The online market is flooded with brands competing for customers’ attention. Meanwhile, people’s attention spans continue to decrease year by year. With such an issue, how can you ensure your brand sticks in the minds of your customers? And what are the most important brand attributes to have in mind?
If you’ve tried various branding strategies without much success, consider identifying your brand attributes first. By focusing on this, you can create a brand that is recognizable and memorable, resulting in improved brand awareness and loyalty.
To guide you through this process, this article will share seven steps that can help you identify your brand attributes.
What Are Brand Attributes?
Brand attributes are a collection of characteristics that define your brand’s personality and identity.
They are expressed through tangible and intangible elements such as colors, typography, content, value, culture, as well as tone and voice.
The color you choose plays an integral role in building your brand identity. Different colors embody certain meanings and emotions. Green, for instance, represents wealth and nature. Meanwhile, red is often associated with excitement, passion, and energy.
The same goes for your brand’s font choice.
Each typeface carries particular characteristics and emotions based on its style. Contemporary fonts like Munich and Bodoni convey a sense of modernity and professionalism. Meanwhile, calligraphy typefaces such as Adreena and Mistral carry informality and elegance.
Therefore, brand attributes matter. By choosing the attributes that best suit your brand personality, you help navigate how people perceive your brand.
The foundation to creating a solid and defined brand personality is a cohesive and consistent look and feel. When done right, people can easily understand your brand through surface-level elements such as logo and color palette.
How to Identify Your Brand Attributes?
Let’s get right into the steps to identify your brand attributes, starting from recognizing your company culture, all the way to gaining feedback from your target audience.
1. Identify Your Company Culture
The company culture is a set of shared values, goals, attitudes, and practices that are promoted within an organization.
The type of culture your company cultivates can carry over into your brand image through conversations with customers or brand voice on social media posts.
Thus, it’s important to identify your company culture to help define your brand personality. With a solid understanding of this, you increase the chances of creating recognizable and consistent branding across different channels.
Depending on the qualities you want to bring out in your company, here are several company culture-inspired brand characteristics:
- Ambitious
- Friendly
- Traditional
2. Assess Your Core Values
The values serve as a company’s compass. They are a set of principles and beliefs that guide employees’ behavior and actions.
In practice, a company’s culture and values are inseparable. Let’s take a look at Facebook’s company culture and values, for example.
While the culture promotes self-authenticity for each employee, it enhances this by having values such as:
- Be bold
- Be open
- Build social value
- Focus on impact
- Work where and how you work best
Facebook’s core values communicate that the company is home to self-starters and those confident in their skills.
This consistency is what creates a solid and strong brand personality, which further helps identify a company’s brand attributes.
3. Know Your Unique Selling Points
Understanding what sets you apart from competitors can help identify the attributes you want to embed into your brand.
Popular examples of USPs include statements such as:
- The first-ever
- The most affordable
- The highest-quality
That said, USPs aren’t limited to the three statements above. In fact, they can be as unique as M&Ms slogan, “the milk chocolate that melts in your mouth, not in your hand.”
Once you’ve found what differentiates your product from competitors, you can create brand attributes such as taglines for ads and campaigns to increase brand awareness.
4. Understand the Brand Attributes of Your Target Market
A target market refers to your brand’s intended customer. This is defined by certain characteristics and demographic similarities such as age, pain points, location, education level, socioeconomic status.
To begin, consider creating a buyer persona to help learn about possible potential customers.
From understanding who they are, you can gain insight into their likes and dislikes, purchasing decisions, and other behavior. Leverage this information to understand the best approach to market, advertise, and position your brand.
As you grow, continue to improve using social listening tools to gain more data about your audience. That way, you can make adjustments to your brand to best fit their preferences and grow a successful brand.
5. Use Brand Voice and Tone
This is the core of your brand’s personality. It is how your brand chooses to communicate with the audience, including the choice of words and emotional tone. Is it friendly and playful, empowering and uplifting, or professional and serious?
That said, brand voice and tone are not synonymous. Your brand voice should stay consistent and unchanging at all times. Meanwhile, the brand tone should change to suit particular situations.
For example, your brand tone can adjust to different purposes, such as educating, informing, entertaining, or selling.
Once you’ve established your voice and tone, it’s best to create a style guide, so they always remain on-brand. This is important for consistent brand identity so the audience can always feel safe and secure regardless of how they choose to communicate with you.
6. Identify Your Customer’s Emotional Journey
Consider the emotions that customers experience before finding your brand. For instance, consider how they feel about specific challenges, problems, and pain points.
From there, think about the emotions you want to bring out when customers finally experience your product or service. Understanding a customer’s emotional journey can help identify brand attributes such as empathy or optimism.
A positive emotional connection with your audience can positively impact your brand as well. It drives more engagement and increases brand loyalty.
To create a pleasant emotional journey for your potential customers, consider the following points:
- Listen to what your customers want
- Speak to your target audience
- Remain honest and authentic
- Tell a story
7. Gain Feedback from Target Audience
Listening to your target audience’s feedback helps identify your brand’s current state versus where it needs to be.
From there, you can make improvements and adjustments to your brand’s attributes, resulting in improved brand positioning.
Additionally, feedback from your target audience can help to measure their satisfaction with your brand, making it essential to making product or service enhancements.
To do this, make sure you have open lines of communication with your audience. Show that you are interested in what they have to say and give them the opportunity to voice their thoughts and desires.
This can start from as simple as your social media comments section all the way to user surveys.
Conclusion
Identifying your brand’s attributes helps to capture attention and build a recognizable brand.
By following the points mentioned above, you can start putting together all attributes that best represent your brand. Here is a short recap of the steps:
- Identify your company culture
- Assess your core values
- Know your unique selling point
- Understand the attributes of your target market
- Use brand voice and tone
- Identify your customer’s emotional journey
- Gain feedback from your audience
Although compiling your brand attributes can take some time, it’s one of the best moves you can do for your business to gain an edge in today’s highly competitive market.
