Branding

We all have our favorite brand for the things we use daily. You get up in the morning, and the first product you use is a brand you trust. There is a reason why you picked that brand, among others. Whether you are building a brand for yourself or a company, keep this in mind.

Branding is how others are perceiving you or your product. Your brand provides an experience that resonates to your customers. A brand could also be as simple as a comment about you when you leave the room.

There is a diverse process of building a brand. For large organizations, the branding system is quite extensive, given the expectations of their big-time clientele. As for leaner teams, the process is more agile with a lot of collaboration with the product owner. But the level of work isn’t different from each other. It requires a process that guides the team from market research to product distribution.

Here is a project I’ve handled in my former company and my story on how I’m building my brand.

A branding story

My first-hand experience in building a brand was for a new product, a “watch stick”. It’s a flash drive pre-loaded with TV programs that you could take anywhere for as long as you have a device to watch it on. The target market is the Filipino seafarers who are usually at sea for months. They have no access to local shows and the Internet. It was just a few years ago when Netflix was only accessible through a basic VPN. So, you could imagine how people would resort to pirated DVDs to access their favorite shows. The “watch stick” was the answer to the entertainment need of the Filipino market.

The website, elleanorma.com, started as a personal blog sharing stories about my new life as a mom running a digital marketing consultancy business from home. The motivation to come up with this concept came from growing up without my parental unit. Our generation believed that we could only excel in our career or business if we entrust the responsibility of raising our kids to others. Ultimately, I want to show that despite our background, no parent has to leave their kids for the sake of putting food on the table. It’s a combination of my personal experience as a new parent and my work to show others that they can do it too.

Here’s how you can build a brand

Start with a vision

For an individual or a company looking to start a brand, the journey begins with a vision. Is there an existing problem that you want to solve, and how will you brand a product to position it as the solution? In the case of seafarers, the business empathizes with the market’s reality of being far away from home. The answer was an easy-to-use entertainment product that they can use anywhere in the world. They positioned the TFC Watch Stick as a reliable companion on-board.

Back it up with a research

A company conducts investigations to understand the different aspects of their business to learn the needs and perceptions of the market. Today, brands begin their journey by merely listening to people on social media or through Google search. Through active listening on social media, I was able to connect with fellow moms. I’ve discovered that a lot of them aspires to have a blog or to start a home base job.

Develop a brand strategy

Ideally, a brand strategy must be simple. It has to create an authentic brand story that connects to its market. I’ve seen this trend in freelance coaches. They relate to others by using their experience on how they transitioned from a 9-to-5 job to a more flexible work setup. They support others to transition, as well. With my brand, I go a little bit deeper to empathize with other parents who are torn between fulfilling their financial goals and spending time with their kids.

Putting the brand together

Once there is a clear brand strategy, the creative team, along with the talented copywriters, would work together to come up with different names for the brand. With TFC as the parent brand, the team had to come up with a descriptive name that could seamlessly join the main brand’s portfolio. Thus, the TFC Watch Stick brand name was born. What follows after that was the development of the logo and identity of the brand.

Be an advocate of your brand

There are many ways to enforce your brand. Start by mobilizing your brand with a marketing plan. Apply your branding across all marketing channels such as your website, social media accounts and other marketing collaterals. For example, the content I produce for my website. The content topics are about work to help aspiring freelancers to gain their confidence too, and my lifestyle to show how I thrive.

Need help in building your brand?

Let’s work together! Fill up the form with details about your project.

“A brand is what they say about you when you are not in the room.”

maybe from Jeff Bezos