By Greg Chapman, Scott Bryant, and Derek Muller
Creating a brand that attracts customers, stands out from the crowd, and stays true to your company’s core values is a challenge to say the least. You must create
a whole identity around your brand.
What is brand identity?
Brand Identity is defined as the visual elements of a brand such as color, design, and logo, that identify and distinguish the brand in consumer’s minds. It is the message that a person receives from your brand upon experiencing it.
In the CBD industry it is becoming more and more difficult to create a brand that stands out among the crowd as people are flooding the market with new brands every day. The “green rush” is such a big opportunity that it is pulling people out of their current jobs and risking everything to take their piece of the industry. The industry is expected to hit $16 billion by 2025 and that is a very attractive number to a lot of people, especially big businesses with big budgets.
Big business might have an edge with their budgets and teams of specialized experts, but they can be beaten by following some of the branding guidelines we list below.
Step 1: What is under the umbrella of branding?
Branding is creating a consistent message that shares your company’s message and values across all platforms and medias that come into contact with your ideal customer. Your sales language and message need to be consistent and reliable. Customers can sense inconsistencies from a mile away and creating distrust in today's hyper competitive market results in lost sales.
Here are a few examples of places where your branding is important:
-Packaging
-Social Media
-Sales Documents
-Website
-Email Marketing
-Trade Shows
Step 2: Find your niche audience.
In a hyper competitive market, unless you have a very large marketing budget, there is a popular saying that we like to live by; “there are riches in the niches.”
This means that the smaller you can make your target audience the more likely you are to succeed because you will be more likely to resonate and connect with the people in your niche.
You have to take the details of your target audience to levels deeper than you ever thought necessary. For example, instead of just saying “female, 25-35 years old, middle class income, and college educated”, you want to say “female, does yoga, has 2-3 children ages 3-15, drives an electric car, eats only natural, non-processed foods’. Now doesn’t that paint a much more vivid image of who your target audience is.
By narrowing down your target audience to a hyper specific niche you are able to create a branding scheme that speaks to a specific person more directly than trying to speak to a crowd of random people.
Step 3: Write down your company values and create a mission statement.
By establishing your company’s values, you are publicly proclaiming what you believe in as a company. If you do this properly you will be able to speak to your niche directly in a way that they will hear your message clearly in the crowd.
Since you have already established your niche audience most of the work is done for you. You simply need to do some research on what the values are of your ideal customer and repeat them back to them with a dash of your own personal flavor.
Does your audience believe in being home with family? Then talk about how important it is to keep your health a priority for the ones you love. Is your audience outdoorsy and adventurous? Then talk about pain relief for people on the go.
Step 4: Research your competition.
Knowing who the competition is in your niche is very important. Choosing a niche that is already crowded is a sure fire way to losing a lot of money out of the gate because you are going to have to spend more money than your competitors to just get noticed.
There is a saying in advertising that the company that can spend the most money to acquire a client gets the client. The more competition there is in your niche the more you are going to have to spend to get the attention of your customers.
Researching your competition should start with a geographical search which can be done on google. It is also beneficial to do some boots on the ground research by going into CBD shops, dispensaries, drug stores, convenience stores, anywhere that sells CBD in your market and see what your competitions branding is like.
Step 5: Creating the visual aspects of your brand.
Colors, shapes and fonts have meaning and how you combine them on your packaging and marketing tools tells the story of your brand before the customer even has time to read the name of your brand.
Here are some of the basics on how the psychology behind different colors and shapes can affect the visual representation of your brand and what it stands for.
Colors
Red: excitement, love, energy, youth, strength, anger
Orange: warmth, health, happiness, energy, enthusiasm
Yellow: warmth, imagination, friendliness, knowledgeable, childish, growth
Green: growth, peace, health, liveliness, harmony, nature
Blue: confidence, wellness, professionalism, trust, responsibility, passion, strength
Purple: sensitive, passionate, innovative, wisdom, grace, luxury, care, regal
Black: serious, sophistication, elegance, sharpness, authority, power, modern
White: calm, peace, innovative, balance, neutrality, simplicity, minimalism, virtue, cleanliness
Shapes
Squares: hard working, structured, organized
Triangles: leaders, focused, outspoken, independent
Rectangles: excited, unpredictable, team players
Circles: harmony, fun, nurturing, trustworthy
Step 6: Create your voice
How do you communicate with your desired audience? What are the keywords that you are going to use when you are speaking to them? What are the most popular social media and marketing channels used by your niche crowd?
By doing some research online you can find where your demographic is “hanging out” and then you can go to them where they already are. It is much, much easier to go to a crowd of people to share your voice than to bring a crowd of people to you to listen.
Once you have your keywords it is important to set a tone in your voice. Are you strong and reliable? Soft and nurturing? Inspiring and forward thinking? How you speak to your demographic will set the stage for how they view your business and how they will include you into their lives.
Step 7: Be honest and transparent.
In today’s world of digital sales it is important to be as open and honest with your followers as possible because there are so many options that people are going to decide how they feel about your brand within seconds.
In those few seconds you have to be able to share your business's philosophies, ideals, pillars, mission statement, and level of quality. The only way to do that is to be hyper focused and clear on what the message is that you are sharing and to be as willing as possible to share that with the world.
Make sure that your website, social media channels, emails, packaging and staff are all speaking the exact same language. Confusion loses customers.
Be open and honest about costs, ingredients, who you work with, where you sell your product, who you source ingredients from and anything else that might be a commonly asked question.
If you can cover these 7 steps to create an attractive brand then you will have a good chance of entering into your CBD market to attain success. We also recommend hiring a professional graphic designer and branding company to help with your product. The more work you can do to create a concept before taking it to them will help to greatly lower the amount of time needed to design your brands image and will help save on costs.
Some branding and graphic designer partners we recommend.