Building a Brand That Resonates
Building a brand that resonates has never been easy, but the challenges are now greater than ever.
In today’s fast-paced, online environments, brands are highly vulnerable to quickly falling out of sync with market and buyer preferences.
Prime 8 helps companies identify and implement innovative strategies for enhancing and sustaining brands.
Advertising was once largely a matter of product one-upmanship — ads placed in newspapers or magazines were often little more than long lists of reasons why buyers should prefer the product from Brand X over Brand Y.
But as markets evolved, so did advertising. By the time of the Mad Men era (i.e., the 1960s and ‘70s), marketers began to realize that the secret to sales success was less about promoting the product and more about building the brand — specifically, building a brand that resonates with buyers on an emotional level.
Building a Strong Brand Identity
Research has consistently shown that whether the product being sold is soap, soda, cars, computers, or even consulting services, the buying decision is a mix of rational and emotional factors, with the latter more often than not playing an outsized role.
At Prime 8, we’ve seen over and over how building a brand that resonates — winning buyers over and then keeping them loyal — is largely about addressing those emotions.
Sure, the differentiators between one product and another are important, but not as important as evoking a feeling in which people instantly recognize the solution you’re offering as one that they like and trust and, once they buy it, will leave them feeling better about themselves.
That’s how companies like Coke and Pepsi compete. But it’s also the strategic brand communication playbook followed by stalwarts of tech such as Apple, IBM, and Microsoft.
A brand that works over the long term is one that consistently uses the full range of business marketing tools — messaging, words, graphic design, color palette, illustrations, photos, icons, typography, packaging, placement — to prompt an instant recognition on the part of the buyer.
A strong brand is the key to initiating, building, and sustaining the essential emotional connection that drives sales.
Strategic Brand Communication: Enhancing Brand Resonance in a Digital World
Our marketing consultants regularly provide brand identity development services to clients who are looking to adapt their brands to today’s digital marketing strategies.
With the glut of ads on your customers’ phones, tablets, and PCs, enhancing brand resonance — achieving that “aha” experience of instant recognition — becomes much more challenging.
“The internet era makes brands less durable,” notes the article How to Build a Digital Brand That Lasts in the Harvard Business Review. For that reason, “Durable brands are adaptable brands.” The article provides numerous examples of how leading brands such as Apple, Coke, Google, Hasbro, Marvel, Lego, and others have successfully adapted to building a clear brand identity in digital marketing.
B2B BRANDING
In our work with many FORTUNE 100 companies on their business-to-business (B2B) outreach, our marketing consultants have identified an often-overlooked opportunity to build brands with executive thought leadership. This typically involves using a highly curated set of assets — such as blog posts, video interviews, webinars — and making them available for free or in return for registering and providing contact information.
Integrating the personal brand of a company executive into a company’s overall positioning is a proven way to strengthen a brand. An Edelman and LinkedIn study found that because of thought leadership, 54% of buyers reported purchasing a new product or service from an organization that they had not previously considered.
Leveraging Data for Brand Enhancement
As brands and markets evolve — ever faster in the digital era — it’s essential to take a hard look at what’s working and what isn’t. It’s not a complicated process, but it does require work. It also benefits from familiarity with the latest data visualization tools, such as Power BI.
For example, we were engaged by a global tech company that was spending millions connecting to customers using an array of touchpoints — from digital ads to in-store promotional events — but couldn’t really pinpoint which were successful and which weren’t.
To address the situation, our consultants developed a solution to standardize data collection and combine everything into a robust Azure SQL database that could be leveraged by Power BI. The result was not simply a solution to the immediate problem of knowing what outreach is working and what’s not — it also made the client much more aware of the value of data-driven marketing.
Content Marketing: The Keystone of Effective Business Branding Services
Creating logos, websites, an initial round of ads — that’s just the start of defining your brand. You need to keep generating content to sustain that definition. Branding, like nature, abhors a vacuum. As is often said in politics, if you’re not defining your message, someone else will, and not usually to your advantage.
Content is, of course, a key way to rank high in online searches. Those rankings are an important measure of the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy, but it’s important not to stop there.
Content should constantly evolve based on the ROI it delivers. This involves knowing how frequently leads turn into actual sales, but you should also look at the impact of the content on other channels:
Account-based marketing: What role is your content playing in sales enablement, particularly in an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy?
Establishing company credibility: How well are salespeople able to use content created by marketing to make introductions, credentialize the company’s capabilities, and increase average deal sizes?
Sentiment and visibility: What does the data show in terms of increase in consumer sentiment and customer engagement?
Measuring ROI gives you a chance to review and demonstrate the full value of your efforts and tie your actions back to your business needs.
Conclusion: Bringing It All Together for Brand Success
Markets change and new competitors appear. What it took to make an emotional connection to a Baby Boomer is a lot different than what it takes to appeal to an Instagram-obsessed Millennial in 2024.
That makes building a brand that resonates a real challenge — but also, fun and exciting.
Getting ready for a rebrand? Our digital marketing consultants work with leading companies to help ensure their brand resonates authentically and effectively. Talk to Prime 8. Let us show you how we can use cutting-edge techniques, from influencer partnerships to tailored content creation, to put your brand at the forefront of the digital conversation.
