Companies that cultivate meaningful connections with customers grow revenue and profits faster.

Brand Building

A company and its associated products must present a clear and compelling reason that customers should buy from them. To build brands that mean something to customers, the products and solutions they offer need to effectively and compellingly complete a job or task for customers and/or give them a certain feeling while using their products.

What is Brand Building?

Companies need to have a clear idea about who they are, what they do, why they do it, who they do it for and how they make their customers’ lives more enjoyable, convenient, or valuable when they use their products.

Brands that cultivate meaningful emotional connections with customers are sometimes called intimate brands. Companies that can achieve these clear connections cut through the noise in the market and typically outperform the S&P 500 and Fortune 500 in both average revenue growth and average profit growth.

Companies then reinforce these valuable connections with associated processes, customer support and retention, as well as visual elements like images, colors, symbols, typography, photography and trademarks to create fast and distinct associations with customers and prospects.

Unfortunately, many companies do not have the clarity of a single shared vision internally for what the identity of their company brand should be.

Brand Building Essentials

Brands create emotional connections with customers in which customers’ interactions with products or services improve their lives through convenience, enjoyment or problem solving.

The annual Brand Intimacy Study by MBLM, measures how emotionally connected consumers are to the brands they use.

Each brand is rated on four key factors:

1. Users – Consumers the brand has a relationship with
2. Emotional connection – positive feelings a user has for a brand and the extent to which their values align
3. Stage – the depth and intensity of the emotional connection in the brand relationship
4. Archetypes – The degree to which six need states that determine if intimacy is present. They are:

• • Fulfillment
  • Identity
  • Enhancement
  • Ritual
  • Nostalgia and
  • Indulgence.

The brand and consumer relationship has shifted with the ages, but each generation’s unique value system has remained the most important piece of the puzzle.

There are very few brands that have the luxury of retaining loyal customers from different age brackets. Amazon, however, manages to transcend age. The retail giant appears in the top five for Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers—with the latter awarding the brand their #1 spot.

Every generation named “enhancement” as Amazon’s defining trait, meaning their lives have improved as a result of the relationship. The “ritual” trait also scored high, with users claiming the brand has become ingrained into their daily behavior.