A great place to start when building a brand is with your target audience; after all, they will ultimately determine the success of your business so need to be your main priority when it comes to branding. 

 

While you may want to target as many people as possible, the likelihood is that as a business, you’ll be more relevant to specifics groups of consumers. Thus, rather than trying to capture everyone, it is best to start by picking at least two demographics that you want to target specifically and ask yourself critical questions about them. Examples of these may include: Who are these people? What are their interests? What do they want from retailers? What channels of communication do they use? 

Once you have concluded who your target audience is, you then need to research your competitors to ensure you create a brand that’s unique to your business and will make you stand out in the marketplace. As a start-up, you can gain a lot from evaluating others, particularly with regard to marketing. Ask yourself, how have these businesses branded themselves? What’s different about each of them? What’s similar? How do they address the target market? What have they done well? Where could they improve? 

 

Throughout this evaluative process, it’s important to remain impartial and resist the temptation to just replicate someone else’s brand. While some will have beaten you to the punch on certain things, don’t see this as a disadvantage. Instead, consider what the incentives were that motivated these choices and use them to influence how you build your brand. 

While there are bound to be similarities, it is important to identify your business’s strengths and decipher what makes you different from others in your industry. This could be anything from offering lower prices to specialising in handmade goods. Whatever it is, emphasising those unique aspects of your business in your branding will help set you aside from your competitors while conveying to clients exactly what it is you can offer that others can’t. 

Once you have established what sets your business aside from others, it’s time to start thinking about your brand personality. The best way to do this is to think of your brand as a person; this way, you can use what you believe the personal attributes of your business to be to shape your branding. What sort of person would your brand be? Would it be male or female? What would its age be? How would it come across to others? Simple questions like these can help form a picture of your brand, which can then be used to influence the next stage of your brand building process. 

Now you have a feel for your brand personality, you can use these attributes to start constructing the more concrete elements of your brand such as your logo, colour scheme and slogan. For instance, if you’ve decided that your brand would be happy, young and female, these qualities may translate as bright, modern and feminine; thus, you would style your brand’s elements accordingly. However, don’t forget to refer back to your audience and competitor research at this point to ensure you keep your creations focused. 

The final and continual stage in building your brand is to apply it in different ways through various forms of communication so that your customers can constantly interact with it and become familiar with who you are as a business. Consistency is key here, so don’t hold back; from the colours of your website to the retail display units you use in store, your brand must be visible at every available opportunity. Not only will this uniformity serve to cement your branding efforts, but it will also help make your business appear more trustworthy to consumers by demonstrating a repeated sense of identity. 

 

Here at Furniture Crates, we want to help you make the most of every opportunity to emphasise your brand. That’s why each of our retail display solutions are available for customisation from their size and colour through to their graphic treatment. So, whether you’re after a selection of custom wood crates or a branded shelving unit, we are sure to have to solution to all of your branding needs. Visit our website to browse our ranges now.