Crafting the Brand Positioning: The Artful Practice of Marketing
Your brand is much more than your logo. Your brand is your business personality. It represents your company in all of your communications with the world. Your logo is a big part of that too, but it’s just a beginning. Your brand is the voice of your business. It speaks for you. It tells the world who you are, what you offer, and maybe most importantly, what you stand for. That’s why your brand shows up in the style of everything you put out into the world. It’s the words you use. The colors. The promise. The commitment to customers.
Branding is the process of engaging people to create memories, emotions and a relationship around your company. It’s important to build such a strong connection and such strong beliefs that your customers are not only favorable toward your brand, but adopt it and remain loyal customers for your business. Sometimes customers use a brand to even help identify who they are as individuals. Creating these deep connections is not a simple task, but it will have far reaching effects and long term rewards.
A fantastic example of a company with success in their branding is well-known Harley Davidson. Back in 2013, Forbes wrote on the huge success of HD’s social branding and whether they will be able to continue to maintain it. While their main products are big, loud motorcycles, they sell lifestyle. The lifestyle of “Americans who yearned for safe rebellion and the promise of the open road.” Their brand positioning wasn’t closely focused on the actual bike itself, but rather the lifestyle and opportunities that the bike could lead you to if only you owned one.
One important principle that many successful global brands utilize is sharing “why” they do what they do instead of focusing all the time on “what” they do. People want to align with companies that give them something to believe in, something that matches up with their own priorities. It’s up to you, then, to let current and prospective customers know why you do what you do so that they can determine whether or not they will become lifelong customers.
Crafting the Brand Positioning
Madplum Creative builds company brands that people not only care about, but also want to engage with. At the most basic level, we work to inspire encounters between people and the world surrounding them. We then help build brands through artful storytelling and innovative methods to improve human interactions. But we also believe that a business needs to get serious and drill down to find out what it truly wants to achieve before attempting to create or adjust its brand.
As a business, ask yourself these questions:
- What is the high-level goal that your business/product/service hope to solve?
- What sparked the drive/passion to create a company and solution centered on this particular, high-level goal?
- What’s an important point of contact you want your company to have with your target audience? Their lifestyle? Wellbeing? Education? Safety? Their own business success?
We think the passion behind the brand needs to come through. And that’s the starting point of a brand. Once that is determined, everything else falls in place as support of that mission. Sure, we love colors and fonts and beautiful graphics, but they don’t mean anything unless they’re purpose driven. Sometimes the mission and purpose can get lost in the day-to-day execution of business operations, but that’s where our mission comes in. We help business brands stay on point and focused to deliver authentic and innovative customer experiences that reinforce brand messaging and core purpose.
Posted In: Blog, Brand Crafting
