Strategy

A brand is the perceived image of the product or service you sell.
​
​Branding is the strategy to create that image.  
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• Customer journey
• Tone of voice
​• Tell a story
• Name your business

Build magic experiences for your customers

Brands are on the world stage 24/7. All your brand touchpoints need to be branded to give the same look and feel. You want your customer’s buying process to come across as a seamless experience. ​

Brand management is the planning and maintenance of everything that goes into defining your brand, from design and communication to brand behaviour. Brand touchpoints are the interactions and exposures that a consumer can have with a brand, such as:

• Website
• Blog
• Social media platforms 
• Your employees (they are all brand ambassadors)
• Media, ads
• Packaging
• Your shop front and/or events
• Reviews
• Customer service

The customer journey 

The customer journey is a detailed outline of every step a person takes to become a paying customer. The starting point for this process is unique to everyone and by mapping out your customer journey you get an understanding of all the information (touchpoints) a customer needs.

How are they discovering your business?
How do they research?
Any snags along the way?

​Shoppers are looking for magic moments. Here's the journey:

Awareness
Customers decide they have a problem and begin to look at solutions via search engines, social media, ads or word-of-mouth. Show them how you can help them.

Consideration
Here customers want to narrow the field to those products or services that meet their initial criteria. They look at websites, blogs and product pages to compare products and services.

Decision
They look at reviews and customer ratings and decide among their options to buy from you.   

​Retention
This is where you provide customer support to ensure the customers that they made the right decision. You want your customers to feel satisfied.

Loyalty (and if done right, advocacy)
The ultimate goal is for your customer to become a brand advocate, by recommending your brand to others.

Tone of voice

Communicating with a consistent tone of voice builds trust, authority and likability and adds an extra dimension of personality to your communications.

It might be professional, casual, or even funny, but in order to establish an emotional connection that will lead to your audience trusting you and buying from you, you have to communicate in a way that they will believe.

Ascertain what type of words can and cannot be used within your tone of voice, so that your content embodies the personality of your business.

​When you have found the right words you need to define a writing style. Keep in mind who you will be writing for.

​One way to go about it is to emulate an existing publication. What does your audience read? The Financial Times? The Sun?

Tell a story

Creating a brand story is about building something that people care about. Something they want to buy into. People do not buy products and services. They buy stories and relationships.

Storytelling allows you to present information to your customers that resonates with them on an emotional level. But your story is not just what you tell people. It is what they believe about you, based on the signals your brand sends out about what you do and what you stand for.

​Everything you do, each element of your business, is part of your brand story, from your logo design and marketing material, to interaction with your team or staff.

Name your business

Your business name needs to be unique and memorable, it should be easy to say and you want it to work well as a web address. The shorter, the better. It should reflect the character of your business. You should also make sure that the name doesn’t translate into something inappropriate in a different language.

Use the founder’s name 
​Hewlett-Packard (David Packard and William Redington Hewlett), Marks & Spencer (Michael Marks and Thomas Spencer) and Boots (John Boot) are a few examples.   

Describe what it is 
Mark Zuckerberg originally wrote Facebook as a social network for the community at Harvard. A face book is a printed or online directory helping students get to know each other.

​Make an acronym
Richard Saul Wurman created TED to inspire greater communication between 3 industries: Technology, entertainment, and design.

Make up a word 
Get your creative juice flowing. The name Google came about by accident.

Pick a geographic origin
Jeff Preston Bezos, the founder of Amazon, picked the largest river in the world to communicate Amazon’s vast selection of books.

Describe what it does 
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is a perfect example. It’s used to explore the Internet.

Add a Prefix or Suffix
You can turn a common word into a product name simply by adding a prefix or suffix to it. Examples are Apple’s iPhone, iPad and Audi A3, A4 series.

Change Spellings 
Flickr and Liquid-Plumr use real words that are misspelled. It’s creative and helps when the name you want is already trademarked or the related domain names are already taken.

Take a word out of context 
Apple’s voice-activated assistant Siri was named by its creator Dag Kittalaus. He had planned to name his daughter Siri, which means “beautiful woman who leads you to victory” in Norwegian. Until he had a son.

Use a Verb
You can use a verb as your product name, like Bounce dryer sheets or Apple’s iPod Shuffle. Some examples of brand names that have turned in to generic verbs are Hoover, Tipp-Ex and Google.

That's it for Chapter 2. Next chapter will be posted on 16.11.21.

​I would really appreciate your feedback in the comments below. No need to fill in website or email if you do not wish to do so... Thank you!

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