How to Establish Your Brand

To recap, your brand represents how the general public views your company. It’s the emotional responses people feel (good or bad) when they encounter your business or your products.

Apple has an incredibly strong brand: When we think about Apple, most of us think about high-quality, groundbreaking, gorgeous electronic products. Similarly, Disney has built an extremely valuable brand: For many of us, just hearing the name or seeing the company’s logo triggers thoughts of family-friendly content we can trust, or family vacation experiences we’ll remember fondly forever.

The value of those two brands—meaning the public’s trust and overwhelmingly positive feelings about Disney and Apple—allow those companies to enjoy industry dominance year after year, even as ever-more competitors enter these markets and offer less-expensive alternative products.

But you don’t need to be a multibillion-dollar mega-corporation to establish a brand for your company. Building a brand isn’t something you wait to do until you have enough funding, enough customers, or enough media attention. In fact, the opposite is true: Establishing a unique brand should be one of the first major initiatives a new business takes when it launches.

 

Why is it so important to establish a unique brand, anyway?

The barriers to entry in just about every industry have fallen so sharply in recent years that virtually no business can expect to become or remain successful if they simply offer a commodity product or service—even if today they can offer it more cheaply than their competitors. 

Eventually, another company will come along and find a way to undersell that business. 

Which means that to succeed today, a business needs to distinguish itself from the rest of the market. It must establish a unique voice and set of values that set it apart, and it must develop a genuine relationship with its customers. When a business does this—when it establishes a successful brand—it creates a long-term bond and trust with customers that will be very difficult for any competitor to challenge.

That’s why establishing your brand is so valuable. Here are four ideas for doing it.

 

4 ideas for establishing your company’s brand

1. DETERMINE WHO YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE, AND SPEAK DIRECTLY TO THEM

 Have you ever wondered why Apple has never introduced a $79 version of the iPhone? Or why they didn’t launch a low-cost, stripped-down iWatch designed to compete against the Fitbit? The company could certainly capture a greater share of the market if they expanded their product catalog to include less-expensive models. So why haven’t they done so? 

Simple: Apple has always positioned itself as a high-end company developing premium products for the type of people who are willing to pay more for the top of the line.

Apple doesn’t apologize for the fact that its laptops are often cases twice, even three times as expensive as entry-level laptops available from other computer makers. In fact, they proudly stand by the high cost of their computers, because it reinforces and strengthens the message they’re sending specifically to their target customers: You, the Apple user, understand the unique value of an Apple product and are happy to pay for that unique value. 

This is one proven way to establish a unique brand: Identify your target customer, ideally a subset of the population as opposed to the entire market, and then speak just to those people. They’ll sense your company’s authenticity, and this will help you establish trust with that market.

In fact, as you can see with Apple, when you consistently speak only to your target customers—to the exclusion of everyone else—you will often find that the broader market senses your authenticity as well, and people you aren’t even targeting will come looking for your products too.

 

2. OFFER SOMETHING NEW OR DIFFERENT

 This is likely the most difficult route to creating a unique brand, but if you can pull it off, you can own an entire market—at least for a while.

Think of TiVo. When it hit the market, almost no one in the world knew what a DVR was. But within a couple of years, TiVo had educated us, and the company had hit the brand jackpot. Millions of people were using the company’s own name in verb form—as in, “I’ll have to TiVo the show because I’ll be out of town that weekend,” or, “I TiVoed the Yankee game last night and I haven’t watched it yet, so please don’t tell me what happened.”

Creating an entirely new category, as TiVo did, is one of the fastest ways to establish a brand for your company. 

And the new category you create doesn’t have to an entirely new product. It could be something new you add to any part of the customer experience. Domino’s Pizza introduced the concept of guaranteed home delivery within 30 minutes (or the order is free).

That was a new idea that caught on with millions of people and generated billions in sales for Domino’s—and tremendous brand value—despite the fact that, as the company admitted later, Domino’s didn’t make very good pizza.

 

3. GIVE YOUR CUSTOMERS A GREAT STORY THEY CAN TELL THEMSELVES

When they unveiled the Prius, Toyota hit on a brilliant brand-building strategy: Consumers could drive a car that would signal to family, friends, colleagues, and everyone they passed on the road that they were doing their part to preserve the environment.

For decades, car companies have built brands by giving their customers unique stories they could tell themselves. Think of how driving a Ferrari or Porsche allowed the owners to feel about themselves. Or the American-made muscle cars of the 1960s and 70s. Volvo positioned itself almost exclusively as the “safe car” for parents who worried about driving their young children around.

All of these car manufacturers created unique stories for their target customers—not stories about the cars, but stories that those car buyers could tell themselves about themselves.

With the Prius, the first car to advertise itself primarily as a “green vehicle,” Toyota came up with maybe the most compelling buyer-centric story ever for an automaker: Buy our car, and you’ll be saving the planet.

That story was so powerful, in fact, that it enabled Toyota to sell Priuses in those first years even though the car itself was riddled with performance, reliability and even gas-mileage problems. 

Give your customers products that let them create a positive narrative about themselves, and you’ll grow a beloved brand.

 

4. ESTABLISH PUBLIC TRUST—EVEN IF THAT MEANS HIGHLIGHTING YOUR WEAKNESS

People love an underdog. The original Rocky movie—one of the best underdog stories ever told—won the Best Picture Oscar in 1977. (And of course the Rocky formula has been copied a hundred times in Hollywood since then, because we never get tired of a good underdog movie.)

With that in mind, one great way to establish a unique brand is to highlight the fact that your company is an underdog, struggling to bring great products to market but facing an uphill battle from stronger competitors or other outside forces.

One of the best examples ever of this strategy is the Avis “We try harder” advertising campaign of the 1960s.

In those days, Avis was the second-biggest car-rental service, behind Hertz. So they decided to play up this fact in a series of ads, as a way of simultaneously showing honesty, vulnerability and a commitment to better service. The original campaign slogan was, “When you’re only number 2, you try harder. Or else.” Then it morphed into the even more memorable “We try harder.” And it netted the company millions of dollars in revenue and massive public goodwill—in other words, greater brand value. 

Remember, your brand exists in your customers’ minds and hearts. It’s how they feel about your product when they see it or hear its name. Establishing trust with those customers—even if that means making your company a bit vulnerable—is another great way to establish a unique connection with your target customers and establish a strong brand.