5 Brand Development Exercises to make you stand out

If you wanted to actually create real relationships with your customers, then you know that great products and good service don’t cut it anymore. Brand development has gone far beyond just visual elements to include emotional considerations and characteristics while considering the customer journey. This is critical information about your customers that they can relate to. But their characteristics are just one-half of the equation. Your brand is the other half. These 5 exercises will help with your brand development so you can meet your customers as more than just a business.

I. Brand Archetypes

Just like you, your brand has a personality. Identifying that personality can be tricky. It may overlap with the traits of decision-makers in your organization! In some cases, the overlap can make brand communication natural and easy. But this could also clash with the brand image your customers have in mind.

You can either take a great brand archetype quiz or have founders and decision-makers take up a personality quiz while trying to keep the characteristics of the brand in mind and aggregate those responses. You can also use this one by Vision One as a starting point.

Renowned Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung created 12 archetypes as part of the “collective unconscious” of the entire human race. All brands begin to exhibit a character through their goals, values, communication, and purpose. These human psyche archetypes were adapted to apply to brands as well. Below are just a few examples:

II. The Uncommon Denominator

This exercise requires you to make lists, be honest with yourself, and know your competitors. Simply put, A common denominator is just something that is shared by all members of a group or sets of data! But that’s no use for brand development.

You have to outline your UNcommon denominator. This should be a factor or feature not shared by other groups or data sets and playing to your strengths.

Let’s apply this to your brand development exercise by making 3 lists:

1. All your customer’s interests, needs, and preferences related to your brand offering

This includes how they like to purchase, how they connect with you, what they say or think about the kind of offering you sell, their pain points, and challenges. Explore their expectations for quality, speed, budget, or service. Considering their likes and behavior is +++. Don’t stop at how and what questions, ask yourself the WHY questions that your customers answer as well. For eg. Why do I need this product/service?

2. Your competitor’s strengths and features

Never do what you do because your competitors are also doing it. BUT, don’t ignore them altogether. Find the top 5 competitors in your space. Place regional weightage as well. These must be competitors who actually stand a chance of winning the business that you want. Now list their services, their style, value proposition, and any information they’ve made public on their website and socials.

3. Your strengths and features

This is the easiest list of them all. Be honest, use feedback from the past, and list what you do well or better. If you’re confident of fulfilling service in the near future that you don’t offer now, go ahead and include it. Don’t restrict yourself to your product or services as well. Talk about your values, organization, people, and work style. Anything and everything that you are proud of, and know is a winner, should make this list!

III. The Law of Focus

First proposed by Al Ries & Jack Trout in their bestseller “The 22 immutable laws of marketing”, the law of focus simply states that one of the strongest was to build brand equity and increase recollection and recognition of any brand is to own a word, a concept, a phrase in the mind of your audience or customers.

Follow the steps below to complete the exercise:

1. Create a manual list or use MS excel/Spreadsheets to list all the phrases, keywords, and descriptors. Bonus tip: If you have words to position your brand as a hyper-niche (a niche within a niche) then you’re in for a relatively simpler process here.
   
   
2. Take out a dictionary, use a thesaurus or go online and look for synonyms or adjectives for your top phrase, keywords, and descriptors from the above list.
   
   
3. Don’t try to get fancy and create a new word, and ignore any overly complicated words. Remember: Simple is memorable! Going for things like “high quality”, “fast service”, and “ low prices” just makes it difficult for you because that is the focus for every company that isn’t doing these brand exercises. So, THINK DIFFERENT! (which are coincidentally Apple’s focus words.)
   
   
4. If you land on any word that your competitor is using in their brand message, their about section, or in a lot of their posts, then you have to think of a new word or synonym for it.  It is tough to create your own “space” in someone’s mind if another brand is also associated with the same phrase or word.
   

Your final output for this exercise isn’t just the word list itself. Try to create a value proposition statement that includes as many of your list words as possible. What is a value proposition? 

According to Hubspot:

“A value proposition describes what sets your product or service apart from competitors. It gives an overview of the benefits a product or service provides.”

You can further include anything that your brand stands for that is different or even rare in your field. You should have plenty of terms to work with provided you have completed the above exercise.

IV. The Benefit Ladder

One of the primary areas of focus for any brand is understanding how it can turn the benefits it provides to customers into a brand image. Despite any marketing efforts to shape a brand identity and control how the brand positions itself in the marketplace, the brand image is determined only by customers. The brand image is how your customers perceive your brand.

Using a benefit ladder helps with controlling the narrative to a certain extent by ensuring that you communicate the benefits your customers stand to receive as a result of purchasing your offering, signing up to your service or associating themselves with your brand in any way!

The Brand Benefits Ladder was first introduced by “the father of modern marketing” Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller to help with brand positioning within the marketplace. The applications are now wider than just positioning, and the ladder (in this case) will present you with the overall brand value that you can leverage into the brand image you want your customers to see you as!

5. Brand Purpose

The primary purpose of most organizations and brands includes success (financially and otherwise), but purpose-driven organizations have been able to survive longer and maintain success, leaps, and bounds over those that aren’t. 

With this exercise, we are going to try and uncover your brand purpose! Let’s first understand the factors that go into discovering that very purpose:

1. Strengths of the brand or organization
   
2. Interests of the brand/organization as a whole (sum of all its parts, or an average)
   
3. The things that the brand or people collectively care for, and are passionate about
   
4. Ways that the brand can monetize or attain benefit 
   

The brand purpose is at the intersection of the 4 factors. This will be your North Star, everything your brand does must be aligned with your brand purpose for you to truly be “purpose-driven”. The key advantage is that your brand and its offerings feel more like a movement than a business. People truly connect with each other and share pride and affection for everything you stand for as a brand!

Conclusion

And there you have it!

5 brand development exercises that can help you carve a space for yourself in the hearts and minds of your customers. The other piece to the puzzle is to focus on your customers. Create specific customer personas and feed that into a clear and useful marketing planning model like SOSTAC and together you can have a balance that will yield great results!