“Establishing a brand in a new market is tough. It takes a long to get brand name recognition.” – Mitch Corwin
Irrespective of the size and type of business, every company wants to make their brand stand out and apart. However, establishing and sustaining a highly recognized brand is a time-consuming and tedious process but the returns are rich. A highly recognized brand is one that is constantly exposed to and in the forefront with the target audience and current customers. The company’s efforts in creating a hype and building the awareness around the brand must be a consistent and focused activity. To ensure that you build and sustain a highly recognized brand your customers and prospective ones must be completely and thoroughly familiar with what you have to offer. By continuously putting your brand ‘out there’ and ensuring that your customers have top class experiences, your company will be able to ensure trust, dependability and most importantly loyalty for its brand. A highly recognized brand is not just that – it brings about increased business, better and more frequent referrals, happy testimonials and many other benefits for itself and the company.
In order to make and sustain a highly recognized brand it is crucial that the brand clearly spells out the unique selling proposition (USP) of your company. Bringing the USP in focus ensures that customers and target customers know why they must enter into or remain in business with your company. Whatever be the USP of your company – high quality products, or top class customer service or the lowest pricing for certain products – a brand that can uphold the sanctity of this USP will be a highly recognized brand sooner than later.
With competition increasing unabatedly – both from on-line companies to the traditional brick and mortar ones – companies must invest and engage in finding ways to attract and retain customers using innovative methods. It has become the need of the hour to not only make your brand sound and appear better, but actually be better than the others. Once you can establish why your brand is better, bigger, more effective and more value-adding and other such traits – you will have got yourself a highly recognized brand. Your brand must ‘announce’ your company, maintain its image and display its values – customers would find it easier to associate your brand to your company and vice versa. Your brand must be able to convey why it is the best for the customer’s business, what advantages it carries and why no other brand compares to it – doing so will make it a highly recognized brand that also has the loyalty, trust and respect of customers and other target audience.
Building a highly recognized brand is about ensuring that the brand is advertised, promoted and marketed in the same way both on-line and in-store. True that a lot of focus turned to e-commerce because of the surge of the internet and social media sites but customers still attach equal importance to being able to feel, touch, hold and inspect a product before buying and so in-store buying still remains as popular. In the process of promoting your brand ensure that your company’s website and real world store has an attractive design – great layout, well-designed shelves / pages, prominent displayed logo, eye-catching colors and detailing, professionally done campaigns and other such features that will catch and arrest the attention of the customers. Both – virtual and real stores – must enable customers to navigate through them smoothly and be able to ‘find’ whatever they are looking for with ease. Maintain uniformity between ‘both worlds’ such that customers are not confused and the brand becomes and remains a highly recognized brand. Provide your customers incentives to remain with your brand and lay out attractive schemes to attract prospective ones – both these sets of customers must be able to associate value-added promotions and incentives to your brand.
For a highly recognized brand, a company must ensure that there are some updates, fresh information, trendy appearance of campaigns and other such features associated with the brand. This keeps customers engaged and keen to know ‘what’s next’ thereby making your brand even more popular.
In addition to these aspects, it is crucial to also have a brand that is trusted and is known to be one with integrity. This is possible by ensuring that the promises made by your brand are delivered and the least amount of effort required from the customer. As customers, over time, are more willing to trust and also refer your brand and company to others. As the ‘good word’ about your company spreads, it will be much easier for you to have a highly recognized brand that stays in the mind of the customers.
Customers hate nothing more than being treated shabbily especially if they have given a company their business. They want to feel valued and important and to make your brand a highly recognized brand, they must receive prompt, agile and efficient service each time. Customer service levels often are the determining factor of whether a person / company becomes a customer and for how long they would remain one. Much has been written earlier too about the criticality of customer service.
For a highly recognized brand it is also necessary that it connects with the target audience. They must be able to see what values your company holds and they should be able to identify with the values and ‘personality’ of the company. Weaving a story around your brand will enhance your company’s chances of building an emotionalconnect with the audience. We have discussed earlier, that people most often buy for emotional reasons and hence being able to satisfy those needs will raise the popularity quotient of your brand.
Whatever your company does must reflect on the brand – exceeding their expectations, proactively assessing their needs and providing for both will not only gain business for you but also ensure that customers will know that they can depend on your company and brand and can turn to them when they need. Offering some value-added services, without cost to the customer but which for them will be something they will remember and associate with your company. Free seminars, conferences and other such events that will help your customers are a great to building a highly recognized brand. The idea is to ‘occupy’ the mind of your customers and prospective ones.
As a customer you know that you would return to a company’s website or check out the social media sites if there was something interesting the brand had to offer. Many companies are using blogs to entertain and educate their users and customers. Such informative content ensures that the readers and customers can associate it to your brand – a brand that offers more than just information about itself. This in turn builds a connection of consistent value with your brand, making it a highly recognized brand.
There many such methods to build awareness for your company and the brand. Companies could use some or a combination or even all the methods to dominate not just the market but also the emotional and mental space of its customers. Once you are able to build and sustain customer loyalty, the customers will ensure that the brand becomes a highly recognized brand and they would be proud to be associated with it. As is human nature, the more proud you are of something, the greater the desire to share it with others. Think of the amount of costs and effort your company will save on publicity and promotional efforts. Also the chances of success are much higher since customers tend to trust the word of other customers more than all the ‘bugle blowing ’ done by companies.