How to create a brand from scratch in 6 steps

If you are looking for information on how to create a brand from scratch, you are probably in one of these two cases: either you are an entrepreneur who has already started a business with a brand that does not satisfy him, or you are at the beginning of your journey and now the time has come to create the brand.

Well let me tell you from the start: building a successful brand is no easy feat. But with the right strategies and a long-term view, it is certainly possible.

In this article I want to give you some advice on how to approach this path to create a strong brand that lasts over time. 

A difficult path, I warn you. But if you want to work hard, with commitment and dedication, if you are willing to reflect on who you are for others and what you want to achieve, if you believe that it is possible to give up certain ideas or paths to adjust the shot of your business and go meet your customers, then I can tell you that you can do it great.

So let’s roll up our sleeves and create this brand from scratch.

How to create a successful brand: starting from emotions

Before talking about how to create a brand, let’s make a brief parenthesis and first understand what it is. The brand is literally the brand of your company. The word brand is not chosen at random. In addition to being one of the translations of the English term brand , in Italian it also means an indelible sign of recognition. And that’s right. The brand is the sign of recognition of a company. Over time, however, this concept has expanded and today we can say that it represents its face and soul.  When a consumer looks at a brand, it arouses emotions. I know it may seem strange to you but it is and I am sure that you too perceive different emotions in front of different brands. 

• Do you want to bet? I bet you seem to feel the taste of home , family , tradition and craftsmanship , right? 
• What about if I show you this brand and this payoff: “Power is nothing without control”.

As you can see, the sensations are different. Here strength, energy, balance, mastery of one’s power, are the main elements.  This payoff, which among other things turned 25, seems to be telling us: power and control are the two sides of the same coin and it is the ability to keep both in balance that makes the Pirelli product unique. At this point you will have understood that the brand is not just a logo that shows the name of the company and a phrase from an advertising spot. The brand identifies the company, arouses emotions, remains in the memory because it is easily recognizable and retains the customer who perceives it as something familiar to trust or as something to identify with, to belong to. To create a winning brand, therefore, it is necessary to implement a marketing strategy called branding that can last for years and that is part of the brand itself. Let’s say that branding is the process by which an entrepreneur manages to create a successful brand.

You can have a fantastic brand, a logo with an attractive shape and colors, a beautiful payoff and a memorable name but you will not be able to make your way if your brand does not reflect your company, if you can not position yourself in the minds of your potential customers in univocal way, if there is no brand awareness, if you are unable to convey a strong brand identity.

Similarly, if you have all this but you can’t summarize it in a name, with a logo and a winning payoff, then you will hardly remain in the minds of your potential customers.

As we have already said in the past, if the brand is the face that identifies the company, the branding represents its soul.  So, to quote, the brand is nothing without branding … and vice versa!

But how to create a brand then?

Keep following me and we will see together how to create a brand starting from scratch, taking one step at a time and trying to implement the right marketing strategies, such as branding, to have a lasting result.

How to create a brand from scratch in two steps

You are probably thinking that at the beginning I told you about a long and difficult path and now I propose to face only two phases. Attention, I’m not here to offer you anything miraculous like: “lose 30 kilos in 2 days”. In reality, the steps necessary to open a brand are 6, but the phases into which the entire operation can be divided are 2 because I am convinced that basically these are two large macro areas. But I assure you that everything you need to create your brand is included in each step.

The first step in opening a brand is research. 

You have to consider that research and study are the basis of everything. Who wouldn’t have liked to play the piano just by sitting down and moving their hands on the keyboard? 

And so it works with the brand too. You can’t do it without the research and study phase.

The second phase, on the other hand, is the creative-operational part, i.e. the one where the brand is physically built on the basis of the identity of your company.

For example, if you have a small company and you want to create a food brand, certainly the brand identity cannot be the same as that of a real estate agency.

So let’s see what are the steps within each phase, and what are the questions you will have to ask yourself at each step.

First step to create a brand – Research 

1. Target: who is my potential clientele?
2. Market: How is the market in my niche? How can I differentiate myself?
3. Competition: what competition is there? Little? A lot? Can I compete?

Second phase – Brand identity and creative-operational aspects

1. Identity: what is my identity? What do I want to convey to my customers?
2. Creative-operational aspects: choice of name, logo (colors, fonts, lines) and tone of voice, that is, the way you want to communicate. 
3. Technical-legal aspects: trademark registration, legal adjustments.

“Advertising is identity. It is never the banal pursuit of selling the product. It is trying to see the product within the company, to see the company within the company. The product evolves if the company evolves, if the people of the company evolve and to do so they have to live in society, looking to the future. “

Research and identity, therefore, are the foundations of the work we are going to do. And it is also a question of the search for identity itself. 

If a company evolves to adapt to the market, at each evolution it will have to do research to recreate its new identity Do you remember the payoffs I mentioned at the beginning? Mulino Bianco has gone from “Eat healthy, go back to nature” to “A good world”, because at the time of the first slogan there was a great deal in society the need to return to natural and simple things. The new payoff, therefore, abandons the concepts used up to then, such as “family”, “hearth” and “return to nature” and introduces more modern and typical concepts of this era, such as “renewable energy” and “green sensitivity” .

The company could not have made this important step without:

1. a strong research component to understand society;
2. a great effort of identity to adapt one’s belief to the change of the former.

Having made this premise to motivate the sense of these 2 phases of creating a brand, let’s see all the steps in detail.