your brand compared to the competition? By researching the marketplace thoroughly, you learn the behavioural language your consumers use and soon find out the answers to your branding strategies. It’s no fun spending a great deal of time, effort, and money on your new look, only to discover you look like a clone of your nearest rival. So, invest the right amount of time upfront to yield more satisfying results at the end.

Staying up to date with your behavioural changes in your target audience cannot be undervalued.  Just keeping the status quo & repeating the same tactics over and over, will not lead to breakthrough for your brand and it’s a short-sighted strategy. In almost any market it’s very easy to get put off by over-saturated industries’ full-on competitors or to take the easy way out by just copying your rivals. However, even if you ‘clone’ marketing and branding techniques their originality is diluted and, as a result, the impact is often much less than the original campaign concept.

Your brand research should always be focused on two key objectives:

1. Gaining a clear understanding of who your brand consumers and potential consumers are.
2. Keeping an up to date definition of the behaviour of your brand’s consumers and how your brand aligns with the needs created by consumer behaviour. The main factors that impact this behaviour include their age, gender, location, how they socialise, how they travel, their level of affluence, web interactions and their spending habits.

Keeping these objectives at the forefront of your design process gives you a great starting point in any design process, but in order to have the greatest chance of success your research should go further. It’s much more involved than just scraping the surface level of these demographics.

Don’t make it personal

How well do you know your marketplace? Do your consumers even like those sepia tones you’re proposing, let alone lime green? It’s no use just shooting from the hip and going with your gut if this means alienating your customers.

With the ever-increasing presence of online platforms (especially social media) there has been a significant shift to consumers becoming the ‘brand owners’. This is a direct result of how the very public opinions about consumers’ experiences and interactions directly impact the reputation and performance of brands in any industry.

With this in mind, the creative direction of your brand messaging should never be overruled by your personal tastes or bias. For example, ensuring that your font choices, visual tones, messaging tactics should consistently entice your niche audience, rather than being more generic and weakening the brand. Don’t overload your viewers with information, the more refined your messaging the greater chance of positive engagement. In any advertising and marketing campaign content is king and design is secondary. There is nothing worse than creating what you view as ‘cool’ visuals if they alienate your viewers.

Identify simple and effective ways that your consumers can replicate, and further spread brand messaging and values to a much broader audience. Simple video-based concepts are ever- increasingly being used to promote brands as well as their products and services. Part of this inevitably involves analysing feedback from consumers in terms of how much they like the visual execution of your campaign. Balancing your approach through learning from both positive and negative feedback ultimately leads to a sharper understanding of your consumer’s needs.

“If no one hates it, no one really loves it.” – Jessica Walsh

Build culture through customers’ endorsement of your brand’s values and standards.

Sustained consistency is key to building brand culture which is rooted in how your consumers interpret your values and how that translates to your products and services . Consistency combined with effectively executed marketing strategies equips your consumers with a much deeper buy in of your brand values, which in turn reinforces the brand culture.

Building brand awareness takes time, skill and patience and because you look at your brand (and live it) more than anyone else means you often get bored with it far too quickly based on a gut feeling. Are you sure your customers are happy or not with your look and feel? Testing the market first can save you a lot of hassle in the long run.

Testing can take many forms beyond basic surveys, scraping data to get feedback, looking at sales, etc. You might consider looking at ways of developing pro-active exercises that generate intrigue that goes beyond the basics of advertising and instead are focused on encouraging public conversations about the brand in question. With the rise of networking platforms and social media the term word-of-mouth has taken on an entirely different shape in this smart data-centred digital era. As a result, dialogues between consumers, talking about their experiences and interactions with brands, is much more widespread and influential than ever. Utilising and steering the base concepts behind these conversations can be even more powerful that the biggest budget-based advertising campaigns.

To conclude, a few clear pointers to bear in mind for a thoughtfully and objectively designed campaign can provide so much more impact than many businesses realise.

Identifying and implementing the specific hooks for your target market, maintaining freshness and currency, and constantly monitoring and reviewing your campaign’s progress, reshaping and enhancing accordingly, will not only deliver business success, but will elevate your brand, new product or service to a new level that is a cut above the rest.