Top Five Brand-Building Tips

1. Come in under the radar

Building a brand is a roll-out process, not a drop everywhere in the world at one time. The key to brand-building is to have something good that you roll-out in a very intelligent way. Maybe even invisibly for a while because you want to be under the radar screen of competitors.

2. Know Your Customer

You’ve got to understand and choose the customers you want to serve. Don’t just go after everyone. Define the target market carefully through segmentation and then really position yourself as different and as superior to that target market.

3. Own Your Brand

Businesses are no longer in a state of competition anymore. They are in a state of hyper-competition. So people are desperately looking for handles — functional features, emotional appeals — that will draw customers to their product.

4. Stay Ahead of the Competition

The worst thing is that if something works, your competitors are going to clone it and before you know it anything that you had as a differentiator is imitated by the others. So you must be in the business of constant innovation. Constantly ask yourself, ‘Three years from now, what will our differentiator be?

5. Make it an Experience

You must have seen or heard this language being used; “We’re in the experience design business.” Go the extra miles in your brand strategy; make it an experience rather than just mere product or service.

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