Building a Powerful Brand
Do you know what makes a brand strong? And if you had to make yours stronger, would you know how to do it?
Many factors influence the strength of a particular product or brand. If you understand these factors, you can think about how to launch a new product effectively, or work out how to turn a struggling brand into a successful one.
In this article, we’ll look at Advisight’s Brand Equity model. This tool highlights four steps that you can follow to build and manage a brand that customers will support.
Overview
The concept behind the Brand Equity Model is simple: in order to build a strong brand, you must shape how customers think and feel about your product. You have to build the right type of experiences around your brand, so that customers have specific, positive thoughts, feelings, beliefs, opinions, and perceptions about it.
When you have strong brand equity, your customers will buy more from you, they’ll recommend you to other people, they’re more loyal, and you’re less likely to lose them to competitors.
The model, seen in figure 1, illustrates the four steps that you need to follow to build strong brand equity.
Figure 1 – Brand Equity Model
The four steps of the pyramid represent four fundamental questions that your customers will ask – often subconsciously – about your brand.
The four steps contain six building blocks that must be in place for you to reach the top of the pyramid, and to develop a successful brand.
Applying the Model
Let’s look at each step and building block in detail, and discuss how you can apply the framework and strengthen your brand.
Step 1: Brand Identity – Who Are You?
In this first step, your goal is to create “brand salience,” or awareness – in other words, you need to make sure that your brand stands out, and that customers recognize it and are aware of it.
You’re not just creating brand identity and awareness here; you’re also trying to ensure that brand perceptions are “correct” at key stages of the buying process.
Application
To begin, you first need to know who your customers are. Research your market to gain a thorough understanding of how your customers see your brand, and explore whether there are different market segments with different needs and different relationships with your brand.
Next, identify how your customers narrow down their choices and decide between your brand and your competitors’ brands. What decision-making processes do your customers go through when they choose your product? How are they classifying your product or brand? And, when you follow their decision making process, how well does your brand stand out at key stages of this process?
You are able to sell your product because it satisfies a particular set of your customers’ needs; this is your unique selling proposition , or USP. You should already be familiar with these needs, but it’s important to communicate to your customers how your brand fulfills these. Do your clients understand these USPs when they’re making their buying decisions?
By the end of this step, you should understand whether your clients perceive your brand as you want them to, or whether there are specific perceptual problems that you need to address – either by adjusting your product or service, or by adjusting the way that you communicate your message. Identify the actions that you need to take as a result.
Step 2: Brand Meaning – What Are You?
Your goal in step two is to identify and communicate what your brand means, and what it stands for. The two building blocks in this step are: “performance” and “imagery.”
“Performance” defines how well your product meets your customers’ needs. According to the model, performance consists of five categories: primary characteristics and features; product reliability, durability, and serviceability; service effectiveness, efficiency, and empathy; style and design; and price.
“Imagery” refers to how well your brand meets your customers’ needs on a social and psychological level. Your brand can meet these needs directly, from a customer’s own experiences with a product; or indirectly, with targeted marketing, or with word of mouth.
A good example of brand meaning is Patagonia®. Patagonia makes high-quality outdoor clothing and equipment, much of which is made from recycled materials.
Patagonia’s brand performance demonstrates its reliability and durability; people know that their products are well designed and stylish, and that they won’t let them down. Patagonia’s brand imagery is enhanced by its commitment to several environmental programs and social causes; and its strong “reduce, reuse, recycle” values make customers feel good about purchasing products from an organization with an environmental conscience.
Application
The experiences that your customers have with your brand come as a direct result of your product’s performance. Your product must meet, and, ideally, exceed their expectations if you want to build loyalty. Use the Critical to Quality Tree and Kano Model Analysis models to identify your customers’ needs, and then explore how you can translate these needs into a high-quality product.
Next, think carefully about the type of experience that you want your customers to have with your product. Take both performance and imagery into account, and create a “brand personality.” Again, identify any gaps between where you are now and where you want to be, and look at how you can bridge these.
Step 3: Brand Response – What Do I Think, or Feel, About You?
Your customers’ responses to your brand fall into two categories: “judgments” and “feelings.” These are the two building blocks in this step.
Your customers constantly make judgments about your brand and these fall into four key categories:
- Quality: Customers judge a product or brand based on its actual and perceived quality.
- Credibility: Customers judge credibility using three dimensions – expertise (which includes innovation), trustworthiness, and likability.
- Consideration: Customers judge how relevant your product is to their unique needs.
- Superiority: Customers assess how superior your brand is, compared with your competitors’ brands.
Customers also respond to your brand according to how it makes them feel. Your brand can evoke feelings directly, but they also respond emotionally to how a brand makes them feel about themselves. According to the model, there are six positive brand feelings: warmth, fun, excitement, security, social approval, and self-respect.
Application
First, examine the four categories of judgments listed above. Consider the following questions carefully in relation to these:
- What can you do to improve the actual and perceived quality of your product or brand?
- How can you enhance your brand’s credibility?
- How well does your marketing strategy communicate your brand’s relevancy to people’s needs?
- How does your product or brand compare with those of your competitors?
Next, think carefully about the six brand feelings listed above. Which, if any, of these feelings does your current marketing strategy focus on? What can you do to enhance these feelings for your customers?
Identify actions that you need to take as a result of asking these questions.
Step 4: Brand Resonance – How Much of a Connection Would I Like to Have With You?
Brand “resonance” sits at the top of the brand equity pyramid because it’s the most difficult – and the most desirable – level to reach. You have achieved brand resonance when your customers feel a deep, psychological bond with your brand.
Break resonance down into four categories:
- Behavioral loyalty: This includes regular, repeat purchases.
- Attitudinal attachment: Your customers love your brand or your product, and they see it as a special purchase.
- Sense of community: Your customers feel a sense of community with people associated with the brand, including other consumers and company representatives.
- Active engagement: This is the strongest example of brand loyalty. Customers are actively engaged with your brand, even when they are not purchasing it or consuming it. This could include joining a club related to the brand; participating in online chats, marketing rallies, or events; following your brand on social media; or taking part in other, outside activities.
Application
Your goal in the last stage of the pyramid is to strengthen each resonance category.
For example, what can you do to encourage behavioral loyalty? Consider gifts with purchase, or customer loyalty programs.
Ask yourself what you can do to reward customers who are champions of your brand. What events could you plan and host to increase customer involvement with your brand or product? List the actions that you could take.
Example
Julie has recently been put in charge of a project to turn around an under-performing product. The product is a high quality, fair trade, organic tea, but it’s never achieved the sales and customer loyalty that the organization expected. Julie decides to use the brand equity pyramid to think about the turnaround effort.
Step 1: Brand Identity
Julie’s target customers are mid to high income, socially conscious women.
After careful analysis, she knows that she is marketing in the correct category, but she realizes that her marketing efforts aren’t fully addressing customer needs. She decides to change the message from “healthy, delicious tea,” to “delicious tea, with a conscience,” which is more relevant and meaningful to her target market.
Step 2: Brand Meaning
Next, Julie examines the product’s meaning, and looks at how the company communicates that meaning to its customers.
The performance of the tea is already moderately high; it’s a single-source, fair trade tea of a higher quality than the competition’s product. After assessing the organization’s service effectiveness, Julie is disappointed to find that many of her representatives lack empathy with customers who complain. So, she puts everyone through a comprehensive customer service class to improve responses to customer complaints and feedback.
Last, Julie decides to post to the company’s website personal stories from the fair trade farmers who grow and pick the tea. By doing this, she aims to educate customers on how beneficial this practice is for people around the world.
Step 3: Brand Response
After going over the four brand response judgments, Julie realizes that perceived quality might be an issue. The tea itself is high quality, but the pack size is smaller than the ones her competitors use. Julie doesn’t want to lower the price, as this might affect how customers assess quality, so she decides to offer more tea in each box in order to surpass customer expectations.
She also decides to enhance the tea’s credibility by becoming fair trade certified through an independent third-party organization.
Step 4: Brand Resonance
Julie knows that her target customers care deeply about fair trade. She decides to promote the organization’s efforts by participating in a number of fair trade events around the country.
She also sets up a social networking framework to involve customers in the organization’s fair trade efforts, and she creates a forum on the company website where customers can discuss issues surrounding fair trade. She also commits to championing the efforts of other fair trade organizations.
Key Points
Within the pyramid, the model highlights four key levels that you can work through to create a successful brand. These four levels are:
- Brand identity.
- Brand meaning.
- Brand responses.
- Brand relationships.
Within these four levels are six building blocks that further help with brand development. These six building blocks are salience, performance, imagery, judgments, feelings, and resonance.
Find this interesting and want to start Building Brand Equity For Yourself With the Best Apply Here
Being an entrepreneur seeking to develop my online business ,it is very helpful to see articles like this that help me in knowing how to develop my business and website and one of the aspect is developing a strong brand for my company. iI love how clear your content is, very beginner friendly and easy to understand. i will definitely be visiting your website more often. Thanks for sharing .
I am in the business of helping and coaching aspiring entrepreneurs in the home based business level and I find this article of yours helpful in crafting ideas on how to help my clients better. In simple words, it can be compared to “connecting with and meeting the customers where they are”. I like your example, Julie’s story, it demonstrates exactly what it takes to be there, meeting the customers where they are. With regard to pulsating what the market feels about our products, are online surveys qualify as a good medium for taking the pulse?
This article is very good, especially when you are new to the whole website thing. This will actually help you “focus” on how to do things and how to get to where you want to be, just by following the steps. Very good information on how to get started. This will definitely help me in figuring out who I am targeting and how. I still feel like I might need to work a bit more on my brand identity but I also feel I have a fair idea about it too. Great article that will come handy.
Hello, very interesting and informative article. Brand equity model seems like a very useful concept, as you mentioned if you want to make strong brand you need to understand many factors. I agree with you that it is really important that you know what your customers think and feel about your product. You made a good review, I`m sure it will be helpful for many people who just started with online business. Thanks for sharing with us!
I found this article highly interesting and can see this being of great use to me as I build my own brand. I have bookmarked this article as I will be referring back to it and most certainly be taking further action to pursue information on brand growth.
Thank you for a brilliant post that is more like a tutorial, Highly Engaging!
This is a great article because it really details the steps needed in order to launch a successful brand. The internet has been both a blessing and curse as it helps launch a brand quickly, but also has people thinking they can be an overnight success.
Your article shows how you have to go about launching the brand step by step and the work it takes to lay the foundation upon which you will build your brand.
Awesome post you got here Advisight! It was very complete and insightful. There are many different types of brand strategies that have learned over the past few years. They were based on target audiences, marketing campaigns and budgets. A well-received brand strategy has the potential to build brand equity and solidify its place as an established brand. Some companies also employ multiple strategies to increase the odds of a successful campaign. Your page is well informative and helpful, thank you. Wish I had this back then when I was just starting out.
Tony
Enjoyed your post a lot. Liked how you broke each stage of branding down and even went through what the customer or our audience that we are going after are asking themselves about us. Then you ave us application ideas or steps for each stage. The graphics you used really helped aid in bringing me along with each stage you mentioned.
This article will be a big help for anyone trying to build their brand. Thanks, and again, nice article.
This is a very comprehensive and informative article outlining the whole process of branding , building a trusted name and identity in the current marketplace. You have progressed through the understanding and application of establishing an identity, giving it meaning, clarifying the response and defining its resonance within the market..
It is a very professionally presented article and would be a valued piece of information for any board room of a company hoping to establish themselves with a recognizable brand.
This post has most definitely been the most helpful article I’ve read all day. I’m blown away at how so much of this just appears to be common sense, but a lot of the time we just don’t think about it. We take what we can with the little knowledge we have and do our best with it. This knowledge has truly shed a light on some of the concepts my brand has been missing. Especially in step 2 where you talk about the “brand meaning”. I need to have an ultimate goal with my business. One that stays consistent and all my efforts revolve around. I also need to keep this goal in front of me all the time as I work towards it so as to not get distracted from my ultimate purpose.
I needed this!
Thanks
Michael
This article of yours was quite instructive. It’ll be useful for myself as well since I’m in the process of building my own brand. I believe I’ll attract the customers & people I’m supposed to attract by being myself and staying true to myself & my purpose. Anyway, keep on dropping that good content.
I feel like I just completed a psychology class, you went into such great detail about branding, explaining so well about the brand response, and the brand resonance. I never really knew this stuff, I mean I knew a little about branding, but this is really in-depth good stuff you are presenting, and I just wanted to pop in and thank you for that. I know so much more what I need to be doing online now. Thanks.
I’m a small Electrical Contractor in Massachusetts and until now never really considered my “Branding”. This article was so informative and gave me the motivation to really think about the message I want to portray to my customers, I will be looking forward to learning as much as I can from Advisight.
Great information on building a brand and creating your brand identity. As an affiliate marketer, I assume my brand is myself and the niche of my site. Is that correct?
Having you customers know what your brand is, is obviously important, other wise why would they need to come to your site.
Does a brand need to be a product? I wouldn’t think so.
Thank you for this informative and useful information.
Commanding article! I have been searching for such an answer for what seems to be forever. I am a believer in having a plan and your brand equity model definitely fits the bill. I’m still struggling to fully figure out my brand identity. It may only be once I have more traffic to my site and review the analytics that I will have a better idea. Would you suggest I do a survey? Or would A/B testing be sufficient to determine my core customers?
This article is by far one of the best ones about building a brand that I have read lately. I was especially intrigued by step 2, the brand meaning. I always thought that the name we give our business would be our brand in some sort, but I was so wrong. Especially when we think about companies like Google or Amazon. Commitment and performance are what counts and what will bring trust and loyalty from our customers! What an eye-opener for me! I will try and apply those principles daily to my online business as well! I also have bookmarked your website for future reference!
I have learned a lot from this post. it is very clear what I need to do and apply on my own business.It all begins with your brand and how you want people recognize it. it is the first step to get your customers interested in what you have to offer and how they will remember you in the future.
Thank you very much for this detailed and professional information about the improvement of a brand. It has been a paradigm shift for me because until now I was focused on creating content on my blog, generating traffic and sharing in social media.However, I realize that there is much more about strengthening a brand and the way you describe it makes it seem simple, by breaking it down into smaller processes on which you can work to optimize them.
Thank you so much for this post, Brian.
I’ve bookmarked it because I want to read and re-read it but also to explore your site fully. I think there is much to learn from you.
Must admit I’ve only ever thought about my pages and posts and using keywords to get ranked. I’ve never thought about my “brand”, how it’s perceived and how I might generate more positive feelings towards it.
Clearly, companies like McDonald’s, Rolex and Apple put a huge amount of effort into this.
Your pyramid type diagrams are very helpful and both put it all into context and show a logical progression of how your business is perceived.
Fascinating and powerful stuff!
The keypoints are very helpful and should apply this to my brand. I really love the key points, brand identity, meaning, responses, and brand relationships.
It is all about adding value to your product. I think I might have to check out the program.
Thanks for the post, it really helped me understand the six building blocks.
I believe the message on creating a meaningful and worthy brand has just been simplified here for anyone who wishes to know about it. To be honest, this is really great and I’m grateful for sharing this out. Everyone wants to get involved in a brand these days but the creation is easy but making the brand well recognised is the issue and you have successfully broken it down here with the brand equity model. Wow! Thanks for sharing this out
Reading this article made me realise just how much I need to work on my brand and knowing exactly what it is about. I read some of these questions and couldn’t actually answer them which is pretty bad, considering I have been working on my website for a number of years now.
Analyzing my site like this is a great thing, and you have really made me think about what I am trying to achieve here. Does Advisight help you to identify just what these areas are, or must you know before you apply?
Well for starters we are currently going through an invite only stage but typically we identify the weak points and work on it with our clients.
Brand creation cannot be much more easier than you gave presented it right now and u value this so much. To excel in this world now, there is need to create a brand that is worth recognition from the whole word but it can only be achieved if the goals are well designed and explained. Thank you for explaining this. Knowing who we are and what we are would help to shape what we present out to people.
Thank you for this detailed instructions on making a brand strong. To be honest I have never looked into branding in such details as you presented. I thought that if I write some good and quality helpful information to my readers, then the brand (my website) will become naturally stronger and well-known with time. But after reading your article, I learned that there’s much more to branding (even just a website) that I thought. Thanks again!
I must say that this article is very helpful and informative. It is very important for anyone who just starts an online business to build a brand that will last for years. I have my online business for 6 months and I know that it is too early to think about the brand but your article helped me to understand its full meaning and what to expect.
I appreciate the breakdown you give in your article; all the way from brand identity to brand relationships. As I see it, first you need to let potential clients and customer know who you are (the first 3 steps). Then you need to build quality relationships with those same people. Seeing as how people are most likely to buy from those they know, like and trust, building these relationships is vital.
I see this as a great step by step guide in building your brand. Saving this article for future reference.
Thanks Again,
Ralph
I have learned so much from reading your post today about making a brand strong. I am a very visual person and I found your example of Julie turning her project around very helpful. It taught me to understand the process of applying the 4 step model. I will be working through these 4 key levels and see if I can better target my brand. Thank you so much for your insight.
I am a student and I am learning about branding and marketing business. This article is very important for me as a beginner and I am a lot of things in this article. As a student I only thing the brand is a very easy thing and it will only consider the logo and advertisement. But I read this article I know about many facts about branding and how to make strong brand within considering people’s psychological and social conditions. I know many more things I have to learn about branding and how to build a strong brand. Thank you lot give me this information and forced me to learn more.
Thank you for sharing such an informative post on branding. From your professional experience, how long does it take to build a brand equity? Also how much one should spend on building it? I am still in the process of building trust with my readers but there are many keys that you point out that I need to work on such as resonance. I have to go back into a drawing board and come up with a better strategy to build my brand.
For starters how much do you expect to make from your brand? Your ad budget should be as much at 30% of your expected profit. And secondly there is no time stamp on when your brand equity is built,but for most it takes 5 years to get a firm standing.
I’m working on creating a powerful brand name for my Nike sneakers group or can I call that a brand at all, well I guess that is all brand. I’ll be providing my followers with the best quality information and latest news on latest Nike sneakers. I’ll want to take a look at this Brand equity model for reference. Thanks a lot I’m sure every one who wants to get any business to succeed will need to build a powerful brand name.