Quick 5-Step Guide to Branding Your Business In Singapore

What is branding?

Before we start off with how to keep your brand consistent for your business, we must first grasp the meaning of what branding your business is. Branding is the process of creating an identity for your business, one that garners recognition towards it. Creating a strong presence among your consumers and competitors through a brand mission and identity. When managed well, branding can become the best tool in a business’ arsenal in selling.

A Guide To Building Your Brand In Singapore

1. Know Your Target Audience
2. Identify Your Brand Mission And Goals
3. Have A Valuable Brand Image
4. Have A Memorable Brand Identity
5. Put It All Together

1. Know Your Target Audience

When starting out a business, you’ve probably already established what you want to sell. Hence, from there you need to start identifying your brand’s target audience, the people that you want to buy into your brand and its products or services. It may be a specific age group, hobbies, occupation, or behaviours related to what your brand is trying to sell.

There should be thorough research into the behaviours, habits, and actions of the target audience of your brand as well, therefore solidifying the idea behind your brand, giving way to the next step into keeping a brand consistent.

2. Identify Your Brand Mission And Goals

Now that you know the target audience of your brand, you need to know your brand mission and its goals next.

The following questions should be asked: what does the brand want to achieve with its target audience? Do you want it to empower people? Influence habits? Build values? Cater to the desire of the audience? These are things that you should consider the brand mission to be. What is the ultimate purpose of your brand existing and how does it solve your audience’s needs?

From there, set goals for your brand to achieve its mission and manage it well. When managed well, the goals of the brand will be able to achieve its ultimate mission and your business will start to take off.

3. Have A Valuable Brand Image

With the business establishing its brand mission and goals, from there we can start to realise the image of the brand.

Know the difference between a brand image and a brand identity. Brand image involves the way that customers actually perceives you. This involves the reputation, emotion, values and beliefs of your business. On the other hand, brand identity is how you want them to perceive you through your logo, tag line, use of language and tone, and overall brand aesthetics.

To go deeper into building a valuable brand image, let’s start off first with the brand archetype. A brand archetype is essentially like our MBTI personality traits, with different brand missions, goals and values that shape a certain personality for the brand.

Going a little more in depth into this idea of brand archetypes, let us explore the four different category brand archetypes: the brand that explores spirituality, the brand that pursues intimate connection, the brand that provides structure and the last brand that leaves a legacy behind.

Furthermore, within these categories are the archetypes themselves, with the Innocent, Sage and Explorer being related to spiritual exploration, followed by the Lover, Jester and Everyman who pursues connection, next with Creator, Ruler and Caregiver providing structure and the Outlaw, Hero and Magician leaving a legacy.

To find out more about the brand archetypes themselves and the values they hold, you may visit this link here.

These archetypes also have a certain ratio which is split into, where most brands have a 70:30 ratio, a major and minor archetype, explaining why some brands may sometimes not represent who they are.

So, after providing examples of the various brand archetypes and how its categorised, let’s talk about how important it is to a business and its branding.

As mentioned, it acts sort of like a brand’s personality, a culmination of all a brand’s goals and missions, closely mimicking that of us humans, who each hold certain values and beliefs which we portray to the people around us.

This in turn helps sell your brand better, as it is seen to have a clear direction through its branding, creating the perception of confidence in what your brand believes in, ultimately building the mental image of your brand, instilling it in your audience.

4. Have A Memorable Brand Identity

The next key to having the ultimate consistency in your brand, is to have a visual identity that is prominent amongst not only the brand’s audience, as well as its competitors. One that commands brand recognition and prominence everywhere.

A brand identity may consist of the following: A brand logo, brand colours, brand tone and language, a brand identity marketing set that may consist of various items such as name cards, letterheads, and uniform. You may feel free to explore any other assets that enhances the physical image of your brand.

A good visual identity should also embody the previously mentioned brand archetypes, brand missions and goals. One such example of this is Apple’s branding, who has the reputation of producing technology. But what Apple is trying to portray and sell through its minimal, modern brand’s visual identity is the idea of status that people get through owning their product.

The visual identity is so strong that people recognise that you are of certain status if you own an Apple product.

With such recognisability of a brand, Apple as a business has consistently flourished because of that, becoming a brand of status for the people, building a brand that people can own together, rather than one that only sells.

So, when put together, what does a well-managed business with good branding look like?

Well let’s use ourselves, Plexxie as an example. Plexxie has a strong mission of being relevant but unique as well, using it as our key to solve issues of clients and their business, managing their marketing strategies for them, kind of like the Hero archetype, hoping to inspire and make a change.

We believe that we have a strong visual identity as well, with brand colours and tone that matches the Hero archetype, green representing growth not only within the business but outside of the business, by helping clients grow and a tone more inspiring towards fellow creators and aspiring entrepreneurs out there.

5. Put It All Together

Now that we are slowly assembling your brand together, the consistency would come in naturally when a good foundation has been built and managed well in its execution, which we would further delve into right now. 

Whilst building your brand and managing your business, there comes a time where you need to create content to market yourselves out to your audience. There comes in the ad campaigns or day to day marketing, from there you should establish a brand guideline to ensure that the in-house team or external agency adheres to the identity set in place by you.

The brand guideline serves as a handbook, where creatives follow as close as possible to your brand during the creation of content for your campaign of daily marketing. By managing this, it creates consistency throughout all content you put out, further establishing your brand’s presence in the market.

To showcase another good example of how brand applications are used to create consistency, let’s look at how Plexxie manages marketing for other brands. We will look at Michelin Asia, one of our biggest clients and see how we have followed their branding guidelines from their International brand and how it has been applied into the content creation we have done for Michelin. 

We have stuck closely to the typefaces that Michelin has provided us, along with the duo-tone styles and blue, yellow/white colour scheme, attempting to keep consistent with the International brand through the art style as well, maintaining a consistent image of Michelin even throughout its Asia branch.

Thus, the examples show how crucial application of brand identities are to a business in keeping its brand consistent, even through campaigns which drive different messages but retain a similar brand voice.

Additional Tip: Know When And How To Pivot Your Brand

In a constantly evolving and developing world, businesses should know when to pivot their ideas, resulting in a shift in the brand’s goals and mission. The biggest example we can use is when COVID-19 hit the economy hard, and through that, businesses managed by either shifting to online platforms or entirely different ideas to cope with the effects left by the pandemic.

The businesses you see surviving today, are those who knew how and when to pivot themselves and their brand according to the situation. Within Plexxie, we weren’t always exactly a social media marketing agency, we were once a platform for freelancers to sell their creative work. But through advice from mentors and thorough considerations by the our founders, they decided to pivot the brand and business, being an Everyman for the creators trying to create a platform for them and establishing a connection between all parties involved, to being more of a Hero, prominently trying to inspire and solve issues of the clients as a social media marketing agency.

But notice how when the shift occurs, the archetypes are still in its 70:30 ratio, with Everyman and Heroes switching places but retaining their place within the business itself. This shows how even through a pivot that the original brand identity would always linger around, normally within the 30% minority of the combined brand archetype.

This decision has pivoted and boosted us into new heights as an SME in Singapore, influencing growth not only internally but also externally within our clientele. This shows how important pivoting can be not only for a brand but the business entirely.

Conclusion

In summary, to keep a brand consistent, one must first know your target audience, then identify the brand mission and goals with full clarity on how it serves its consumers, building on it would come the visual identity of the brand which should be the main face of the business, embodying the brand’s archetype, mission and goals.

Then comes the application, the brand guidelines that keep the business in check when carrying out its day to day marketing or campaigns, which should be followed as closely as possible, this is the most crucial part of keeping the brand consistent.

Lastly is to know when and how to pivot, this will continue to build the pace for your business and when managed well, can retain its original major and minor archetypes, keeping consistency even through shifts.