A brand is bigger than a product and even multiple products combined, for that matter. While a product can be called a singular entity that just performs the function it’s designed for, a brand is what defines the relationship between the customer and you. A brand owes trust, credibility, and promise of delivery to its customers and prospects. These are also the pillars that distinguish your brand from the rest. By making your product into a brand, you integrate what they both individually offer to the customer. That is — an actual commodity, along with the promise of trust, credibility, and delivery. And if executed wisely and smartly, this can prove to be greatly successful.
Here’s how you can make your simple product a brand.
1. Does the product hold enough significance?
Before deciding to make a brand out of your product, you need to ask yourself these questions —
“Does this product hold enough significance for the customer that making it into a brand would benefit the customer and attract greater attention from people ?”
Since making the product into a brand will mean an increase in its cost, will the customer be willing to pay more in exchange for the new added benefits that come with the product now that it is a brand in itself?
Does the promise of the brand apply effectively in increasing the value of the product in a way that will make the whole deal more compelling for the customer?
If upon studying, analyzing, and understanding your market and your target audience, the answers to these questions come out to be positive, then you may very well be on your right path.
2. Pin-point your Objective
What is your mission?
Address the reason as to why you want to make your product a brand.
What specific aspect do you aim to address or offer by making a brand out of your product? Or to put it simply, what do you have in mind that will become the selling point of the brand?
It can be anything from just the premium appeal that the product offers or you can also cash in on emotional value if your product has any link to it. Integrating such factors into your branding strategy is a common trend and often proves to be beneficial.
3. Define parameters of the brand — distinguish the regular product from the brand
In order to establish the brand, you need to modify the package that the product is. The offering as a whole (regular product offering) will require a facelift. Decide which parameters need new changes and upgrades over the regular product.
Learn what your customers and your prospects want from the product and what more could they be asking of the product. This can either be observed through market trends and customer behavior or through surveys.
Know what you will be selling and whom you will be selling to, then design the brand parameters accordingly.
Frame an outline of the modifications your product-offering will get and then specify it into the form of benefits and features that the customer will enjoy if he/she buys from the ‘brand’.
For example,
- Providing better & advanced finance options on the product to suit various customers.
- Providing added features – tweaks in the product in terms of performance & functionality, or even just some cosmetic tweaks.
4. ‘Create’ the brand
This is the most important step in the process of establishing a brand. In order to make the brand recognizable, you need to build a brand image. The Following parameters come under brand image:
- A logo – great to look at, yet relevant
- A tagline – concise and appealing
- Get your Brand messaging right – the brand’s motive & attributes should be particular and all your employees should possess reasonable knowledge in this aspect.
- An exclusively dedicated website for the brand
- Consistent design templates (aka design language) preferably with a unified theme for various marketing and publicity instruments e.g. posters, hoardings, brochures, online marketing content such as emails, social media posts, website themes, advertisements, banners. Basically maintain the same look and feel throughout the marketing material.
- Consistency in delivery and completion of promises. Stand by your brand’s principles and standards.
5. Bring out new products under the brand, based on the original product
Once the brand has been established, you need to make it grow. You also need to make sure that it doesn’t die out with the product.
In order to make it a full-fledged brand, you can add new products under the brand that derive from the original product that became the brand. You can bring out different variants or a product line up based on the original regular product.
Those subsequent products may preferably share the DNA with the original product and definitely with the brand attributes. Select one parameter and maintain consistency in that parameter across all the products. It might be design, functionality, size, price range, quality, etc. One of these fundamental aspects may be shared by all products across the line up under the brand, with some or all the other aspects varying as per demand in the market.