How to Bridge the Gap Between Creative and Strategy
7 Steps: Starting from Brand Development and Transitioning into Brand Salience
If you’re starting a brand, the first gut check you should have is that a brand is not just a logo alone. The distinct company name and logo only stand as secondary visual representations of the brand. The overall “brand” is what the public thinks and feels when they see products of the brand.
Let’s take this into consideration and see how the steps of brand development coincides with brand salience.
1. IDENTIFY THE TARGET AUDIENCE
The first steps taken when creating a brand are to identify the target audience. In order to do so, take a few days to brainstorm and think about who will most likely benefit from the brand. A brand is not meant to reach everyone, therefore it is better to choose a specific target than to want everyone as your target. A large target audience becomes too broad of a number and makes it harder to reach the demands of your potential consumers.
2. RESEARCH THE TARGET AUDIENCE
Now that you know who you want the target audience to be for the brand, identify other qualitative information that can help in the process of brand development. The more you know about our target audience, the more you can work towards reaching their specific demands. Get to know the potential consumer and discover their wants, needs and individual behaviors. Go outside and experience it first hand as you watch the interacts people have with a brand and even with one another. Analyze your own actions and play close attention to your behavior and how you go about your day to day as you interact with brand(s) as well. If the physical work is too much, this research can also be done with the help of a marketing science and analytics team; who have access to certain measurement vendors and are trained in tools of their own that can help in identifying target audiences and audience behaviors.
Take the wants and needs of the target audience and come up with an identified goal for the brand. In the above image, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that lays out the core needs of a person in 5 tiers. When researching human behavior Maslow discovered that the needs of some people take more precedent than others and out of them all the “need for physical survival” is the one that motivates our human behavior. Once this is accomplished, the following levels are what motivate people to move up the ladder (or triangle in this case).
3. CREATE A STRONG BRAND POSITIONING
This is how you see the brand positioned in the market against its competitors. The brand positioning is also identified as the conceptual place you want to own in the mind of the targeted consumer. You want your targeted consumer to think of you when they think about the benefits of a particular product — and as a result they will choose your brand.
Any brand positioning should tell a story that evokes the emotional values and benefits of the consumer and yet continues to align with the brand objectives consistently.
4. DEFINE THE MISSION STATEMENT
Establishing the brand positioning helps to identify the key values of the brand, which match the wants and needs of the targeted audience. In return, the potential consumer looks to the brand as one they like and can trust.
Now, the brand’s mission statement basically supplies a message of existence by formally summarizing the values of the company in one strong, concise sentence/quote.
5. DESIGN A LOGO AND TAGLINE
This is the most creative aspect within this category because it can go from a few weeks to a few months to create a strong logo/ tagline. There are different levels of the creative process that brought to life by art directors, graphic designers and copywriters when designing the brand logo and tagline.
The most important insight to take from this is to make sure that the graphic logo and tagline are aligned and that they both connect back to the brand cohesively.
Everything the logo and tagline to the voice/ tone and personality of the brand will reflect back to the mission statement and further speak/catch the attention of your audience.
6. BUILD BRAND MESSAGE/ ELEVATOR PITCH
The brand message/ elevator pitch allots time for the brand to express itself to the consumer and communicate on a level that the consumer will understand. It goes past the logo, tagline, mission statement and focuses on who the brand is, what the brand offers and why the people ( target audience) should care. In return, this will make a direct, emotional connection to the consumer. When drafting a brand message/ elevator pitch —keep it simple. Point out why the product is important to the consumer rather than stating what the product can do. This language is more engaging and will grab the attention of the consumer through an emotional connection.
7. SUSTAIN BRAND SALIENCE (Last but not least…)
Brand Salience is the degree to which your brand is thought about or noticed when a customer is in a buying situation. According to the Associated Network Theory (ANT), the human mind is made up of nodes of information and when the consumer is in buying action, these nodes are activated based on individual concepts, things or feelings that they have or come to mind when associated with that they see.
Brand fluency assists in having consumers connect with the distinct assets of your brand. This level of familiarity that consumers have with your brand comes from it’s distinct assets, such as, logos, colors, taglines, spokesperson and etc. This is why developing these when creating a brand is highly important. On the other hand, brand feeling ( the emotional charged nodes in the brain) shapes many of the brand associations we make in our minds and has a long lasting effect on our decision making when it comes to buying branded products. It aligns with psychologist Antonio Damasio’s belief that “We are not thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think.”
While brand fluency, brand feeling and brand salience work together, all three make up the effects of the Dual Process Theory — which is the idea that there are two systems in the brain that control our (consumer) behavior. System 1 is considered the autopilot where 95% of the brain is quick and automatic. System 2 is considered the pilot where 5% of the brain activity is slow and focused.
..and we want brand salience to be considered in the early stages of brand development in order to lead in the System 1 way of thinking from The Dual Process Theory.
For more information on brand salience, read Awareness in Advertising: Why Are There So Many Types & Which Ones Actually Matter?
