How to build a brand from 0 to 1?

I often encounter this problem in my daily work.

1. How to build my brand

2. Should I do promotion?

3. Is there any live broadcast that can bring goods?

4. How to do brand marketing ?

….

In fact, there is really no standard answer to this type of question, or in other words, this type of open-ended question will never have an answer. The subtext of these questions is "How can I make more money?"

In this issue, I will share with you "How small companies build brands and brand assets from 0 to 1". This topic is a bit difficult, but I will try my best to provide some specific methodologies and paths.

To truly answer this question, we must first understand the essence of this question.

1. What is a brand?

2. What is brand equity?

3. What is the path to building brand equity?

I always say: Only when you have a clear definition can you develop a solution.

In real life, many of us seem to understand this sentence when we see it. But my thinking logic is to first clarify its definition. Is it important to get the definition right? Very important. I often see many meetings fail due to “lack of consensus on definition”, resulting in no results.

The reason is that everyone's understanding and cognition are different, and even everyone's brain operating system is different. But I firmly believe that figuring out the definition is actually half the battle.

If you don’t understand the business, you don’t understand marketing; if you don’t understand the business, you don’t understand the brand.

Aren’t we talking about brands? How do we talk about enterprises? In fact, we need to go beyond brand marketing and look at brand marketing from the perspective of the entire enterprise; go beyond the perspective of the brand and look at the brand as a whole.

In my opinion, if someone has no understanding of the overall operation of a business, how can he create a brand? Obviously not.

I have seen many small companies that did very well in the early stages of their development, but after they became successful, they hired some professional brand experts or recruited brand managers, only to end up being led into a ditch. Because any brand or marketing that is separated from corporate strategy and overall business thinking is pseudo-marketing. Not only do they not know what they are doing, but they also don’t know that they don’t know.

Therefore, a true brand marketing expert must first be an entrepreneur. Otherwise, nine out of ten times, they are all big liars.

From a business perspective, whether it is a company, a product, or a service, all of these things are actually branding tools.

However, in our usual perception, what is a brand? Brand is a tool for business operations. It is to improve users' and customers' recognition of their products and services. What companies hope is that this tool is easy to use and everyone can understand what brand it is at a glance.

Since they are two sets of logic, the resulting actions are naturally completely different. Therefore, there are such absurd ideas as: small companies don’t need to build brands, we can talk about branding when we have the strength, branding is a money-burning thing and we don’t have the budget...

It is true. If you just want to do a small business, you really cannot feel the role of the brand. So this is the real reason why small companies only focus on marketing and promotion, and hardly do branding, and will not do branding.

How do you understand that everything an enterprise does serves the brand? The establishment, struggle and growth of an enterprise seem to be in the hands of the shareholders and founders of the enterprise. But businesses have a lifespan. At most one or two hundred years. But what about the brand? More precisely, what about the symbols left behind by human activities? It's a bit like genes. Brand symbols, like genes, can transcend time and last for a long time.

Therefore, everything a company does ultimately serves the brand.

In the long run, brand is the only asset of a company that can transcend time and is the purpose of all corporate activities.

In order to better operate the brand, our predecessors proposed concepts such as "brand container" and "brand account", and then told everyone what is in this container and account to guide us in implementing the brand. But many companies often lose their way while doing business because they forget the relationship between brand and company.

Why can brands transcend time?

Only symbols can transcend history. So I often say “brand is a symbol”. You may say, this is too easy. Anyone can just find a designer and create a brand. Maybe you misunderstood, keep reading.

In 1980, Colonel Sanders died, but the KFC he founded and the image symbol of Kentucky Fried Chicken remained. Now he still stands at the door of KFC every day to greet us, although this business has nothing to do with their family anymore.

The English word for brand is Brand, which means "burn" in Old Norse. Ancient people used this method to mark private property such as livestock. In the Middle Ages, European craftsmen used this method to burn marks on their works for identification, and thus "brands" came into being. If the product is good, the user will accumulate his love for it on this burning logo, skipping the process of "searching, understanding, and trusting" and purchasing it directly. For this "craftsman", "transaction costs" are saved.

You see, a brand is just a symbol. A company has a lifespan, but a brand can transcend time. So what is a brand?

Since a brand is a symbol, the first step in building a brand is to establish a symbol.

To build a brand is to create a symbol that identifies your products, condenses your value, and makes consumers buy from you and recommend you. This symbol can be a word, a graphic, or a sound. A good brand symbol should be easy to remember and spread.

How to evaluate what is a good brand symbol?

We need to establish principles from perspectives: one is the cost perspective; the other is the investment perspective.

Cost perspective. The marketing and communication costs of a brand start with naming. I have seen many clients who spent money to create a brand symbol and then spent more money to explain the brand symbol. This is just because they are stupid and have a lot of money.

Like many people, they make a company logo just for the sake of having it. To let others know about their company, they also have a logo. Then, these logos require a long explanation before you can clearly say what the logo is. Some logos are just for the sake of looking good... Logos made with this kind of thinking are obviously unqualified.

There is also an interesting phenomenon that many companies want to spend no money or less on marketing and promotion while finding more customers. They think that all these are just money, but they don’t know that huge marketing and communication costs have actually been incurred when naming the company and the brand.

If I give you a method now that can save 100 million in advertising fees for your new company name or new brand name, would you be willing to do it? Follow the official account and I will share the specific methods later.

Therefore, we look at all marketing communication tools from the perspective of cost. When you choose a name, don’t ask whether it sounds good or not, but ask whether it costs a lot or not; when you design a logo, don’t ask whether it looks good or not, but ask whether it costs a lot or not. For an advertising slogan, an advertising image, an e-commerce website, a packaging design, or a TV commercial, we only ask whether it reduces the customer's selection cost and our marketing communication cost.

Investment perspective. Advertising is not an expense; it is an investment, an investment based on expectations. You will definitely argue that the money I spend is given to others and does not generate any interest, so how can it be considered an investment?

Indeed, for many of our clients, advertising is essentially spending money to buy traffic, and what they get in return is customer inquiries, so they don’t believe that “advertising is an investment.”

When it comes to investment, we put forward the idea that "brand assets are brand competitiveness". In our view, all business operations are for the brand and are only for the purpose of accumulating brand assets. Accumulating brand assets means enhancing brand competitiveness.

Brand assets are the brand recognition of consumers that can bring us benefits.

How can we convert the advertising, marketing, communication expenses, etc. that we spend into our brand assets?

For example: Why does Moutai keep promoting the 1915 Panama International Gold Award? In fact, it is accumulating brand assets. Today we talk about the Panama International Gold Award, which is almost synonymous with Moutai painting. When it came to promoting the Panama Gold Award for liquor brands like Xinghua Village and Hengshui Laobai Gan, it no longer worked. In other words, Moutai’s continued publicity has privatized the Panama Gold Award.

Let me give you another interesting example. Why do the four major banks, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China and China Construction Bank, all use the copper coin symbol as their brand logo? They all have money, but they can't privatize it.

Now, we have figured out “what is a brand” and “what is brand equity”. Next, let’s answer the question, “How do small companies build their own brands and brand assets?”

First of all, we must deeply understand the "Three Principles of Western Red Brand"

Principles of social supervision

Society is the goal, enterprise is the means, and brand is the prop.

From an economic perspective, brand is a game mechanism. It is a repeated game mechanism created by companies in order to win customers' choices and give customers the opportunity to punish themselves.

Brand cost principle

The significance of brand existence lies in reducing three costs:

First, reduce the cost of social supervision; second, reduce the cost of customer selection; third, reduce the marketing and communication costs of enterprises.

Brand Equity Principles

Brand equity is the consumer brand recognition that brings benefits to a company. When doing anything, the standard is whether it can form assets, protect assets, and increase the value of assets.

The key for small companies to build their brands is to always focus on accumulating brand assets.

1. Is our brand symbol qualified? Does it have low memory cost and low communication cost? For example: There are two villas, one is called Rancho Santa Fe and the other is called West Suburb Manor. Which one is the best?

2. At all times, brand is the first asset. Then focus on the brand, let customers identify your products, condense the value of your products, and then let consumers buy from you and recommend you.

3. In the process of building a brand, the proportion of resources to be invested should be determined based on the order of brand assets to ensure "the greatest strategic success is achieved with the lowest cost and lowest risk."

4. How to do marketing, communication, creativity, promotion, story writing, advertising, etc. are not important. The symbol itself is important. Secondly, everything must be within a system and must always revolve around the "investment perspective and cost perspective".

5. When creating a brand, you must think from the perspective of business operations. Independent brands only treat the brand as a "slave", and what they finally cultivate are slaves, not top students.

6. The path to building each brand is different, but the ultimate success is only reflected in symbols. Business success does not mean brand success, so when building a brand and establishing a business model, we should understand the difference between the two. Regarding how to find business opportunities and how small brands can rise, please read my other articles. How do small brands attack big brands? method! 》"How can new brands break out of the red ocean market? What enlightenment does Hubang hot sauce give us! 》"In 2021, the opportunity for new brands to rise rapidly has arrived! 》

7. If a small company wants to build a brand and brand assets, the most important thing is to establish the correct awareness, and then continue to practice, verify, and persevere.

In summary, the above are my thoughts on brands and brand assets. In fact, they are applicable to both large and small companies, but these are all "mental methods" and their specific implementation requires methodological support. Take naming for example, it is also a technical job. If after reading this, you still ask me if there are any specific methods to create a brand, I suggest you save this article and read it repeatedly.

In my opinion, no matter whether it is a large company or a small company, it must think about specific things such as brand, marketing, promotion, and communication from the perspective of business operations. Any brand or marketing that is separated from corporate strategy and overall business thinking is pseudo-marketing. Not only do they not know what they are doing, but they also don’t know that they don’t know.

If my article is useful to you, please forward it to your friends.

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The author of this article is the founder of Western Red Strategic Marketing.