Last Updated on January 15, 2023 by DesignerPeople

Do you know one of the most evident reasons why so many startups in India shut down within the first few years of their launch?

They do not give ample attention to their Brand Development.

So many Indian business owners nowadays get so lost in their day-to-day operations that their branding strategy eventually slides to the bottom of their to-do list.

Frequently undermined, brand development is a crucial requisite for sustainable and long-term business growth.

There are countless reasons to invest in your brand development. It helps to maintain the consistency, relevance of value, quality and trust of your brand – Everything you need to make your business strive in any saturated industry.

In this post, let’s discuss the elements that make brand development such an effective strategy and how it can be a game changer for your business this year.

What is Brand Development?

Brand development is a strategy focused on strengthening your brand voice and image for consumers. Brand development is completely linked to the customer experience and your company culture.

Developing a brand is a lengthy process of expressing your values, vision and mission to the consumers.

Ever wondered why your target consumers would choose your brand over your competitors if you both sell the same products or services?

Brand development helps you align your brand with your objectives and values, making your consumers consciously pick your brand over others.

Why is brand development important for Indian Business?

Even though you have spent hours honing your product quality, if your brand development strategy isn’t well laid, you may lose out on many potential customers.

Brand development is a strategy that collectively focuses on elements such as website optimisation, content marketing, and more.

Suppose your website isn’t optimised based on your brand development strategy. This way, your target consumers may not have the best user experience or may not even find your website when searching for your products!

If you want your brand to be up and front of your consumers and make a compelling impact, your Indian business needs a brand development strategy.

When your brand mission, vision and message are inspiring, you can effectively leverage that using your brand development strategy to bring your company to a solid position in the market.

Advantages of Building a Brand for small Indian businesses

Your brand development strategy improves your business in various aspects. Here are some benefits you can notice after implementing a solid brand development strategy for your Indian business.

It promotes greater awareness

As we said, brand development is all about creating a noteworthy perception of your brand in the market. It starts with raising awareness for your brand using various strategies.

Nykaa, a leading cosmetic brand, established itself as one of the global giants in the industry in just a few years by branding itself as young, bright and relevant to the current generation.

They collaborate with tons of influencers that are trending on social media platforms – Just one of the strategies that made them stand out from the other beauty brands in the market.

When your brand development strategy makes your brand distinct from others, your brand gets more noticeable. It will make it last longer in the memories of your potential consumers.

It promotes mutual respect

Big brands like TATA, Infosys, Reliance Industries and others have built their brands over the years. Consumers will always prefer these brands over others on any given day.

Hence, when your brand has a message that is actively preached and lived up to in front of the consumers, you can expect your target consumers to trust you blindly!

Consistent brand development can readily build trust with your consumers and make them choose your brand over others without worries!

Increases Client Loyalty

When your customers can trust your brand due to your consistent brand development strategy, they will stay loyal to your brand, considering you give them the best service.

Your brand strategy must focus on a specifically targeted audience base. When you work towards exceeding your customer expectations, you will gain customers who are likely willing to spend more to buy your services!

Branding Communicates Value

Your brand design and strategy will determine how much value your customers will attach to it. When you invest readily in your brand, you can expect great deal from the brand.

For example, Louis Phillipe advertises their products as one of the best in the Indian and global markets. The way they promote their products, it is never surprising that consumers always place a premium value on Louis Phillipe products!

Hence, a proper brand development strategy attracts the correct type of customers and raises the value of your products or services exponentially!

Branding Establishes Standards

Establishing standards is an essential step for any brand to get successful. When your consumers pick your products from the retail shelves, they already have clear expectations about your product.

For example, Lakme, a veteran cosmetic brand in India, has consistently marketed its products. Consumers always have consistent expectations from Lakme accordingly.

Hence, if your brand promises a certain quality, you are directly establishing standards your consumers will likely preserve in their minds and reach out to your brand every time!

It Establishes the Climate for the Workplace

Irrespective of how much you spend on your marketing and other endeavours, your business is still impacted mainly by your staff. Your staff has much to do with how your brand is perceived in the Indian market.

When your brand development strategy is focused on delivering exceptional customer service, it is the responsibility of your staff to provide the same to the consumers.

Suppose your brand is known to be empathetic on mental health and productivity. In that case, your employees will deliver the best experience to your consumers, resulting in increased profits yearly!

9-Step Formula: How to Build a Brand for Your Small Indian business?

Building a brand development strategy isn’t an overnight process. There are plenty of crucial elements and factors to keep in mind. To simplify the process, here is a step-by-step guide to creating a successful brand development strategy for an Indian business. Let’s get started.

Recognise your brand’s current position

To ensure the success of your brand development strategy, you must focus on keeping the fundamentals strong.

Start with analysing the current position of your brand. If you have already launched your brand, this should be your starting point to grow further.

Measuring your brand in the first step will allow you to plan the next steps strategically by making informed decisions that are personalised to your brand rather than just choosing random strategies for your brand development strategy.

Determine your intended audience

Like any business strategy, you must know your targeted audiences to match their interests with your plans.

Segment your target audiences based on buyer personas. This includes studying the audience demographics, interests, professional roles, age, and other elements.

Several ways to know about your audiences include hosting surveys, reading community forums, interacting with your consumers directly, etc.

Even the smartest marketers can’t read the minds of customers! Hence, keep your brand development strategy aligned with your target consumers by analysing what they truly value and need from your brand.

Establish the genuine mission and vision of your brand

This should be a step done even before you launch your brand in the first place. However, better late than never!

Formulate a brand mission that resonates with your mind and the members of your company.

The more authentic it gets, the higher the chances of achieving it.

Next, take time to analyse how you can reach your brand mission. This should be your brand vision. Involve your actual values and thoughts in this step, as this can be a game changer for your brand development strategy.

Develop the positioning and messaging for your brand

Presenting a brand consistently across every platform increases your revenue potential by 23%. Keeping a consistent brand message based on your brand’s current position, vision and mission is a prerequisite for engaging well with the audience.

Based on your brand’s positioning, you can set the brand message that must be consistent and compelling enough to reach the target customers. Be creative here as you want to make it impactful sufficient to string the minds of your consumers!

Examine the brands of your industry’s rivals

Sure, you must not copy the branding strategy of your competitors, but why not analyse them?

This will help you understand what makes their brand development strategy stand out in the Indian market and where they fail.

Since the goal is to persuade your customers to buy from your brand, you should use these points to differentiate your brand from the competition.

Study different aspects of their branding strategy and what makes them the choice of your consumers. This will also help you define your brand positioning more effectively. The more you know about your industry, the better you can target it for your consumers.

Create a brand name, a logo, and a tagline

Since your brand development strategy acts as your brand image, you must be good with your brand’s visuals.

If you want your brand imprinted in the minds of your consumers for a lifetime, you cannot go wrong with your brand’s name, logo and tagline.

These will appear on everything that is even sparsely related to your brand. It will simply become the identity or the visual recognition of your brand.

It is advisable to rely on a good branding agency in India for curating your brand’s name., logo and tagline, as they will be able to bring the most authentic essence of your brand in its visuals. Their expertise will leave a unique and timeless mark on your Indian Business branding strategy.

Establish your website

Your brand must be visible and easily accessible to your target consumers. Creating and optimising a website for your consumers in this digital era is necessary!

When designing your website, incorporate your brand voice, message and personality into the content. Be very attentive to the colours, fonts and everything added to your website, as it is the first thing your prospect will see when they check out the products on your website.

Be attentive to Search Engine Optimisation. This will allow your targeted customers to easily find your website on the top of the search engine result pages.

Develop a brand promise

Unless you decide to make an impact on your consumers, why will they even care to trust you for their requirements?

Based on measured consumer response, develop a brand promise and stick to it!

The consistency should reflect not only on the quality of your products but also on every other marketing campaign and document related to your business. This will enhance your long-term branding more accessible and more sustainable.

Create a content marketing strategy

Did you know brands that create blogs regularly tend to have 67% higher leads than those that don’t?

Content is king in this tech-savvy era!

Starting from increasing your brand awareness to retaining your previous customers. There are so many ways good quality content can help your brand.

Define a good content marketing strategy and keep it SEO-optimised. The strategy should be tailored to your brand and target audience. Explore different forms of content such as case studies, whitepapers, lead magnets, podcasting, videos, infographics, etc. and be relatable to your audience. When you connect with your audiences through your content, you can ultimately expect higher traction!

Creating a content marketing strategy will also help drive your business’s organic traffic. It makes your prospects trust your brand and hold you accountable for their requirements.

Vicks is a great example here. They started the #TouchOfCare campaign with a video that challenged viewers to rethink their definition of family! With over 9.7 million views, it was an excellent initiative in 201 to attract the consumers of India and bring them together over love and care depicted by quality content.

Continue to measure and improve

Last, no marketing strategy is ever complete without continuous progress monitoring.

Postulate the key areas of your brand strategy and analyse the month-over-month and year-over-year metrics.

There are plenty of tools, like Google Analytics, HootSuite, Sendible, Mention, etc., that can help in the effective monitoring and analysing of your brand development strategy. The more consistently you monitor, the more you can optimise your brand development strategy over the years and yield higher results.

Conclusion

Numerous big brands gradually lose their market share apart from the newly launched local business brands. If you want your consumers to love your brand even in the future, you must formulate and optimise your brand development strategy.

As the market grows rapidly with increased customer demands, brands that are still deciding on their branding strategy will be soon cancelled quickly by the younger generations, who are looking for stronger connections more than ever.

Having a strong brand development strategy will leave a long-lasting effect on the future of your brand. If your product isn’t in demand in the next fifteen years and you want to introduce a new product to the consumers, you will have a strong brand in place that your consumers will recognise and trust right off the bat!

Now that you know what it takes to create a successful brand development strategy for an Indian business, it’s time to compile all the components discussed above and deploy your power-packed strategy to the Indian market!

Author: Anush Malik

Being a strategist’s head and a long term visionary personality aims to achieve excellence in branding, packaging and digital marketing field. My 15 years of design experience and masters degree ais my strength which keeps me motivated and keep me going positively. I have participated in extensive branding design conquests in India, USA, Australia and New Zealand with winning zeal. My objective is to encourage start-ups and hence involves actively in the articles which will act as a productive intake of knowledge for them. Do connect me personally via my LinkedIn and I love to share my expertise with you.

Brand Development: An Essential Strategy for Indian Business