Simplify Your Life

Here’s a quick 101 on brand building for a hardware or software or service product/ company. This may not completely apply for Personal Brand building.

A great brand starts with a great product

Qualities that make a product great:

• Something that the founder himself/herself finds valuable in her own life
• Makes life of the user better i.e. adds significant value
• Aspirational 
• Intuitive to use i.e. just works without a big manual
• Accessible to most man on the street
• Has a unique value proposition i.e. different from what’s already available in the market
• Reflects the taste of the founder 

Just having a product is not enough if you want a bigger scale impact due to your product. You need a brand around the product. A brand is the “feeling” that people have about you (or a company) when you are not in the room. 

5 Building blocks of a great Brand

If you want the brand to go to the next level, the following 5 building blocks are crucial  

1. Clarity of purpose – Clearly defined purpose of the brand – Product is the key, but the why (purpose) behind the brand is even more important (why before the what) i.e. why does this brand exist, for whom and how
2. Experience – Focus on end to end experience i.e. not just the experience of using the product but in buying it, service, even including the experience of marketing etc. 
3. Consistency – Needed to build trust i.e. Trust is build when consistency is delivered over time. 
4. Emotional connection – Aspirational. Use story telling to convey the aspirational message as stories are emotional vs spec sheet.  
5. Visibility – we live in attention economy, so unless your brand is established, you need to have visibility – Refer to Marketing capability. Use this capability to market the brand’s purpose through emotional connection before marketing the product.  

4 Capabilities that help you deliver on the 5 key components of a brand

Finance and HR are BAU (business as usual) capabilities that help to run a business but they don’t make a business a brand. Below 4 capabilities are key to build a brand.

Customer experience (CX)

If the founder developed the product, he/she may have a niche use case of the product. CX helps to understand if the product will be valued by a broader spectrum of people and whether it can make their life significantly better (Usefulness study). Once it can be established as useful for the broader public, we need to establish if it can be intuitively used by most people without the need to refer to a manual (Usability study). 

Market Research (MR)

• This is needed to understand the relative value of the product compared to competitor products. Below are 3 key metrics used in MR.
• Brand recall – to test the ability of your target customers to remember your brand when prompted by a product category.
• NPS – Net promoter score is used to understand if you have more promoters than detractors. This is used for a product.
• Satisfaction score (eg. E-B score) is used to understand the % of people who are highly satisfied (Exceeds expectations) vs those who are be disappointed (Below expectations) with a product. This is usually used to measure the quality of services provided by the company in cases where its hard to promote the service (and hence NPS cannot be used)

Data analytics

This is important to analyse all kind of data to understand what works and what doesn’t work (eg. Root causes of issues). It helps to gather, analyse and interpret data to help make decisions. It can also be used to identify whom to target with a service message (i.e. inform a customer of a new product that is relevant to him/her).

Brand Marketing

Marketing is done through ATL (Above the line) (eg. Newspaper, billboard etc.) and BTL (Below the line) (Digital, SMS etc.) channels. But the strongest marketing channel is Word of Mouth which comes from a great and consistent product and experience.