How to Brainstorm Your Branding Process That Is Perfect For Your Business?
Ultimately, it all narrows down to one thing–Your brand.
All your efforts, all the trips that you make to-and-fro onwards to filtering the best creative agencies, all the caffeine you jug down your throat, and all the food for thoughts you give to your brain; if that’s not working for your brand, your efforts are all going down to the drain.
What can be done?
The answer is rather simple–Branding in the right direction.
Branding is easy; it’s the right brainstorming on the rough road. Once you get only one shot at impressing your target audience, you must give your all in with a witty and intuitive user experience. Hence, in order to make this one shot the right one, you need to be calculative enough.
In this guide, we will walk you through the best steps to remove your creative blockage and help you brainstorm ideas to improve your branding game.
Before you begin to take a peek into the future of your business, it is crucial to look back and take notes on the past and the existing state of your business. Below are some of the key questions that you need to find answers to before approaching the brainstorming process:
What is your Brand About?
Many startups are coming in across industries. However, when it comes to talking about their mere existence, they fumble. Some businesses enter the niche as a solution provider to an existing problem bugging end users.
On the contrary, some businesses leap into the business to offer price benefits to customers. Besides this, some brands pose as innovators who work on creative and new solutions to existing problems.
While there can be many reasons to enter a business, you need to identify the backdrop of your business.
What are the Mission and Vision of your Brand?
Every brand dies into the business with some values and a dream. It’s crucial to keep these aspects to the fore while brainstorming in order to present your brand in the best lights.
If you are one of the branding agencies working for a brand, you can ask your client to provide you with a detailed vision and mission statement. If you are working for your own business, you need to go to your roots and identify these values to approach brainstorming the right way.
What Goals are you Trying to Achieve through Branding?
The third aspect you need to address is your goals. Ask yourself–what should be on the other side of the shore all across effective branding for your business?
Do you want more visitors to your website? Is your goal to improve brand recognizability? Are you trying to attract new customers or retain the existing ones? It is important to have clear objectives in order to have clarity of ideas.
How do your Existing Customers Feel about your Brand?
To be able to tap into the right kind of sentiments of your users, you need to know what their current feelings are about your brand. You can carry out consumer sentiment analysis.
In addition, you can conduct social media listening to understand how your existing customers are interacting with your brand.
How to Approach the Brainstorming Process for Your Brand?
Now that you have done your homework, you are ready to brainstorm branding ideas for your business. Follow through!
Keep yourself Open to Possibilities:
Any creative process begins with a blank canvas and ends up having an unrecognizable sheet filled with multiple ideas–some scratched, some on hold, some practical, and some idealistic.
However, the key is to not restrict yourself to any possibility your mind can perceive. Have an open mind with your idea. And most importantly, jot it down. The next day when you approach the idea, you might develop something great using the base idea.
Understand your Limits:
Well, this one is going to sound contradictory to when we mentioned for you to be open to possibilities.
However, you need to be practical about certain aspects. For instance, if you perceive an idea that involves getting in touch with influencers to improve the brand recognizable factor for your brand, you will have to have contacts and a free-flowing budget.
While in reality, if you are just starting off your business, it’s crucial to hold your horses and spend every available penny as wisely as possible.
Study your Competitors:
It’s important to stay unique in your niche, but it is equally important to know what your competitors are doing to seek inspiration.
However, note that seeking importance doesn’t mean you plagiarize their idea and use them for your brand. To put this into perspective, do thorough research about your competitors and analyze your business to know how your target audience is reacting to the brands in your niche.
How Much Creative is Too Much Creative?
As soon as the word–branding–drops on the head of businesses, they tend to put on their creative thinking caps to stand out and in a tall manner in their industry.
However, it is crucial to have a balance between the right kind of creativity and brand communication. Not all creativity is received well. As a result, it is important to know that you can’t go overboard with a very creative idea that just bounces off and garners no results.
In order to get the right kind of creativity, analyze the wit-level and context of your target users and play along your brainstorming track on those lines.
Start from 0:
It is alright to have nothing at all on your brainstorming board, even after chugging lots and lots of caffeine in your boardroom. What really matters is to keep on going with your ideas and to let them be loose.
If you are completely blank and have zero thoughts, start small. Take a stroll through the websites of web design services companies. They have huge portfolios, which can serve as the square one for your brainstorming session.
Go through the case studies and read stories of the brands to know how they communicate with their customers.
Trust Me, Scrolling Helps:
Are you keeping your smartphone in your pocket, thinking that it might lead to distraction? Well, you might be partially wrong, depending on what pages you scroll through. In today’s time, social media serves as a rich platform to harvest ideas.
You can go through different branding pages to see how minimalistically and creatively they put their branding across for their target audience to consume. Simply switch on your scrolling mode and get on the social media bandwagon to look for some inspiration.
Don’t forget to tell your peeps–It’s not wasting time. It’s investing time towards branding.
Sleep through It:
Yes! We said it.
Best branding ideas come to marketers at unusual times. Hence, the number of marketers carrying electronic records is rising. When you are done jotting down all your ideas, don’t immediately jump at the execution plan. Give it some time and some to yourself as well.
See if the idea seems exciting enough the next day. There are chances that an idea might just not seem practical or impactful enough when you look at it from a different angle the next day. Hence, sleeping through the ideas is a surefire way to check their relevance.
Connect with your Customers:
You don’t always have to remember your customers when you have low quarterly sales to push your products or services. You can tap into the communication mode any time you feel the need to know the next best step for your business.
After all, your customers are the mirrors of your business. They will reflect what your business holds. Hence, connecting with them over a cold call, an email, or on social media can help you get too many good insights into what they actually are looking forward to when it comes to your brand.
That being said…
Did you notice something different with our guide on how to brainstorm your branding process? We don’t have 1-2-3 steps for you to follow. Instead, it’s a flowing guide. That is because the creative process does not have a set process. It all narrows down to following your gut feeling and giving the thought the space to develop, with time, of course.
Many web design companies operating out there would certainly agree to this process. Branding isn’t a one-shot thing. However, if you get it right the first time, it’s all great. But mostly, you need to keep up with the latest trends, explore what your possibilities can be, scratch them for better ones, and repeat the process.
All that’s left to say is, don’t be afraid to have a weird idea, be afraid when you don’t have the courage to bring in more ideas.
Have a happy and stress-free brainstorming for your business!
Author Bio:
Brijesh Jakharia co-founded SPINX Digital in 2005 and takes great pride in crafting web and mobile marketing solutions for mid-market businesses to enterprises.
Marketing is his passion, and the thrill to build a brand from the ground up has helped him craft successful brand stories for world-class clients. While not at work, he loves to spend his time on research and reading digital content stories.