Branding Strategy for Product, Service, Personality

Building a Brand

When launching an e-commerce initiative or new service, the initial phase is creating awareness about your brand identity and how it can add value to others. You need to think of a long term successful branding strategy and continuously build momentum. Be smart, attentive, and persistent with your efforts.

Do you stand out?

Even if you have a digital marketing strategy well planned out for your business, it may or may not work due to the following:

Your campaign is not compelling enough to grab more than spur-of-the-moment attention from your target market.
There is a lot of competition (direct and indirect) marketing themselves online.
When a target prospect decides to buy because of your product features (or not), you found out PRICE, rather than value, is the highest influencing factor.

Does your online presence stand out?

With the popularity of e-commerce and digital marketing, entrepreneurs are encouraged to create their website, social media profiles, among others. Those who do this in a rush often find themselves with the following situation:

No compelling “About Us” write-up that communicates the value proposition of their company, products, or services.
Not enough write-up for each product or service offered. Sometimes, resorting to copying what others have done online and modified it.

Branding Strategy and Messaging for MSMEs

Not everyone can afford to get the services of an effective branding strategy expert. In my classes, I encourage participants to take the Brand Fascination Profile. This a test that anyone can take to assess what makes their product or service or brand fascinating to others.

The test result gives you:

Your brand’s Fascination Advantage.
The 5 adjectives you can use to describe your brand.
The 4 marketing pillars you need to observe whenever marketing a product or service.

Are you fascinating?

According to Sally Hogshead, author of Fascinate and How The World Sees You, there are 7 Fascination Advantages that you can use in communicating your uniqueness. Taking the Brand Fascination assessment will help you discover what get others attracted to your MSME or your own brand including:

Power – the language of confidence
Think about: Communicate opinions regarding the industry segment you are in.
Innovation – the language of creativity
Think about: Rather than follow how others do it, consider how can you be more creative in positioning a product or service.
Passion – the language of relationship
Think about: Focus on how you can engage your customers – eliciting a “wow” effect with the way you communicate.
Prestige – the language of excellence
Think about: What method or technique or way of doing business that you want to be the best at. Make that your signature. Emphasize in your communication.
Trust – the language of stability
Think about: How can you make your product or service trustworthy?
Mystique – the language of listening
Think about: How can we make our prospects want to learn more?
Alert – the language of details
Think about: How can we make our prospects take action now?

Utilizing the 5 Adjectives to Describe Your Brand

When you take the Brand Fascination test and review your results, one of the important insight is the 5 adjectives you can use to improve your product or service write-up. Use it to make your brand positioning stand-out.

For this example, my result is Power and its 5 adjectives are purposeful, goal-oriented, decisive, assertive, opinionated.

Here’s an example:

Original write-up:

The Certified E-Commerce Specialist, Entrepreneur, Professional Program is a training course designed for individuals who would like to learn the why-what-how of e-commerce and build a credible showcase of e-commerce projects completed.

Here’s the revised one using my Brand Fascination results:

The Certified E-Commerce Specialist, Entrepreneur, Professional Program is a goal-oriented training course for decisive individuals who are purposeful in learning the why-what-how of e-commerce. Designed to help assertive students in building a credible portfolio showing their unique opinionated style.

Use the 5 adjectives as is. Using a variation can lessen its impact.

As a service provider handling online presence on behalf of MSMEs, knowing how to use Brand Fascination will help improve your writing and communication approach focused on your client’s differentiation.

4 Marketing Pillars

Another important aspect of the report is the four marketing pillars that serve as your “voice” guide in communicating your Brand Fascination.

For Power, this includes:

Lead the way
Take control
Pursue specific goals
Voice your opinions of authority

Here’s an example of how I use this:

Lead the way
We work with government agencies in designing e-commerce training programs aimed at training MSMEs and aspiring freelancers to become competitive. Helping them get online buyers or clients as a result.
Take control
We develop certification training programs that produce compelling evidence output attesting to the expertise gained by our students and graduates.
Pursue specific goals
We are one with the government in enabling 100,000 MSMEs (including professionals) to do e-commerce.
Voice opinions of authority
We focus our students to embark on projects that will help in enabling more people to embark in e-commerce.

On your write-ups, the 4 marketing pillars need not be included, but the essence should be.

When there is so much noise in the online world, it is important for your message to connect and fascinate. Build your brand equity early and continuously.

Think About Making Your Marketing Message Stand Out

Whenever you develop and review educational and marketing materials in relation to your branding strategy, think about:

Did I do my best to attract my desired customers?
Did I do my best to communicate that “I am the best choice”?
Did I do my best to convince the prospect I am worth trying?
Did I do my best to make my prospects take action on my offer now?
Did I do my best to keep my customers loyal?