We can’t build a logo and hope that we’ll be famous the day after we twitted it. It doesn’t work like this. Branding is like laying an egg… you need to nurture it, look after it and wait. When your brand is created, we’ll have to go through the following stages.
1. Brand awareness.
When your company’s identity is ready to be shown, do it! It’s essential to promote your business and start planting the seed to your potential customer’s mind. How you do this? Tell the world, you could advertise, local magazines are great to reach your neighbours, and they are usually cheap to advertise. Depending on the nature of your business you might need to advertise online. The whole point is to make people aware of your existence.
2. Brand recognition.
This stage happens naturally and entirely out of our control, apart from design, which is why is important to get it right. Recognition is the stage where people see your logo and know who you are, and it’s the point where people who know you are ready to recommend you.
3. Brand engagement.
Brand engagement is the first time which your company will have the opportunity to interact with customers and show them how good you are. It’s important to keep your offer current and valuable because you need recurrent purchases.
4. Brand loyalty.
When you offer is excellent and frequent, and obviously you have happy customers, is when brand loyalty happens. People will prefer you than your competition if you ensure your brand is current and keeps interested the customers. These customers are the most valuable because are the ones that will be ambassadors and will recommend you.
5. Brand fan.
To have bran fans, it’s a summit. This is when your customers tattoo your logo on their skin or have stickers on their laptop. These are brands that the customer is so proud of the company that there is no competition.
It’s important to keep your brand in the right stage, to optimise the time and be always in the right state just for the right time, except Brand Fan that is where we all want to be.