brand platform: the foundation of brand love and loyalty
You may have noticed that companies with similar products can have vastly different success among consumers. Despite having similar products, target audiences, and marketing tools, their sales levels can be drastically different. The culprit is the brand platform.
It is worth noting that when referring to a brand, it is not just an ordinary trademark. A brand is a product that has a name, reputation, and loyal customers.
Imagine that a brand is the personality of your business.
- — What is its name?
- — What does it wear?
- — How does it communicate with customers?
- — What values and principles does it have?
- — Who are its friends?
Each brand is a separate personality. Samsung and Apple produce the same product from a functional point of view, but their answers to the questions listed above will be different.
What does a brand platform look like?
Essentially, a brand platform is the semantic field of a company, describing its unique distinguishing properties and a system of visual, image, and marketing elements.
In fact, this system is a marketing document that describes the brand attributes, its mission and big idea, and its value to the audience.
So, a brand platform is a foundation around which a brand is built, and consumers' attitudes towards it are formed.
What does a brand platform give to a business?
The goal of any business is profitability. If the brand is the personality of your company, is there a more effective way to understand this personality than by buying your product?
The brand platform conveys to the consumer through meaning, emotions, and rational advantages why they should do business with you and not your competitors. And sales depend directly on this.
In addition to the global goal of profitability, a brand platform is needed for a business to:
- — efficiently allocate resources to promote the company: the values to be adhered to are already described.
When creating an advertising message, a creative person will not blindly follow the latest trend, but will incorporate the brand's value into it.
- — look at the team in the same direction: based on common standards and goals.
Designers won't choose simple shapes and basic colors if the brand platform is geared towards positioning the company as youthful and vibrant.
- - Serve as a guide in difficult decisions: you can always refer to the ideology.
Creating different versions of an advertising campaign for testing will make it easier to narrow down the choice to the creatives that best reflect the company's ideology.
- - Scale effectively: choose a direction for development and build a team based on the ideology.
If your priority is digital promotion, you can immediately exclude print publications from your promotion channels.
- - Make the product less susceptible to market fluctuations: clear principles prevent the brand from being changed unjustifiably.
Your company cannot be on one side today and on the other tomorrow if the brand platform includes an agreement to care about readers' feelings.
The brand platform allows you to look for more effective approaches to developing and promoting your market offering.
What does the brand platform consist of?
Just as a person's personality is determined by their unique worldview, way of speaking, social circles, fashion style, and life purpose, a brand has its own components. These elements make up the brand platform:
- - Mission - the brand's "pearl" or, in other words, the company's purpose and value to society beyond profit.
- - Values - the qualities of a company's products or services that make them stand out and attract consumers.
- - Archetype - the image of the brand in the eyes of consumers. Archetypes make the brand appear more human and less like a soulless corporation, helping to understand the target audience on a deeper level.
- - Tone of Voice - the internal rules for how the company interacts with its audience, the tone of communication.
- - Benefits - the unique positive characteristics that differentiate the brand from its competitors.
- - RTB (reason to believe) - the reason to trust the product or brand, evidence of the benefits of purchasing a specific product.
The brand platform may include other elements, such as a unique selling proposition, customer avatar, and even a brand style. The company determines what constitutes its brand platform.
How to build the foundation of a brand platform?
Let’s start with a basic question: what are brand values? They are the principles and guideposts that explain to the team what you stand for and tell customers what to expect from the experience. It’s the brand values that define the decision filter—for everything from product to communications.
A common question is: what types of brand values are there? They’re typically divided into functional, emotional, social, and ethical. Let’s highlight emotional brand values separately: they’re responsible for the feelings a brand evokes—calm, excitement, inspiration.
A natural pairing is “mission and brand values.” The mission articulates the company’s contribution, while the values describe how you act day to day. In short: the mission is the “why,” the values are the “how.”
How should you approach it and how do you formulate a brand mission? First, describe the market problem in plain language; then state the promise of value for key audiences; and check the focus—one clear idea, no clichés. For reference—examples of brand missions: “We help small businesses sell online without barriers,” “We make conscious consumption convenient.”
Now to examples of brand values: customer centricity (we solve tasks faster than promised), transparency (we speak honestly about timelines and risks), sustainability (we minimize our footprint), innovation (regular improvements to the service). It’s important that the wording be verifiable in behavior and metrics—otherwise the values remain slogans.
There are industry specifics as well. For the fashion segment, it’s useful to formalize clothing brand values: sustainable materials, inclusive size ranges, durability.
To pull everything into a brand-platform system, show the structure with an example. Below is a schematic brand-platform example of a real company: mission — “we make urban mobility predictable”; values — “care, honesty, speed, safety”; positioning — “personal transport on demand”; promise — “you’ll arrive on time”; proof — pickup SLAs and transparent pricing.
Bottom line: when mission, positioning, and brand values are aligned into a single logic, the brand platform becomes a tool that helps you focus and align product decisions.
Business Card
Just as a person hands you their business card when you first meet, a brand platform is the business card of a company. Many companies don't have one and still exist just fine, that's true. But imagine how much higher they could soar if people perceived any of their marketing moves, products or ad campaigns as part of a certain ideology. People don't buy products — they buy emotions.
Associations that people have with the words Rolls Royce or Nike, or Coca-Cola, depend not only on the benefits of the product for the consumer, but also on the customer's sense of owning the product, the company's history and its message to the audience.
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