Branding 101: How to define your brand mission, value props, and points of differentiation
When you are starting an D2C brand, your brand is EVERYTHING. Authentic and consistent branding has direct impact on your company’s revenue. About 59% of shoppers would like to buy new products from a brand they trust and 21% of shoppers said they bought a new product from a brand they liked. Check out this page for more stats like this!
So now you understand how important it is to have good branding. But you may be stuck on how to go about defining your brand. This is where we come in — here are some of the basic framework that we used to define our brand.
Understanding your Customers
Everything starts with understanding your customers. You need to clearly define who your customers are, what their demographics are, what their general behaviors are, where they like to shop, how they like to shop, what are topics and issues they care about, etc. This understanding needs to form the basis of all the other branding elements to follow.
If you create a brand that doesn’t resonate with your key target customers, you have wasted your energy. So make sure you do thorough research and analysis on your target customers before trying to define your brand.
Brand Mission
Once you have identified your key customers, you need to have a brand. mission. This is the promise you are making to your customers and everything about your brand needs to be working towards fulfilling this promise.
This promise usually doesn’t have to do with your specific product or service. It’s more high-level and idealogical — are you trying to help people feel more fulfilled? Are you trying to help them achieve some life goal? Are you trying to help them escape reality and find indulgence and happiness? What is it that you ultimately want the customer to feel or achieve by buying from your brand?
Brand Values
After you’ve defined the promise of your brand or your brand mission, you need to elaborate on that. These will form your brand values — this is explaining how you will deliver on those promises that you made in your brand mission.
Again, this is usually not tied specifically to the service or product but more so a moral guide for how your company will operate in the future. Is this a promise to always manufacture and source locally, to be sustainable and non-toxic, to have the best customer service, to be transparent about your product or business, etc.
Look & Feel & Tone
You also want to define what your brand will look and feel like. This includes the aesthetics (color scheme, logo, etc.) as well as the tone of the brand (optimistic, down-to-earth, casual, etc.).
Again, you will want to make sure that the overall aesthetics of the brand is in line with the brand mission. For example, if you wanted to deliver happiness and warmth, your color palette shouldn’t be dark and gloomy and your tone shouldn’t be stiff and detached.
Service & Product
Now we are actually getting into the service or product that you are offering to your partners. What is the actual thing that is being delivered to the customers? This is the catalyst that will deliver the promises of the brand.
Is this marketing services? Is this a laptop case? Is this a sofa? What is the medium that is going to help deliver the brand promise and how does this do so?
Value Props
Value props are now the specific benefits your service or product brings to the table. This could be functional, emotional, or both! For example, with our product Shelbru, one of our functional value props is almost no residue in your cold brew due to our strong dual filter. An emotional benefit could be that you feel like you are a coffee connoisseur without needing to invest time and money.
Points of Differentiation
Now think about these value props and which ones aren’t offered by competitors. You not only want to define how it is different but why that makes your product better.
Especially, when you are in a hyper-competitive market like we are in the coffee space, you need to have clear points of differentiation. For Shelbru, one of our key differentiators is that we are a two-piece set with interchangeable lids that allows you to keep your cold brewing process going without having to transfer your concentrate to another glass. This is something that no other competitors deliver and we understand how valueable and convenient this can be.
Conclusion
Branding is an ongoing process, especially in the early stages of your business. As you test out your brand messages to your audience, you may realize that it needs tweaking or sometimes, a complete overhaul. This is okay and a necessary part of developing the strongest brand. If you haven’t defined your brand yet, grab a paper and pen and use this guideline to start right now!
