How to Boost Mobile App Brand Equity
In today’s world, a brand means so much more than an eye-catching logo, cute mascot or fun theme song. A brand lays the concrete foundation needed for a company to grow. It determines the values, morals, goals, ambitions and meaning — it sets the tone for everything. But how can you measure the success of that foundation?
Through brand equity. Brand equity acts as a framework for marketers to gauge the success of their brand by evaluating consumers’ emotions and reactions to their positioning. Within this framework marketers can understand the value of their brand in relation to direct competitors, making brand equity an extremely valuable measurement in crowded industries such as banking.
So if you’re Bank of America, how do you stand out? How can you convince consumers to trust you with their money? By laying the best foundation anyone has ever seen — by strengthening your brand and focusing heavily on brand equity. Developing strong brand equity among your target audience leads to long-term success for your company.
Developing Brand Equity
I’m going to be honest — there is no special formula or explicit “do these five tasks to be the best.” Trust me, I wish there was. But what I can give you are guidelines and suggestions. In a recent Forbes article, Kevin Lane Keller, a marketing professor at Dartmouth College, outlined four factors needed to successfully build brand equity: salience, meaning, response and resonance.
1)Salience
Salience refers to the prominence of your brand and whether or not it stands out. It is how people recognize your brand. If you’re Best Buy it’s probably from your contrasting blue and bright yellow colors. If you’re Geico it’s probably from your talking gecko. So when designing your mobile app, make these trademarks a part of the experience. First, keep a consistent presentation of your brand across platforms. Though an overused saying most of the time, repetition really is key here. Presenting your brand consistently and repetitively can help your company and your consumers — increasing revenue by 23% while driving home brand impressions and remembrance.
Secondly, design a colorful app logo. According to a study conducted by the University of Loyola, color increases brand recognition by up to 80%. It takes 5–7 brand impressions before a consumer remembers a brand, so make those impressions quickly and make them count.
2)Meaning
Meaning refers to how you communicate what your brand stands for. Like I said earlier, your brand includes your morals, values and goals. To build brand equity — share these characteristics. Create a voice. Create a persona through your brand. When doing so, make sure you have a clear and concise brand message that is transparent. In a time when 54% of people think companies do not operate with their best interests in mind, it’s extremely important to deliver on promises and own up to mistakes. This will maintain and improve consumer trust.
One great way to communicate your messaging is through social media. Use platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and LinkedIn (aka: the top 5) to post content about your brand. But most importantly, use these platforms to interact with consumers. 45% of people will unfollow a brand if their activity is heavily dominated by self-promotion. Post videos of your new or updated app in action, repost stories or tweets from happy customers, reply to questions or concerns on Twitter. While your brand represents a company, don’t forget that it also represents the humans that stand behind it.
3)Response
Response refers to how people respond to your brand (yes, this is fairly obvious). I see response fitting in two different categories: 1) actual written responses through marketing channels and 2)new users or customers.
For the first, establishing your brand’s expertise takes time. A lot of time. After launching your mobile app, you may not get the initial response you had dreamed of. And that’s okay. Maybe consumers don’t see you as a thought leader in the space yet — so change that. Write content on industry trends, evaluate competitors, interact with your customer base. There are a ton of marketing strategies that can help you grow your presence and in turn grow your response rate.
For the second, growing your user base is a never ending cycle. While your branding should be unique and engaging, you need to tie all your branding efforts into moving the customer acquisition needle. New customer acquisition remains the number one priority for marketers and brand managers today (34%), according to a recent survey. And this is for good reason. Without a growing customer base, your mobile app will not reach the ranks among the app store and users may choose a competitor over you.
4)Resonance
Resonance refers to consumers actively sharing and discussing your brand, even if they are not currently making purchases. The best way to create resonance among your consumers is to produce content that will touch them emotionally. Customers with an emotional connection to a brand have a 3x higher lifetime value (LTV). Additionally, “65% of people reported that they when they feel an emotional connection to a brand it is because they get a sense that, ‘They (brands) care about people like me.’” That deep emotional connection will keep a company at their top of mind during purchase and even afterward.
Mobile app brand equity doesn’t have to be intimidating. Take your time, identify your target audience and strategize. Design an eye-catching icon, create a unique voice, show your true colors, and always remember that behind the social media profiles are real humans — so treat them as such. Salience, meaning, response and resonance are four fancy words that can be summed up into one clean, less-intimidating sentence:
Create brand equity by making your brand (and products) easily recognizable, memorable, and superior in quality and reliability.
