Brand building is a specialty of Ideabar’s and it’s also one of our favorite things to do. As you can imagine, brand building is a very creative process. One of the ways that Ideabar differentiates our brand building process is that our creative choices are backed by research.
Ideabar has a three-step process for brand building: Immersion, Creation and Expression. Research is heavily involved in the first two steps. Here we will talk about the research that happens during the first stage of Immersion.
Immersion
As you can imagine, we are like sponges during this stage, soaking up information from a variety of sources. As you can also imagine, there is an endless amount of information available. The Ideabar research team is very purposeful about which sources of information we select, ensuring we start with the right inputs to inform later stages.
There are three main sources of information that we draw from during this stage.
Client
The first source of information is the client. Clients know their products and their business better than anyone else.
Ideabar goes deep with our clients, deep into their products and their business. We need to understand everything about the product we’re branding, from micro to macro.
We also need to understand the client’s business goals. What does success look like? We must understand this to ensure the brand positioning – and the marketing and media plan – ladder up to those goals.
Market
Most products are launched into an existing marketplace. Understanding that marketplace is vital to ensuring a new product will rise above the noise.
What are the market trends? What are the challenges and opportunities? What other products are out there? What are they saying? What do they look like? Where is there white space?
Consumer
The final source of information is the consumer.
The consumer is a bit like an onion. The outside of the onion is what they look like. How old – or young – are they? Are they male or female? Are they married or single? Consumer demographics are important to understand because the product will resonate with some consumers more than others.
The second layer of the onion is behavior. What does the consumer do? Where do they shop? What do they buy? How much do they spend?
The inner layer of the onion – which is really the most interesting and important layer to understand – is why they do what they do.
What motivates the consumer? What values and beliefs do they hold? What do they care about? What do they not care about? What drives them; and what pushes them away? If we understand the inner psyche of the consumer, we know how to talk to them in a way that inspires action.
At the end of the Immersion stage, we distill the information we’ve collected from the client, the market and the consumer and then share with our team of strategists and creatives.
Our team aligns internally and with the client on the best target consumer. Who is most likely to buy the product? How many people fit the target? Does the target consumer size align with the client’s business goals?
We then find the meeting point between consumer, market and product. That perfect brand trifecta comes when we uncover those specific aspects of the product that differentiate from the market in a way that resonates with the consumer and drives them to action.