This is a blog post written under contract for TVI Marketing, NYC.
Branding for Utility: Why They Need You
We’ve talked a lot in this blog about branding – strategies
for establishing a brand, how your marketing has to support your brand, how you
have to deliver on the promise your brand makes. Today, we’re going to talk a
bit about inventing your brand identity itself, and how it relates to these
other topics.
In the concept phase before you are either premiering a
brand for the first time, or re-branding yourself for the marketplace, you have
the opportunity to give some thought to your design, to the actual message that
you want your brand identity to evoke in the minds of the public. At this
stage, one of the very first and most important things you should focus on is utility.
Put simply, utility refers to creating an identity for your
brand that demonstrates that your products and/or services are genuinely
useful. Your brand should communicate a sense of value, of effectiveness,
to the intended audience. In this way, you generate marketing that is intended
to stop interrupting what people are interested in, and instead to actually
be what people are interested in. People are interested in things that are
helpful, that improve the quality of their lives.
This is especially important in digital marketing, which is
almost entirely user-driven. The message “My product is good!” is evolving – by necessity – into the message “Here
are the ways my product makes your life better.” In order to attract the attention of the modern user, your marketing
has to tell people why they need you, and what problem you solve for them.
This is how “Buy our beans because they are better than
everyone else’s beans” becomes a more
nuanced and personal message along the lines of: “Beans are good for
your health, they have benefits, they improve digestion and make you live
longer.”
Taking a step back from that message, you understand why our
fictional brand designer decides to name her product “Health Beans.” Because
the entire idea is a consistent branding strategy that from front to back gives
the consumer the message that the product has real, tangible value that
improves people’s lives.
Once you’ve decided on a brand identity that stresses
usefulness and value, your marketing actually becomes easier. You know that
your entire message is about your brand having an important and useful place in
people’s world, and everything follows from that central ideal.
When there was work to be done around the house, and I was
roughhousing and trying to get my folks’ attention, my dad used to say, “Stop making
noise and make yourself useful.”
Still good advice.