So the process of branding then is everything we do to start building those associations in our customer’s minds. Another way of thinking about it is that branding gives you a distinct identity beyond just your products or service. It’s something that your customers can actually relate to and connect with.

Branding is all about building associations in your audience’s mind about what your company means, what it stands for. Apple isn’t a multi-trillion dollar company because it has a piece of fruit as its logo. It’s everything that you think of and feel when you see that logo or use that company’s products.

Why do brands matter?

That’s all well and good, but you might be wondering why any of this matters - especially if you’re just a small business or even a solo freelancer. Branding matters because people make purchase decisions based on how they feel about brands.

We live in a time of endless choices - you have an overwhelming number of options of products to buy and services to use at your fingertips. People need a reason to choose you, and the brand you build is a way to stand out from the crowded competition.

Not only does a brand affect someone’s purchase decision but their whole customer experience. Our experience is subjective - how we feel using your product or service doesn’t just depend on your features or quality but all the associations you’ve built in your mind.

Imagine for a moment that I gave you two glasses of wine. One is just a generic house wine. It’s nice, but the other one, it’s exceptional. It comes from a little vineyard in Mendoza where I spent my 23rd birthday. I met the owners, the sweetest couple in their early 60s who had been running this vineyard their whole lives, passed down from their grandparents to their parents to them. They picked every grape by hand and had a process refined through generations. Once they pick the grapes, they are aged for 3 years in organic oak barrels from trees grown on the same property, which they used to climb when they were kids.

Okay, now we could have a little taste test, but I can already tell you which wine you’ll tell me tastes better, and it’s not the generic one. Mmm, delicious. And I know that because this is a real study that’s been done again and again with different products. And consumers consistently rate products more highly on all kinds of metrics - taste, texture, freshness etc., based on the stories they have been told about them. And it’s not just the taste, it’s the whole experience that changes. You smile a little when you drink it, thinking of the love and care that went into creating the product.

And that’s the power of branding - it doesn’t just impact if people buy your product, it changes their entire customer experience, how they feel using your product. And since that customer experience is a significant factor in whether they become a repeat customer and buy from you again, that’s a pretty powerful thing to understand.

6 reasons why brands matter

Building a strong brand takes time, so let me outline the 6 most important reasons why brand matters.

  1. Brands help people make decisions in a crowded market
  2. People feel good about choosing brands that align with their values and personality
  3. Encourages emotional connections
  4. Customers are loyal to brands they love
  5. They allow your customers to become advocates and spread the word about your company
  6. A great brand enhances someone’s experience of actually using your product.

How to build a brand

We’re generally working on 4 key things when building a brand:

It all comes down to thinking about how we’re perceived in the eyes of our customers. How we’re currently perceived is our actual brand, how we want to be perceived is our ideal brand, and the gap in between is where we need to get to work.

So if we want to be seen as trustworthy, but people don’t have that association or don’t have it strongly enough, then that’s an association we need to build proactively.

Every touchpoint matters

A brand doesn’t exist in your logo or perfectly styled brand guidelines but in the hearts and minds of your customers. And those associations aren’t just formed when reading your about page or looking at your beautiful logo, but in every single interaction they have with your brand.

So when we’re thinking about building a brand, we need to think about every single touchpoint someone has with your brand:

All too often, the marketing team crafts a ‘perfect’ brand in their website + advertising, but when it comes to the rest of the company and how it interacts with the world, there is absolutely zero consistency.

So to illustrate this, let’s look at an example - frank body. Now, if you haven’t heard of it, frank body is a cosmetics brand that makes body scrubs out of coffee. Their concept wasn’t that new, and honestly, you could make it yourself.

What’s interesting about a coffee scrub brand? They made $20 million in 2 years.

One of the founders, Steve, owned a coffee shop in Melbourne, Australia. He often had customers ask for leftover coffee grounds to use as a natural exfoliant. So he and his partner saw an opportunity and decided to start a little side hustle with minimal funds (under $5k). They had no budget for advertising, so they focused their efforts around growing organically on Instagram.

They decided to take a boring product and make it into a cheeky, even a little bit naughty brand. Their packaging has a cheeky little illustration of a bum and quotes like ‘Guess what? You’ll be naked in one minute.’

7 components of a powerful brand

Let’s use frank body as an example to dig a little deeper into what a brand is and how to communicate that to your customers.

We can consider the way people think about brands, just like how we created an avatar or persona for our customers. We set expectations for how a brand would behave and communicate, whom it would connect with (and whom it wouldn’t), and even how it would react in different situations.

To see what that looks like in practice, let’s break it down into 7 components and deconstruct what makes a great brand.

(1) Who is the brand for?

We ask this question to try to define the public side of understanding our target customer. When we’re looking from the outside, who is the brand for?

Frank describes themselves as being for ‘all babes’. They showcase a lot of body positivity & diversity across their Instagram & website, making it more inclusive in terms of ethnicity and body diversity.

But that doesn’t mean it’s for everyone. It’s clear that frank body is for women who care about their skin and appearance and aren’t afraid to be a bit cheeky. Women who find the inappropriate comments and branding funny, not offensive. Women who resonate with the message to love your body but are also frustrated with skin conditions like acne, dry flakey skin, cellulite, etc. Women who want to spend time and money pampering themselves. You also get a feeling that it’s generally for pretty young women - it doesn’t seem like a brand that your grandma would use.

If you’re uncomfortable with nudity or women’s sexuality, or if you are offended by a bottle of lotion talking about your booty, then frank is definitely not for you.

Frank knows that not everyone wants to purchase such an outspoken brand or be okay with the mess that a coffee scrub makes in the bathroom. They have no problem with it - they are unapologetically for their target audience, the ‘babes’, and they are happy for everyone to know that.

(2) What problem are you solving for them? How are you changing their lives?

One of the most important things that people should immediately recognize about your brand is understanding why you? Why should they buy your product or service? What problem will you solve? How will you change their lives? Why are you better than all the other options? If they can’t see this immediately from your marketing materials, then you have work to do.

For frank body, the problem they are solving is around skin - cellulite, stretch marks, scars, skin texture, etc. They want to have soft glowing skin, but on the other hand, they also have skin concerns that they want to solve. They also probably want to enjoy a little more me-time, and frank is offering them an indulgent experience of spa time at home. And for many of the customers, it might also be partly a desire to feel more sexy and beautiful. Some women might be attracted to frank because they already feel that way, but I bet lots are also attracted to the brand because of how it makes them feel. It might seem silly to say that someone is being flirted with by a brand, but that’s kind of what’s happening here.

When you’re comparing the options, you could just make coffee scrub for yourself or buy a cheap one from the supermarket - but then it’s just a coffee scrub. It isn’t playful or sexy, it doesn’t make a fun gift for a friend, you don’t chuckle as you use it. You don’t have an excuse to post a half-naked coffee scrub for them.

Good branding still requires you to have products that give value to their lives, and for frank body, that means creating a product line that their customers are genuinely interested in that gets excellent reviews.

The branding part is becoming known for that. When you browse through their website or social media posts for even just 10 minutes, you understand what the brand is and how it helps - with informational posts, before and after examples, etc.

(3) What are your values and beliefs

As a brand, people want to know what you stand for, what you believe in. People, especially frank’s mostly millennial consumers, expect the brand to have an opinion and be willing to stand for it - for things around diversity, body image, sexuality, the environment. You need to get really clear on your values as a brand and communicate those clearly because people want to know what they can expect from you. Frankly, they are cruelty-free, so they don’t test on animals (or as they refer to it, ‘only test on babes’), and they use only natural, Australian-made ingredients.

You could totally picture frank getting involved in campaigns like #freethenipple because they believe policing women’s bodies is ridiculous and that the human body is a beautiful thing - they even have an entire Pinterest board dedicated to ‘no pants’.

(4) What’s the lifestyle of the brand?

You know what core beliefs you share with your customers, but that’s not quite enough to resonate with them.

Hippies, farmers, and scientists all might believe in environmental sustainability. But the similarities end there.

As a brand, you need to understand your target audience’s lifestyle and talk to them about their interests. For frank body, it’s about skin, life, love and health, and embracing your body.

Find the stuff that gets your audience going. If you want to keep your new friends coming back for more, you need to keep talking to them about the things they’re interested in.

Here’s some of the content that they have on their blog:

The content strategy of frank body is built around these key pillars because it’s a mix of content that builds brand awareness. When you read one of their blog posts, or they pop up on your social media feed, it’s a little reminder that they exist and continue to build brand associations - playful, cheeky, fun, helpful for your skin, people love them, etc. At the same time, they also develop brand resonance - yes, omg, you get me! I love this.

(5) What is your brand personality?

Just like people, brands have personalities that help people understand what to expect from them. If you spend even just 15 minutes on frank body’s website or social media, you get a pretty clear sense of their personality and almost what to expect from them.

Part of human psychology is that we like to have our expectations met - we want people and businesses to be consistent and know what to expect from them. But when they deviate from that, it’s kind of jarring.

Frank made $20 million in 2 years with their cheeky brand personality, but if you turned up at your dentist and they applied that same personality to their marketing communications, you would probably be a bit creeped out.

Brands can be playful and fun, or reliable and professional, or adventurous. Think about some of the biggest brands you know - Apple, Tesla, Corona, WholeFoods, etc. They all have completely different personalities. If one started behaving like another, it would be pretty jarring.

Frank nails this, and if anything, is probably an over-the-top example compared to most brands because they have personified their brand into this character ‘Frank’ who refers to himself in first-person and is cheeky, flirty, unapologetic, and honest.

You compare that to something like Tiffany & Co, and we have almost polar-opposite personalities. Tiffany & Co is sophisticated, elegant, and upper class with a timeless and charming personality. It’s everything that their customers aspire to be, and it has a feeling of intentional exclusivity around it.

Do you remember those ads from Apple which were a clever play on comparing their brand personality to the average PC with their ‘hello I'm a Mac, & I'm a PC’? From the clothing to the body language to the conversations each character played out, it was so much more powerful than a literal breakdown of features or points because it got straight to the heart of the target audience. The ads were so effective it lasted over 66 unique videos.

6. How do you communicate? What’s your brand tone of voice?

Flowing on from the personality is the brand voice. How do you communicate? Is it with jokes and humor or a more serious tone? Are you cheeky and playful or conservative?

For some brands, the brand tone of voice can be the primary way to communicate their values and personality. And brands like frank body have done an incredible job of ensuring every element of their marketing communications - from the website copy, email newsletter, social media posts, and even their customer service and organic outreach use a consistent tone of voice.

Most brands, however, do not.

I would say this is an area where so many entrepreneurs and marketers struggle. They have an idea in their head about their brand personality, but when you read their marketing communications, that’s not the impression you get.

In the beginning, we’ve defined a brand as ‘everything people say, think, and believe about you when you aren’t in the room’. Your audience decides what your brand personality is, and your brand voice is one of the main ways you communicate that personality and build a clear brand. A quick scroll through frank’s homepage, and you’ll see their cheeky tone everywhere - the product labels and packaging, the product descriptions, the big banner with the text ‘Firm supple skin? I’m the booty call you’ll want to answer.’

Instead of saying ‘contact us’, their website says ‘talk dirty to me’ with a customer support email of getnaked@frankbody.com, and even their warning labels for allergies says ‘Psst, babe, I contain nuts’. When they wanted to expand their target audience to men, they launched a campaign #iscrubbothways. When working with influencers they use innuendo like ‘Tousled hair. Flushed cheeks. Now that’s a good scrub.’

(7) Finally we’ve got our brand aesthetic.

I’ve intentionally left this till last, even though it might have been the first thing you thought about when it comes to branding because I believe most people spend far too much time on this section and not enough time on the rest. That’s not to say that brand aesthetics aren’t important, they absolutely are, and having consistent visuals is a big part of creating a memorable brand. But on their own, they aren’t enough. You have first to figure out who your brand is for, what its values are, what the personality and tone of voice is, and only then can you figure out how to represent all of that visually.

Aesthetics comes down to a few things - does it fit the personality? Is it memorable and eye-catching? Will it stand out wherever you see it? (on the shelves, on your website, on social media?) Most of the branding process revolves around looking at your company and your customers, but it’s also really important to look at your competitors when it comes to aesthetics. If you’re branding a wine company, for example, you want to think about all the other bottles that will stand next to each other on the shelves.

One of our Photography & Social Media Bootcamp alumni, Pili, who founded a marketing agency after the course, was hired to build a brand for a new wine label. After fitting the brand personality and appealing to the target customer, one of their biggest considerations was how they could really pop on the shelves - immediately catch your eye because it’s just so different from anything else that’s out there.

Your visuals are one of the first things people will see, so you want to catch their eye and immediately feel cohesive with the rest of the brand story. Frank is girly, with pastel tones, but it’s also cheeky with its typewriter font and playful animations and illustrations. And the natural-toned eco-friendly packaging of their original coffee scrub was a bit of a nod to the wholesome natural ingredients - it felt a bit like you were ordering a bag of coffee.

When you’re first starting out, it doesn’t necessarily mean you need to spend thousands on hiring a professional graphic designer. I honestly wouldn’t recommend that, but it does mean you need to develop one cohesive style that fits your brand personality and use that consistently across all platforms if you can. Think about the color tones, the typography and the whole visual experience.

To wrap up, I want to leave you with one final analogy.

Think of branding a little like dating - what makes you an appealing date depends entirely on the person you’re trying to attract. There is no one generic formula for one person or another to gravitate towards.

Once you’ve figured that out, you can make the world’s most compelling tinder profile that has stunning photos, a witty description and immediately catches the eye of someone who ticks all the boxes for you. But if you turn up sweaty and gross after the gym and act like a bit of a jerk, then that perfect first impression you made with your tinder profile isn’t going to make much difference to you landing the second date.

When it comes to building a brand, we have to look at it from every angle and remember that it takes dozens of positive interactions to build brand value, but only one negative experience to damage it. If you’re not consistent in who you are and what you’re offering, then your customers are unlikely to swipe right.

Want to apply the above components to yourself and your own brand? You can learn how by checking out our Photography and Social Media Bootcamp here.