Learn how to make your brand unique and memorable to win customers’ hearts amidst growing competition.
In this article, I will discuss how to identify the uniqueness of your brand, choose the most effective marketing tools, and determine which communication channels are best suited for your business. You will learn how to create a visually appealing brand that stays in consumers’ minds, and how to build a community of loyal customers around it.
How to Understand What Makes Your Brand Unique
Brand uniqueness is about how you stand out from your competitors in the minds of consumers. In the marketers’ bible, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Jack Trout writes: «A brand is not a trademark but what defines your position in the consumer’s mind». Therefore, the best way to understand what makes your brand unique is to ask your customers.
For example, as a business owner, I conduct 1-2 in-depth interviews weekly, each lasting 1-1.5 hours with customers using a specific technology to find out what they value in our product, why they bought it, what they compared it to, and so on. Our marketers conduct dozens of such interviews monthly, but it is also important for me as the owner to have direct contact and stay in touch. A business owner who loses contact with customers will eventually cease to be one.
Tools for Increasing Brand Recognition
The most crucial marketing tool for increasing brand recognition is a carefully and professionally developed brand strategy. Without a strategy, other tools (social media, content marketing, targeted advertising, etc.) will be much less effective and sometimes even harmful. For example, a new marketer may develop a «brilliant» advertising campaign in their view that completely contradicts the brand the company has been building for many years.
Moreover, company culture is not what lives on paper in the corporate knowledge base, and CEO’s speeches twice a year, but what lives in the smoking rooms and the real attitudes of employees — to each other, to customers, to the founders.
When you have a working brand strategy, you can easily choose the tools that fit your budget and will work most effectively in your case.
How to Create a Memorable and Visually Appealing Brand
Unfortunately, it is impossible to give a universal answer to the question of how to create a memorable and visually appealing brand. Simply because you need to start from what your customers think by conducting in-depth interviews, panel studies, and ethnographic research. Many make the mistake of starting to create a brand with visuals — making a logo and corporate identity. In fact, visuals are created from the semantic level, that is, from the brand strategy.
We live in a world where functional product advantages are quickly copied by competitors, and to stand out, you need to appeal to the values and emotions of your target audience representatives. This is what you can learn from communicating with customers.
Your task through communication with customers is to find an emotional connection between them and your brand, and then you will understand how to strengthen it.
Which Communication Channels Are Most Effective?
It highly depends on the type of business. For instance, consider a business selling organic fertilizers wholesale and a premium segment women’s handbag retail store. The communication channels will be drastically different here.
It is important to constantly measure the effectiveness of communication channels. Small businesses at best limit themselves to researching the effectiveness of communication channels in terms of performance marketing, which is the return on advertising through sales via these channels. As the company grows, it becomes necessary to consider how advertising and other communications affect the company’s brand.
How to «Make» People Talk About Your Brand
The best way to «make» people talk about your brand is to create a product and brand that will change the existing market status quo, especially if it will fight some problem or injustice.
For example, few could imagine that in the taxi app market in the 2020s, someone could quickly develop and take drivers and customers from giants like Uber. But suddenly, InDrive appeared on the market, which made the idea of restoring justice its company (and brand) strategy. Instead of taking a lion’s share of the trip revenue from drivers, InDrive charges the driver only a fixed monthly fee for using the app, leaving all the trip revenue to the driver. It was this “fair” strategy that made ordinary people worldwide talk about InDrive, and it spread almost without advertising like wildfire.
There are other ways to make people talk about you, such as collaborations with stars and creative PR campaigns, but they are one-time and quickly fade. Truly viral brand spread is achieved only because consumers get huge value from the product and are interested in promoting it to their friends themselves.
In our company, there was such a case — resident Tagir Sagidov and his company Old Press, offering photo services in European cities in the style of old newspapers. Old Press employees photograph tourists with a retro camera, and within seconds, the person is on the front page of a newspaper. At the same time, the company does not sell these pictures but gives them away — people can donate the amount they see fit. As a result, a «Butterfly Effect» occurs — the company makes thousands of newspapers every day, gives emotions, and people, in turn, pass on this energy further.
Now, thanks to this unique concept, people plan their tourist routes in European cities in advance to definitely visit a city where Old Press is present and get photographed. Viral marketing worked when a tourist from South Korea published a photo in his blog, attracting the attention of many Korean tourists. Active social media management and strategic placement of photographers in key tourist spots also played an important role. Positive reviews and customer recommendations created a word-of-mouth effect, attracting new customers.
This case shows that product uniqueness, active use of social media, and positive reviews can make a brand well-known and in-demand without significant advertising costs.
How to Build a Community Around Your Brand
To create a community around your brand, it should provide not just functional value to customers but also give them the opportunity to find or enhance their identity. For example, the immense popularity of the iPhone and iPad arose because Apple made a big emphasis in marketing on creative people who are not geeks, do not know the technical details of gadgets, but simply want to create digital content using convenient and beautiful devices.
An «Apple» community has formed around the Apple brand, for whom the choice of a new phone boils down to whether to buy the new iPhone now or wait for the next model. This happened largely due to the emotional identification with these stylish people who so deftly and beautifully use Apple technology in their promo videos and materials.
Effectiveness of Brand Recognition Strategy
The effectiveness of the brand recognition strategy is measured by qualitative and quantitative research. For example, one of the classic methods is top of mind. This method involves surveying consumers to find out which brands come to mind first in a particular category of goods or services. This allows you to understand how much your brand is «on the surface» of their consciousness and how often it is remembered compared to competitors.
Qualitative research is conducted to understand the brand’s perception more deeply and identify emotional and rational factors affecting consumer preferences. These can be focus groups, in-depth interviews, and other methods that provide detailed information about the opinions and feelings of the audience.
After qualitative research, quantitative research is conducted to test hypotheses put forward during qualitative research and obtain statistically significant data on brand perception on a broader level. This may include large-scale surveys and questionnaires to measure brand awareness, recognition, and attitude numerically.
Adapting the Recognition Strategy to Changing Audience Needs
To adapt the brand strategy to changing trends and audience needs, you first need to conduct good qualitative research — study what the target audience thinks and feels about your brand, competitors, and what is happening in society.
Another thing to pay attention to is long-term trends and megatrends that affect your industry and customer behavior features. You can learn about megatrends from various sources, such as reports from analytical companies (for example, McKinsey, Deloitte), specialized research, and publications in industry media.
Regularly studying such sources will keep you updated on global changes and adapt your strategy accordingly. The results of these studies should be considered when creating or updating the brand strategy (primarily the brand platform and communication strategy).
Mistakes When Increasing Brand Recognition
A typical mistake is drastically changing the brand or its communication strategy based on the founders’ or top management’s fantasies and «brilliant ideas». This starts a vicious cycle when an unsuccessful turnaround in branding is then long and unsuccessfully tried to be saved through advertising budgets and new creative ideas.
To quote Jack Trout again: «If you want to succeed, do not ignore the positions of competitors, and do not deviate from yours». When making any changes in branding, it is necessary to consider competitors’ positions in buyers’ minds. And you can only find out by looking them in the face and sincerely being interested in what is important to them.
Creating a unique and memorable brand requires a deep understanding of your customers, careful strategy development, and constant adaptation to changing market conditions. Your brand’s uniqueness starts with what your customers value and continues through a well-designed brand strategy that considers industry trends and company culture. Constantly measure the effectiveness of your strategy and adapt it according to new trends and audience needs.
Tell us which PR campaigns or collaborations helped your brand become more recognizable?
