How to create a brand development strategy using data
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What comes to mind when you think of Nike? Sports shoes? Sure, but that’s not what sets it apart from its competitors.
A strong brand evokes distinct emotions in the consumer’s mind. The Nike brand voice and tagline — “Just Do It” — stand for ambition, inspiration, and athleticism. Its brand values and mission statement are about innovation, authenticity, and uniqueness. The bold colors and accents in its products, marketing materials, fonts, and typography feel modern and energetic.
As such, all these elements together have etched an indelible impression of Nike in our minds.
…Which is exactly what a brand development process is all about.
Think of it as crafting a vibe for your business — you’re creating a brand personality that stands out among the crowd. It’s the art of giving your new brand a unique flavor — complete with its values, brand messaging, and visual identity that make it pop.
By nailing down what makes your brand tick, you can forge a deep bond with your target market and set yourself apart from the competition. It's about building relationships with new and potential customers based on trust, loyalty, and brand recognition, paving the way for lasting success and business growth.
Successful brand-building powered by data
Creating a brand development strategy using data is like having an all-access pass to your audience's pain points, habits, and preferences.
It's leveraging market research — knowing who clicks on your digital ads, and when and why they click — to design your marketing strategies and initiatives. By analyzing the data on customer preferences, demographics, and interactions, you can tailor your messaging, products, pricing, and customer experiences to better resonate with your target audiences.
Using a data-driven approach, your brand can optimize its SEO and content marketing efforts, improve customer engagement, and grow its base of loyal customers. Also, continuous measurement and analysis of key brand metrics can help you fine-tune your strategies to stay relevant and connect with your audience effectively in a rapidly changing landscape. Hint: Tracksuit’s here to help you with that!
How to create a data-driven brand development strategy
Now that we’ve covered the “why,” let’s look at “how” you can build a brand using data. Here are the key steps in the process.
Data collection
Businesses often limit themselves to data such as website analytics and social media metrics. Those sugary performance metrics might get you hopping off the walls, but they aren’t so great when it comes to predicting long term growth. That’s what brand marketing’s for, baby! Customer surveys can be an excellent tool to understand customer sentiment, brand reach, and the impact of your marketing campaigns.
Fortunately, Tracksuit conducts continuous consumer surveys on thousands of people across the globe, year-round. That means we’re building some pretty epic brand insights across the 4,000+ brands we’re tracking. By surveying real humans, we can gather some deep insights into your target audience.
Here's our Timeline view, which shows Liquid Death's marketing funnel metrics in the US market over the past 12 months.
Data exploration
Dive deep into the collected data to uncover meaningful patterns, trends, and correlations. Utilize statistical techniques and data visualization tools to analyze the data effectively, identifying key insights that can inform your brand development strategy.
Audience segmentation
With data from customer surveys, brands can start segmenting their target audience by dissecting it into identifiable groups with similar traits like age, interests, and spending habits. When you understand these nuances, you can customize branding activities to cater directly to each segment's needs and preferences.
For instance, demographics reveal age and location, while psychographics delve into attitudes and lifestyles. This granular approach ensures your branding resonates authentically with each group, forging stronger connections and driving engagement.
Take a leaf out of Amazon’s playbook, which uses a customer’s previous purchase data, browsing patterns, preferences, reviews, ratings, etc. to serve them personalized product recommendations. Such segmentation empowers the brand to speak directly to the hearts and minds of its diverse audience, fostering deeper relationships and brand loyalty.
Identify brand attributes
Defining your brand identity entails uncovering its essential attributes and values. Survey data can help you understand how people perceive your brand’s worth (or brand equity) and how it’s faring against the competition. This intricate process involves amalgamating data insights with your brand's mission, vision, and objectives to craft a coherent and captivating brand story.
The aim should be to play up the positive attributes and work to dispel the negative connotations that your target audience may have about your brand. By blending quantitative data analysis with qualitative brand elements, you can create a narrative that resonates with your target audience and aligns with your overarching goals.
Crafting brand positioning
Brand awareness and perception can be difficult to quantify with only website traffic data and social media engagement. You also need customer survey data for a more in-depth analysis of how your audience reacts to your marketing campaigns.
With nuanced data, you can craft effective brand strategies to position your brand exactly how you want. Crafting your brand's differentiation strategy is about delineating its unique value proposition to stand out amidst competitors while striking a chord with your intended audience.
Our Imagery view above shows the brand perceptions associated with Nike compared to Reebok. These data is from verbatim responses from real humans.
This pivotal stage encompasses formulating a positioning statement that conveys the exclusive benefits and advantages your brand offers. It's about articulating why selecting your brand is the optimal choice for consumers, emphasizing what sets it apart in the marketplace.
This process can help you establish a compelling narrative that captures attention and cultivates enduring connections with your target demographic, driving preference and loyalty towards your brand over alternatives.
For example, Apple has positioned itself as a premium brand, focusing on high-quality design and innovation to deliver advanced product functions and capabilities. It caters to consumers willing to spend more for high-quality tech products and services.
Execution and monitoring
Rolling out your brand development strategy encompasses more than just launching it across different marketing channels — it's about infusing your brand essence into every touchpoint. This holistic approach ensures consistency and reinforces your brand identity at every customer interaction.
But the work doesn’t stop here. These campaigns need to be monitored so that they can be refined, improved, or even overhauled if required.
With Tracksuit, you can conduct customer surveys every week, to track your campaigns and brand health regularly. Under such scrutiny, you won’t miss any issues or anomalies that may arise with your campaigns. Additionally, it is crucial to track the effectiveness of your branding efforts using key metrics.
With regular assessment of performance indicators and by soliciting feedback, you can fine-tune your strategies in real-time, adapting them to evolving market dynamics and customer preferences. This iterative process not only optimizes your brand's impact but also fosters agility, enabling you to stay ahead in the competitive landscape.
The finishing line 🏁
In today's competitive business landscape, data-driven brand development is a crucial strategy for success. Analyzing data provides valuable insights that help brands understand their audience better and differentiate themselves effectively.
Through segmentation and strategic positioning, brands can tailor their messaging to resonate with specific consumer groups, driving engagement and loyalty. For smaller brands that might not have the resources to collect and analyze data independently, it’s best to partner with a company like Tracksuit (hi, it’s us). We offer always-on brand health tracking that inspires and excites, all at a fraction of the cost of traditional providers.
Of course, it’s not enough to simply develop a strategy and execute it. You also need to track the effectiveness of branding efforts and make adjustments. This iterative process ensures that brands stay relevant and agile in a dynamic market environment, ultimately leading to long-term success and growth.
The bottom line? Data in brand development is a powerful tool that enables brands to connect with their audience authentically and prove the objective impact of their marketing activity. To dive into Tracksuit’s brand data and dashboard, request a demo or speak to one of our brand experts today.
