When you are building a business, one of the most critical areas of focus is creating a brand identity – that is, what your company is and what it offers the customer. It sounds simple enough, but it’s layered with complexities.

3 Steps to Help You Create This Essential Part of Your Business Brand Identity

Creating your brand identity involves many different facets including the logo,Guest Posting taglines, website colours and brand voice.

Every brand has a voice. Your brand is unique, so your brand voice should be too. Your brand voice is the constant personality you use when communicating your message to the world.

Is your business all about you? Read our article: Embracing Your Personal Branding Uniqueness for Business Success

From digital advertisements to social media posts to product packaging, it’s important to have one consistent and unique brand voice across all your marketing materials. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a muddled message that won’t resonate with your customers on any level.

Here are some brand voice examples from well-known brands:
• Dollar Shave Club: quirky, casual and fun.
• Coca-Cola: friendly, optimistic and joyful.
• Nike: inspiring, powerful and positive.
• MailChimp: helpful, encouraging and funny.

No matter what you’re selling, you need to create an engaging brand voice that’s authentic to your values.

Here are 3 ways to make defining your brand voice easier:

1. Make your brand voice relevant.
Think about who uses your product or service. You want to define your brand voice to speak to your target audience and create an emotional connection to what you’re offering.

If your audience is millennials who love yoga, your voice is going to be different than if you’re targeting 40+ women shopping for clothing.

Some good questions to ask are:

1. How do your customers (or how do you want them to) define your brand identity?
2. What’s the greatest benefit your product or service provides to people?
3. How do you want people using your product or service to feel?
4. How does your product or service stand out from the competition?

Once you’ve answered questions like these, you can…

2. Start with three words.
What three words do you want to reflect the personality of your brand? Three is the number commonly used by organizations to define brand voice. Choosing more will just duplicate what you already have or water down your core characteristics.

Here are some examples of words to describe brand voice:

• Enthusiastic
• Confident
• Helpful
• Innovative
• Inspiring
• Fun
• Authoritative

Next, choose limitations for each word. For example, confident but not cocky. Funny but not silly. This will help you further define your brand identity and write targeted brand copy (or give your writers a guide when they’re writing your copy).

3. Implement your brand voice everywhere.
If you’re going to keep your brand voice consistent, you need to ensure every piece of writing reflects your brand’s personality.

This means looking at your website, emails, social media accounts, and print materials such as business cards. You may have to rewrite older copy to reflect your voice or create totally new content, but don’t skip this important detail.

Imagine getting an email with no defined brand voice or a totally different brand voice than the one you get on a company’s website – it’s jarring, confusing and doesn’t evoke a feeling of trust.

These three steps will help you define your brand voice as part of your bigger brand identity. Once you’ve defined your brand’s identity, you can start speaking to your customers in an authentic and compelling way.

To boost up performance of any business branding and advertising play crucial role where brand is tool which change buying behaviour of consumers and advertising act as driving force for conveying message of that brand in customers mind. Actually the purpose of study is to determine that consumer buying behaviour influenced by branding and advertising in public at Islamabad. According to study the youngsters are especially more conscious about brands and results show that they buying behaviour are effected by advertisement of branded products. Peoples of Islamabad perceived brand image positively.

Introduction:

With the passage of time the importance of branding and advertising is increasing in Pakistan. Brand image is promise to his customer. For purchase decisions and product selection advertisement play vital role. People use branded products to show their status symbol. In present time to boost up any business branding and advertising plays crucial role. Teenagers are mostly effected by brand image and advertising of that brand. As branding is tool which positively effects the peoples buying behaviour and advertising act as driving force running these brands. Most of the peoples are conscious about branded fashion clothing. In Pakistan this trend is on its peak now a days. Business war is going on where every company is trying satisfied their customers and to generate more and more revenues.

Advertising is so effective in order to meet psyche of customers and consumers. To convey your message to audience advertisement is an effective way. This system always distributed products and services develop by Human society. In this modern world society’s development is very complex due to availability of wide range of products available in the market. In order to understand the culture of this society,Guest Posting it is required to study the entire lifetime experiences since economic goods consumed because human involve in each activity of this economic system. Human behavior appears to be subsets of consumer behavior for the same factors, individuals are effected in their daily life, and purchase activities are also influenced due to different strategies by the firms. Social class, cast, family, creed and social control system of different societies means culture also effect consumer behaviour. Like in Islamabad the influences created by advertising is so much where most of the peoples are educated and belongs to almost financially healthiest families due to which maximum of them prefer branded products. The brands they used are well-known in all over the Pakistan and most of peoples according to research it is fined that the products which so much expensive they perceive them as good brands. The way different brands make their products famous is through advertising by using their famous brand ambassadors and different actors, models. Actually these members which are used for advertising are seen by peoples specially women’s on daily bases in different television programs and dramas which effects ladies more for using branded products. Brand always and everywhere exist whether it is Islamabad or any far flung village, but in villages most of peoples are not financially well groomed they prefer cheaper brands. Like two brands of soaps exist Pakistan in which one is cheaper and other one is expensive so peoples belonging to different areas use brands according to their will and affordability the can do. In order to attract new customers and existing customers the marketers make their brands known by implement different strategies. To compete with competitors marketers use different ways to make their brand efficient for their customers means more than customers are expecting from that brand. Marketing mix is another challenge for today’s scenario for allocation and distribution of their brand and create awareness through advertisement. As branded products need is increasing day by day, due to number of brands these days heir is tough competition in between them so most of the time customer switch from one brand to another brand, the main reason of switching from one brand to another are inconvenience, pricing factor of different brands, competition among brands, ethical problems, the response to the service failure, switching of customer involuntarily, the core failure of service. After getting some knowledge about brand according to the needs of customer, the customer think to purchase that product. After thinking customer comes to know about worries he have to face while purchasing that product these include failure frequency mean not able to access, secondly down time mean the availability of product not at time, last thing create worries for customer to purchase that product is out-of pocket cost issue which is understandable from name an issue of cost. The product can be marketed through two strategies, push strategies and pull strategies where push strategies involve sale force of manufacturer whereas pull strategies include promotion, advertising, and other forms of communication to persuade the customer behaviour.

Significance of the study:

The study will help specially for marketing any product. Actually this study enables that how much it’s important for any company to make their product to be considered as brand. Any brand originates when it fulfills the needs, wants and demands of any consumer. Brand is the image, idea of specific product which is used by customer, by identifying the logo, name and slogan. Whereas advertising invaded the knowledge about any specific brand, services by producers to its customers. After analyzing this research marketer will enable to understand that how much it’s important for any product to be known as good brand for today’s customers of Pakistan. They come to understand that how advertisement create brand awareness in general public. Marketers also come to understand that where they have to position their brand and what kind of communication channels involve to advertise that product. The supplier also comes to understand that educated peoples preferred mostly branded products according to research of two well-known universities of Islamabad. Franchises for branded products must be opened for providing quality services to her customers. This is basically locational decision of business which involve regional shopping centers, strips of shopping, larger store within location, shopping centers for communities, and districts of central business.

Literature review:

Brand preference is symbol of name, term sign, or combination of them. Using branded products is the symbol of status these days. The brand means to apply marketing methods for a particular product or brand or series and managed summarized by Nepalia [1]. Brand loyalty enhanced in customers mind if the brand is managed efficiently. Sales of product increase due to promise of quality have been made for present time and future. The image of brand effect positively to customers whereas environment issues effect negatively the buying behaviour of customer. To measure purchase attention the quality of product is basic factor. This process makes continuous changes in product by increasing business portfolio day by day to make improvement and enhance performance of branded product to satisfy customer need. With time quality of product increase due to the competition in environment. Various brands are there now a days in market having different attributes and qualities. If the situation of any faults arises in brands they are improved by advertising and presenting new qualities of brands to audience which are customers.

The flaws and problems in brand can be improved by specifying and identifying the area of problems. Secondly make teams and allocate responsibilities to them to improve the quality of brand.

In order to attract the attitudes and behaviour of people positively toward product and attract them advertising is strong tool said by Niazi [2]. Environmental factors, emotional factors and purchasing attention of consumer have strong relationship. For testing other brands peoples change their brands because attention of purchasing changed due to change in income of peoples mentioned by Rasool et al. [3]. As branding and advertising is a tool to change the buying behaviour of customer. Male and females are equally influenced by advertising for brand choices. To collect data Questionnaire survey was used by using non probability convenient sampling technique.

Sample of 200 students is taken from two Universities of Islamabad. Two variables brand image and advertisement are used. Buying behaviour is directly proportional to branding and advertising. If the brand change buying behaviour also change similarly if advertising of product is conveyed well buying behaviour also increases. Hypothesis method is also used. The basic purpose is to find that peoples are effected by brand image and advertisement or not. According to Kotler for selling any brand marketer must keep one thing in a mind about customer satisfaction which is people’s disappointment or feeling of pleasure resulting from product perceived performance in relation to his or her expectations [4]. The firms needs to create customer relationship management by which customer individual information to maximize customer loyalty. The customer buying behaviour can be impressed by organization-wide approach of total quality management. The firms needs create customer base for improving values by increasing the longevity of brand, by terminating low profit customers and focus on high profit customers and by enhancing the growth potential of brand. The social classes comprises of different level of financially classified peoples perceived brands differently mean higher classes are conscious about brands whereas lower level classes are less conscious about brands. There are three kinds of buying situations of brands which are straight rebuy, modified rebuy and new task rebuy. Straight rebuys include routine reorders of branded products like photocopier paper. The modified rebuy brands are those which are purchase on the basis of modification of require aspects like desktop computers. New task buyers of brands are those which include purchasing of product for first time like buying newly branded watch. In order to allocate their product to customers the brand needs to be position first which is the act of designing company offerings to occupy distinctive place in the mind of targeted customers, by advertising the message of brand to their customers and consumer delivered in way that they become crazy and get interested to purchase that brand. There must be value proposition of brand like online service, free home deliver, buy one get one free etc., the firm needs to follow the differential strategies to compete with competitor. These differential strategies include focusing on product, personnel, channel, and image. Actually this will make the company to analyze that what kind of product they are offering and through which channel to their customer whether they are suppliers, advertisers and what effect that brand will have in personnel’s and what image about that brand customer will get. There is another issue that while bringing changes into new product the company don’t create special changes between new product and already existing product so it difficult for consumer to understand changes made in new product so company needs to advertise in a manner so that customer get the changes made in new product. The branded product differentiate from others branded product on the basis of product form, features, performance, durability, reliability, reparability, style, design, ordering ease, deliver of product, installation, customer consulting and maintenance. Branded product should be presented and offered in a way so that consumer made changes of color, any special feature of that product according to their choices. The image of brand is that how people perceived that brand and brand needs to identify or position itself so that the image of brand positively perceived by customer. According to one of the well-known strategy of marketing branded products required modification through improvement in quality, improvement in features and style improvement. The sales volume of products must be increased so that in future company can make amendments in product by adding features into them without hesitation of losses previously. The sales volume of company can be increased by converting nonuser to user of that brand, by entering into new market segments, by attracting competitor’s customers, have consumers who use product on each and more occasions, have consumers use the product in new ways. The company can enhance its brand by online buying and selling of their brand which is much more convenient to use now a days. The role of brands are to identifying maker, simplifying product handling, organize accounting and offering of legal protection. The roles of brands also include signifying the quality of brand, create barriers to entry, it serve as competitive advantage and secure price premium. The advantages of strong brands are that they improve he perception of product performance, greater loyalty, less vulnerability to competitive marketing actions, larger margin to other brands, consumer response is inelastic, Trade Corporation is greater, increase in the effectiveness of marketing communications, and licensing opportunities which are possible e.g., ESPN and Apple are strong brands. Brand is also promise by the marketer’s vision that what brand must be and so for consumers. Driving forces of brands are brand elements, marketing activities with strong involvement of advertisement, and meaning transference. Brand elements involve brand name, URLs, elements, slogans, logo, symbols, and characters. Store atmosphere of branded products must have walls, lighting, signage, product placement, floors, music, surface space and electronic advertisement in the sore create attraction for customers.

Marketing communication of company is the direct or indirect way to persuade, inform and remind customer about brand they sell. There are different modes of communication advertising, sales promotion, events and experiences, public relation and publicity, direct marketing, interactive marketing, word of mouth marketing and personal selling but advertising is more effective. Advertising involve print and broadcast ads, brochures and booklets, videotapes, packaging inserts, logos, posters, billboards. Actually the need of brand advertisement objective is brand awareness, purchase intention, and category need, brand attitude. For communicating message through advertisement brand needs to create message strategy, the creativity in strategy and focus on message source and global adaptation. The decision making of any company play an influential role for marketing their brand. These logistic market decisions are that how the order will be handled by the supplier, the location of stock to make products available for customers, how much stock is held and how goods are shipped. The customer required product at time otherwise he moved for another brands product. The company can distributes its products for customers by fast and reliable transportation of products. The company’s word of mouth marketing also helps it product to be successful in market. The word of mouth involve process is held by chat rooms, blogs and person-to-person. Pricing the branded product effects customer buying behaviour and ultimately the performance of company. The pricing mistakes which are made by company commonly are that the prices are settled according to industrial margin of that brand, revise the price according to market changes, failure to allocate prices according to product segment, channel of distribution and purchase occasion. There must be price cues like some discount and sales on that product. The company must increase prices steadily if the market situation changes. The consumer loyalty regarding any brand is effected by customer perceived value. Loyalty is basically is commitment re-patronize or rebuy the relevant brand and marketing efforts for causing the switching behaviour of customers from other brand to their brand.

Branding Your Business © 2002 Elena Fawkner If you think only big … names need to think about things like brand names, think again. Your brand says a lot about you and your … and that’

Branding Your Business

© 2002 Elena Fawkner

If you think only big corporate names need to think about things
like brand names,Guest Posting think again. Your brand says a lot about you
and your business, and that’s as true for a one person home-
based operation as it is for a multinational conglomerate. In this
article we look at how creating a strong brand for your business
can help you set yourself apart from the pack and lay the right
foundation for the future growth of your business.

WHAT IS A BRAND?

Your brand is more than just the logo on your letterhead and
business cards or your business name. It is your corporate
identity. An effective brand tells the world who you are, what
you do and how you do it, while at the same time establishing
your relevance to, and credibility with, your prospective customers.

Your brand is also something more ethereal. It is how your
business is perceived by its customers. If your brand has a high
perceived value, you enjoy many advantages over your
competition, especially when it comes to pricing. Why do you
think people are prepared to pay stupid money for items of clothing
with the initials “CK” on them? Perceived value. Perceived value
as a result of very effective brand promotion resulting in very high
brand awareness.

Now, I’m not saying we all need to rush out and start creating
brands that are going to be recognized the world over. Most of us
simply don’t have the time or other resources necessary. What I
am suggesting, however, is that it is possible for your brand to
dominate your niche.

WHY DO I NEED TO CREATE MY OWN BRAND?

=> Differentiation

We touched on this in the previous section when we looked at
what a brand is and how it can be used to increase the perceived
value of your products and services. The main reason for creating
your own brand is to differentiate yourself from your competition.
New websites are a dime a dozen. So are home-based
businesses. You need to constantly be looking for ways to set
yourself apart from your competition. Your brand can do that for
you.

=> More Effective, Efficient Marketing

Another good reason for creating your own brand is to make your
sales force (even if that’s a sales force of one – you) more effective
and efficient.

Imagine if you didn’t have to spend the first 50% of your time with
a new prospect explaining who you are, what you do and how you
do it. What if your brand had already communicated that for you?
You can spend 100% of your time focusing on sales rather than
educating your prospects about your business

Another benefit of branding is that the efforts you expend increasing
your brand awareness through promoting and marketing your brand
to your target market automatically transfers to your products and
services. So, even when you’re advertising your brand, you’re
indirectly also marketing your products and services.

HOW DO I CREATE MY OWN BRAND?

OK, so you’re convinced you need to create your own brand.
Where on earth do you start?

We saw earlier that your brand needs to say who you are, what
you do and how you do it. It needs to do all these things at the
same time as establishing your relevance to, and building credibilty
with, your prospective customers. Needless to say, it is absolutely
essential, if you are to build your own brand, that *you yourself*
have a firm grasp of who you are, what you do and how you do it.
If not, you’re going to have the devil’s own time getting that
message across to anyone else, let alone establishing your
relevance and credibility.

=> Write A Mission Statement

So, let’s start by creating a mission statement. What is the
mission of your business? Obviously you’re in business to make
a profit. But making a profit is a byproduct of a successful
business. Focus instead on how you choose to achieve that profit.
What are your core values?

A good place to begin thinking about your mission is to put
yourself in the shoes of your customers. Put yourself in their
target market. Let’s say your business is web hosting. If you’re
in the market for a web host, what things are important to you?
Different people will be looking for different benefits but you can
bet that they want their website to be accessible to site visitors so
reliability will be high on their list. Price is also likely to be high
on the list as is 24/7 technical support. What about add-on features
such as unlimited email aliases, cgi support and what-not?
These things will be highly important to some and less important
to others. So focus on the benefits that are likely to be highly
relevant to the majority of your target market. Let’s settle for our
purposes on reliability, price and technical support.

Your mission statement might read something like this: “I strive
to earn a fair return on my investment of time and money by
providing affordable webhosting with guaranteed 99% uptime and
24/7 telephone technical support”. That’s a pretty general
statement and if you decide to focus on a particular niche of the
webhosting market, such as small business, you may want to
more narrowly focus on that group in your mission statement.

Now that you’ve written your mission statement, you can begin
thinking about creating a brand that reinforces and supports your
mission. So, getting back to the fundamental questions of who
you are, what you do and how you do it, you can now begin to
think of your business in these terms. You’re a webhosting
provider, you host websites of small businesses and you do that
by offering cost-effective webhosting solutions, guaranteed 99%
uptime and 24/7 telephone technical support.

When you create your brand, you need to keep the who, what
and how firmly in mind but also use the brand to establish your
relevance to your target market and build credibility with that
market.

Let’s turn now to the nuts and bolts of creating your brand.

=> Describe What You Are Branding

List out your business’s key features and characteristics, your
competitive advantages and anything else that sets you apart
from your competition.

Using our webhosting example, you’ll focus primarily on the
objectives from your mission statement namely, reliable, cost-
effective webhosting solutions supported by 24/7 technical
support.

=> Identify and Describe Your Target Market

Decide whether you want to target the entire webhosting
community or only a segment of it such as small business
websites. Describe your market.

=> List Names that Suggest the Key Elements from Your
Mission Statement

The key elements from your mission statement were reliability,
cost-effectiveness and customer service. List names that are
suggestive of these elements. Let’s use Reliable Webhosting
for our example. (I don’t claim to be a creative genius.)

Don’t limit yourself to real words, though. A coined name with no
obvious meaning is a perfectly legitimate name provided it conveys
something about your business. You will find coined names easier
to trademark and secure domain names for too – a definite plus!

=> List Tag Lines that Reinforce Your Mission Statement

We’ll use: “Outstanding reliability and technical support at a
price your small business can afford”. I know, I know. You can
do much better, I’m sure.

HOW SHOULD I USE MY BRAND?

=> Create a Logo for Your Brand

Your logo is NOT your brand but your logo should allow your
brand to be instantly recognized by those familiar with it. To
this extent, your logo helps create and reinforce brand
awareness.

The logo you create should be able to be used consistently in a
variety of different media. It should be suitable for corporate
letterhead and business cards, as well as for your website and
corporate signage (if any). You do NOT want a confusing
mishmash of logos and banners and heaven knows what else.
Everything you produce needs to use the same, consistent
style of logo so that, over time, your logo becomes synonymous
with your brand. Instant recognition is what you’re going for here,
so don’t dilute it by using several different logos for different
purposes.

=> Consistent Usage of Company Name, Logo and Tag Line

Going back to our webhosting example, putting the brand name
and tagline together, the physical manifestation of your brand
will be:

RELIABLE WEBHOSTING
Outstanding reliability and technical support at a price
your small business can afford.

To establish brand awareness, this branding needs to be used
consistently and frequently in everything your produce, whether
that be letters to clients, business cards, brochures, quotations,
invoices, advertising, promotion, on your website, on the front
door of your principal place of business and on your products.
And don’t forget to be consistent in your use of color schemes.
These can be powerful brand reinforcers.

=> Marketing and Promotion of Your Brand

Once you’ve created your brand, you need to market and
promote it, in addition to your products and services. This is
how you establish your credibility and relevance to your target
market. You can hopefully see why your brand needs to be
suggestive of your mission statement. If, at the same time as
you’re selling your products and services you also push your
brand, your brand becomes synonymous with your products
and services. And vice versa.

A properly descriptive brand and high brand awareness amongst
your target market will allow you to more easily introduce a wider
range of products and services when they’re developed without
having to start by again selling who you are, what you do and
how you do it first. Your brand has already presold YOU. Your
job then is to sell your products and services.

The e-commerce revolution has made it possible for businesses to sell goods and services to consumers on the other side of the world in just a couple of clicks.

But to successfully do business internationally, building a global e-commerce brand is vital. And that requires – more than almost anything else – effective localisation.

Because while you can now reach a much broader audience,Guest Posting you still need to take the same care to craft your message to the personal culture and context of each consumer if you really want to sell.

If you don’t create a level of trust with each segment of your global audience by doing this – enough for them to be comfortable buying from you and slowly start building loyalty to your brand – potential consumers will go elsewhere.

Smart, effective localisation will help you build a global e-commerce brand which helps you get your slice of the approximately £5 trillion which the world’s online market is expected to be worth by 2023.

Here’s how to localise your brand so that it helps you convert worldwide:

What is a global brand?
As a business leader, you’ll know that it’s often your brand – possibly even more than your high-quality products or services – which really resonates with your customers. It’s your brand which your customers will mentally associate with being “good” or “bad” and which sets you apart from the competition.

So far, so marketing 101. But when it comes to building a global brand, the definition of what makes a brand has to be given a little space to breathe.

Of course, you need your brand to be cohesive. It needs to be recognisable everywhere it is seen. That’s the power of a brand.

But you also need to adapt your brand to meet the local cultural understandings and expectations of local people. This might mean incorporating colour symbolism in China or a carefully adapted version of your trademark slogan for the Middle East.

Why localise your brand?
Every major brand which wants to target its advertising spend efficiently – and convert as many consumers in different regions as possible – knows how important it is to localise their website and brand offering for different audiences. After all:

72% of internet users never or very rarely look at websites in other languages
42% of internet users never purchase goods or services if they can’t do it in their own language
56% of internet users say having information in their own language is more of a factor in their purchasing decision than price
How to build your brand – picturing the localisation process
Localisation is always easiest if it is planned early in the design process. This is especially true when you think there’s a chance that you’re going to want to localise your website, app or content later down the line.

Laying the groundwork for later localisation is often referred to as internationalisation:

1) Internationalisation
Internationalisation is, essentially, the pre-planning work you’ll do to allow later localisation.

With a good partner Language Service Provider (LSP) and a little forward planning, localisation doesn’t have to be a difficult process. By building smart internationalisation practices into the design of your app, for instance, you make it possible to easily localise it for specific audiences at a later date.

Let’s picture a very basic example:

The name entry field. It’s a standard part of almost any form or sign-up process you care to name. It’s also one of the places where poor localisation can make a consumer instantly feel that you do not care about them.

Think about the sheer variety of names out there:

Some Spanish consumers may have two given names or two family names
Some Japanese consumers may need to enter their names in multiple scripts
Some Eastern European consumers may need to enter different family names even if they are married
Some Russian and Eastern European consumers may have patronymic and matronymic names
In this example, the internationalisation process would ensure that a given-name/ last-name form is not hard-coded into the design. This makes later localisation much easier.

Your chosen LSP should be able to give you extensive advice relating to the internationalisation process.

2) Localisation
Next comes localisation itself. A critical thing to understand about localisation is that it is not just translating the words consumers see.

Translation is certainly part of the localisation process. But localisation actually includes everything involved in adapting a product or content for a specific audience. This includes:

Adapting units of measurement and currency
Researching and using preferred purchasing methods
Adapting all cultural references so that they are relevant to someone from your target audience
Adapting images and visual content. After all, if you are targeting China and all of the images on your website are of white British people enjoying themselves near Big Ben, you risk alienating consumers who might feel more at home seeing more recognisable people and landmarks.
Choosing good multilingual fonts and adapting font sizes
Ensuring your design takes into account any text expansion or contraction
The end goal is to make your content, product, website or brand appears completely natural to a given audience. Something which belongs in their personal landscape.

This is the reason why it’s important to select a partner LSP with good knowledge of the region. How else will they know how to judge what “belongs” in that region?

It’s also the reason why localising your brand, specifically, requires careful thought…

E-commerce brand localisation and how to do it
Localising your brand will involve several important steps:

1) Choose your target markets
Realistically, you might not be able to sell to every target market in every country. This means selecting the best target markets is a vital first step.

In particular, you will need to do the necessary research to figure out which markets give you the best chance to do well. Your website and app analytics can be a good place to start when it comes to pinpointing those regions where you might have a clear opportunity for expansion.

Selecting certain markets is all the more important because you need to carefully localise and adapt your brand for each and every market you are planning to target.

Each market is unique in all kinds of ways. You will need to be able to answer, at minimum:

What are the demographics like?
What about consumer purchasing habits?
What are the local sale seasons? When are the holidays?
What kinds of goods or services are popular?
What are the pain points in the customer experience?
Will the way you’ve positioned and marketed yourself in your home region resonate with your new audience?
Are there major competitors in your target region who don’t trade at home? What does their brand say about them?
Which are the preferred marketing channels in the region? Which are the preferred social media platforms? (Remember – not everyone uses or has access to Facebook and Twitter.)
2) Use local experts
Your LSP should always be using local experts to localise your content. Make sure they’re using linguists who are specialists in your industry as well as translating into their native language.

The same is true of your in-house efforts. Looking into a region, culture or market from the outside is a quite different perspective from having grown up within it. Using local experts is the only way to ensure that your brand localisation efforts are more than skin-deep.

You can and should use local experts to help you analyse and select your target markets too.

3) Adapt your design to local tastes and expectations
Your localisation efforts might already have included the smart adaption of the text, images, units of measurement of your website and so on for your new region. But even given this, there’s no guarantee that the overall design of your site will meet the expectations of your new target audience.

For example, take a long look at the websites of major brands which target both European and Asian markets such as China or Japan. You’ll see that – to most “western” eyes – the style of website which Japanese or Chinese consumers are used to looks cluttered with information. Thus, the designs which those brands use in those regions are dramatically different from those they use in other markets.

If you don’t adjust your website design to local tastes, you will end up looking wholly out of place. Possibly to the extent that no one will want to buy from you. The same is true for your brand.

4) Don’t water down your brand too far
That said, while it’s important to adapt to local taste and style preferences, it’s equally important not to completely do away with what sets your brand apart from your competitors while you do.

The example of courier company UPS is a good one. Check out their international branding to see how they’ve subtly incorporated other colours to supplement their brown and gold and appeal to other markets.

Like UPS, you still need to retain as many of the key visual features of your brand as possible if you want to bring all of the positive associations which you’ve worked so hard to grow with you into new markets.

That means using as much of the same style, personality and colour scheme as possible. But it also means walking the fine line between allowing local tastes and preferences to have something of a say and possibly add a little local spice to your main brand recipe.

5) Always test your positioning
The easiest way to figure out how your brand will be received by your new target audience is to test it. You might have to work harder to get the correct look and “feel” of your brand across in some markets than others.

Again, having a partner LSP with local experts and expertise to call on is a great resource here. They can help you find out what people local to this region take away after seeing your logo, slogans or branding.

Has your new audience taken your messaging onboard? Rounds of A/B testing will let you check your tone, choice of language and more against the eyes and ears of local people.

6) Let your localisation inform your home brand
Editing and adapting your brand so that it appeals to people from other regions and cultures can often have an unexpected additional benefit:

All of these efforts can help you refine and even enrich your core brand. As you expand beyond your original local market, you may find that all of the research you do will give you a huge amount of data to re-introduce back into your marketing language.

Going beyond branding
There are a number of other aspects of developing a global e-commerce business which cannot be skipped if you aim to succeed.

Carrying out these steps will help you position your brand as one which is attractive to your local audience. Your efforts here also need to be factored back into your overall branding efforts:

1) Adjust to local conditions
Part of succeeding as a global e-commerce brand is understanding that new markets mean new conditions.

Pricing is the most obvious example of this. It’s no good entering a new market at a price point which no consumers can afford. Equally, it’s probably a wasted opportunity to enter a new market which would pay significantly more for the goods and services you offer at a low price point.

Good initial market research before localising your brand ready to enter a new market will pay huge dividends.

2) Offer something different to local competition
Another aspect of succeeding in a new market which your research will help you with is knowing the local competition. Having competitors, while not ideal if the market is already saturated, doesn’t mean you need to give up on your plans to enter a given market altogether.

They do at least indicate that there is likely to be a high level of demand for your kind of goods and services in the region – something which makes it an ideal candidate for reaching through localisation.

However, you will need to offer something which your competitors do not. This might mean a more cost-effective price point or presenting yourself as the luxury option. It could also mean offering additional value to your clients through any number of extras. Just be sure that these are culturally relevant and desirable in your new region.

Of course, you then need to build clear statements about this offering into your branding and marketing.

3) Don’t just sell – be part of the community
Being known as a foreign, international brand is usually an acceptable position to be in as far as most consumers are concerned.

Problems only tend to arise when it becomes clear that you are not part of the local community, don’t understand how it works or are unaware of recent developments and events. This might include anything from changes in government to natural disasters.

If you can, be ready to lend assistance to your local staff or a local community which is loyal to your brand whenever an opportunity presents itself.

4) Be ready to provide multilingual customer support
As soon as you globalise your client base, you need to be ready to provide equal support in every language you serve. This will almost certainly require that you have either in-house or outsourced expertise in that language.

A cost-effective first step will be to produce a great deal of helpful technical support, FAQ documents and the like – anything which will reduce the number of queries you receive – and have them localised for the regions you want to cover.

Remember, of course, that providing coverage by language is rarely enough. It’s not a good idea to provide the same Spanish-language support files for both Spain and Mexico, for example. Though a Spanish speaker in Mexico will almost certainly be able to understand a document written in the Spanish spoken in Spain, it will clearly have been written for a Spanish audience. This displays a lack of care and commitment to your Mexican audience.

Professional translation should always be a requirement of your customer support process. Resorting to Google Translate is never a smart move.

5) Go mobile
Never forget the importance of making sure your desktop apps, website and so on are properly localised for and available on mobile devices.

The mobile market is continuing to grow worldwide, especially in regions like Africa and the Middle East. Leaving it out of your e-commerce localisation strategy can result in seriously slower growth than building it in from the start.

Like all of your branding, products and marketing, your app content needs to be properly localised. Apps which are localised for specific markets have been shown to increase conversions dramatically.

7) Be social
One of the questions your initial market research should answer regards the social media preferences of your new target audience.

Social media is, perhaps, not as important as your mobile localisation efforts. But they still require carefully localised content if your brand isn’t to become known as a bumbling foreigner.

Don’t always assume that Facebook and Twitter are the places to focus your efforts either. WeChat, Weibo and QQ are the big names in China, for instance.

Localisation – the key to building a successful e-commerce brand
Your goal when building a successful global e-commerce brand should always be to carefully choose the specific target markets you want to localise for. You should then call in the local experts and professional native linguists who can properly adapt your brand for your new audience without diluting what makes it great.

You will make life much easier for yourself if you build an internationalisation framework into your website, app and other elements from the start. This will allow for far easier localisation for any target market you choose later on.

Finally, take steps beyond constructing your global brand to build it up. As with all branding efforts, listening and researching what your customers are telling you, encouraging interaction with your brand and engaging emotionally with your customers are all going to be vital when trying to make your brand appeal to a global audience.

What you need for branding and brand development.

1.0 What is a brand?

Brands can be defined in two ways. Firstly,Guest Posting a brand can be an identification or a mark that differentiates one business from another (through a name or a logo, for example). Secondly, a brand symbolises how people think about your business.Building a brand helps customers in their decision-making, creating a perceived knowledge of what they are going to buy – before they buy it. Brands are based on three related criteria.

Confidence in a business, product or service doing exactly what the customer already believes it will do. For example, a 24-hour convenience store brand can be based on customers’ confidence that it will be open, whatever the time of day or night.The emotional response of the customer to purchasing a product or service. For example, a clothing retailer can create a brand based around making its customers feel good about what they wear, how they look, how good they feel about buying clothes from that shop and what it says about them to their peers.( Josephine Collins,(March 2008)

A brand builds a unique personality for a business, and therefore attracts a defined type of customer.Most importantly, branding is based on consistently rewarding the confidence and delivering the expected emotional response. For example, a domestic cleaning company can build its brand successfully if customers’ homes are always thoroughly cleaned, the owners believe that they are using the best cleaning company and feel good about returning to their newly cleaned homes. Your brand can cover your business as a whole or separate products and services. (Josephine Collins,(March 2008)

When starting your own business, one of your most important concerns is to develop your company’s face to the world. This is your brand. It is the company’s name, how that name is visually expressed through a logo, and how that name and logo extend throughout an organization’s communications. A brand is also how the company is perceived by its customers – the associations and inherent value they place on your business.

A brand is also a kind of promise. It is a set of fundamental principles as understood by anyone who comes into contact with a company. A brand is an organization’s “reason for being”; it is how that reason.( Josephine Collins (March 2008)

is expressed through the various communications to its key audiences, including customers, shareholders, employees, and analysts. A brand should also represent the desired attributes of a company’s products, services, and initiatives.

Apple’s brand is a great example. The Apple logo is clean, elegant, and easily implemented. Notice that the company has altered the use of the apple logo from rainbow-striped to monochromatic. In this way they keep their brand and signal in a new era for their expansive enterprise. Think about how you’ve seen the brand in advertising, trade shows, packaging, product design, and so on. It’s distinctive and it all adds up to a particular promise. The Apple brand stands for quality of design and ease of use.

Brand is a big buzzword in today’s market, but what exactly does it mean? Simply defined, is the brand essence and purpose of what your business stands in the minds of your customers, that they thought what they purchase, both tangible (physical) and intangible (subtleties and feelings ).For example, Nike products provides sports physical. Nike also “selling” speed, fitness, strength, and style.

The brand is not accident, you should deliberately Show&Tell the public what you want them to know and remember about your business unique.

Branding is the action of transferring the brand to target market and create emotional tie to your unique product or service. Branding attract, satisfy and retains customers. Nike work through their consistent visual, logos and slogans determined using well-known athletes as spokespeople for the transfer of non-tangible of their brand.

The brand is important because it solves a problem for consumers. The brand helps them to choose that product or service quality, safety, or function cannot be complete until after the purchase is made is identified. Branding builds trust although cannot remove some risk, especially when doing business with big corporations located outside a local geographic area (credit card companies, broker, online shopping).

Without brand name, products and services easily be compared with each other, any financial institution, insurance representative mix, chocolate bar, coffee, beans, and athletic shoes will be indistinguishable from another, even if in reality a big difference in quality, price, taste, and service can exist.

The Logic behind branding is very simple: If your target market is familiar with your brand and good imagination, they more likely to purchase products and services. But consumers do not know what your business is all about unless you tell them!

Is your company branded? If a distinct graphic, slogan, or feeling doesn’t emerge when buyers hear or see your company name, the brand of your business has yet to be defined and developed. Customers must clearly understand and agree with the nature, character and purpose of your product or service before they’ll buy it. And how they know if you don’t inform them? Hire a professional graphic designer, copywriter, advertising agency to help create and promote your brand of.

It’s never too late to embark on your own branding campaign, regardless of size and age of your business. Creating a successful brand takes deliberate thought and execution, but the sooner you start, the faster the results you see on your bottom line. Here’s how to start:

* Who you are defines what you offer, your method of business, their audiences, and why customers should believe in your products and services is placed.

* The transfer decision and its recognition of all other companies with strong reference image, logo, typeface, colors, slogan, jingle, theme, or tagline. For best results, work with professional skill in graphic design and copywriting.

* Commit to consistently carry your brand through every aspect of your business- stationery, marketing materials, advertising, signage, product packaging, customer service, etc.

Invest in your brand is investing in the success of your company. Clearly know that you are and what you offer, then loudly and consistently portray the image with your target market. Brand of your business is a powerful asset, and therefore maximize its value!

In fact, a brand is mental real estate’. It’s a set of expectations a company instills in its customers and prospects, as well as its employees, suppliers and competition. Further, it’s a service/product or concept that’s easily distinguishable from others. Most important, a brand should enhance how you communicate with customers. I believe that successful branding begins with the recognition that everything a company does/says must drive profits and increase value for the customer. Sounds easy. But what is the true value of branding initiatives (i.e., your ROI), and why invest time and money this seemingly non-revenue-generating activity? In truth, there are many rational reasons, including:

Market Differentiation (competitive advantage)

Customer buying preference (retain a positive impression)

Supports the highest possible tolerance to price (perceived value)

Increased cross-sales opportunities (better profit margins)

Better awareness and recognition (leadership in the market)

Investor confidence (plus employees and external alliances), etc.

Without question, successful branding initiatives can have immense payback and add genuine value to your company, whether new or well-established. However, your brand’s success depends on an implementation strategy comprising four essential must’ principals. It must be a genuine reflection on your core strengths-values-management commitments and align with your customers’ values.

Your brand must also identify a unique position that clearly differentiates you from competitors. It must carry through every aspect of an organization, meaning you must articulate your brand identity into a series of actions, beliefs and tools. Finally, and perhaps most important, it must be consistent over time.

In every brand development process, we employ four distinct elements, each weighted equally. First, the Value Proposition; it defines the uniqueness you provide to customers. Brand Character Definition and Expression follows; the character of your brand must make sense to your most important customers (While your logo is part of your branding, other important elements include corporate identity, company boilerplate, and collateral materials such as brochures, ad templates, website identity, etc.) Next, Positioning Statements must express your place in the market to help suppliers, investors, customers and competitors understand your intent; these concepts often form a mission statement or a byline tagged to your company logo. And lastly, Key Messages must consistently communicate your chosen information; these must promote the brand intent and be consistently employed by the entire team.