Brand Building

The very first step to do is to try to understand what your brand is all about. We need a way to comprehend the context of what your brand is all about before people should try to understand your brand.

This is a crucial step that most people do not, and possibly won't, do because they want to start things off very quickly. Without doing this prior to building your brand, you probably will miss important detail about your identity later on.

After we have successfully determined what your brand is all about, we can start defining how the brand should be. This is a different concept of understanding your brand. This step is where we start defining, depicting, structuring, and even managing the promises and core values of your brand.

There is a saying: “brand is all about promises that are kept”. It is indeed a set of promises because people are paying your brand for the collection of benefits. There, promises defined need to be kept. Promises made, promises kept. A brand is all about promises that are kept.

Now that you know what you want to deliver within your promises, people interacting with your brand are not dealing with the promises. In the end, they would only feel or experience the promises that are delivered. In order to help people interact with your brand, you would need an identity for it to help your audience remember it.

The identity lives up to the promises that are made previously. The whole idea of a brand identity is like giving an identity to a person. You would like to know how they speak, look, and behave. The same goes for your brand. We need to define how it speaks (the tone of voice), how it looks (the brand identity, visual identity, logo, etc), and even how they behave (the brand personality).

At the final step, before going back to the first step again (this is normally the cycle of a brand-building process), you would need to measure your brand performance. This could be achieved by numerous techniques and strategies.

The obvious and the most modern way is to develop your brand guideline. The guideline serves as a touchpoint of your member's knowledge of your brand in practice. The greater your member know about your brand, the higher the score you would get. This step is also called the Brand Equity.