The Branding Blueprint: From Positioning to Scaling

2. Chapter1: Understanding The Core Fundamentals Of Solid Branding: Hello and welcome to the advanced planning for small businesses course. This is in structure. This course is going to be a continuation course of my first course on planning, which is small business planning fundamentals. In that course, we talk about the basic fundamentals of how you can create a small business plan. If you have watched that course, that's fantastic. If you have it, don't worry about it. In this course, I will remind you with the basics, and if you want to go back to that course at any time, it's up to you, all right? So before we talk about deep topic on branding and advanced branding, let's first identify a few myths around branding. It's critical. So most starting entrepreneurs believe that they're social media promotion and advertising is their branding. However, that's not branding. That's a small portion of your brand marketing strategy, and it's built to create value and awareness around your brand. But that is not branding. That's only a small portion of your branding and marketing strategy. Some other entrepreneurs believe that their brand visual identity, such as logo, business card, and so on and so forth, is their brand. However, that's only a tiny portion of your brand visual presentation, and it's not the structure and the purpose of your brand. Some other marketing manager or brand manager or entrepreneur believes that the pictures they take or the videography they take around their brand, it's their branding. And the way they want to express their brand, it's a core of their brand. However, that's not your branding and that's not the structure of your branding. That's only a small portion of your brand visual presentation to connect with a specific group of customers. No. What is branding? Well, branding is about an experience. A experience that the business build around a specific customer. And the customer need to believe in this specific experience, and they need to believe that this experience is their reality. They need to engage with that experience because if they don't engage with that kind of experience, or if they think it's only a matter of a show, or if it's scam or a lie or a joke, they will not buy from that brand. Now, think of Apple. Apple, when they started introducing their iPhone, they induce it in a way it's magical to most of people. And at that point, they were able to put it at a premium price. And they were able to charge a customer a high premium price because they introduced in a way that is magical. Now, after a while, the customer now start to understand that all of this kind of thing is only a matter of marketing, and it's only a matter of branding. And the customer more and more is not willing to pay a premium price, high price for such marketing thing without a lot of improvement in the product. So, In order for you to become a great brand manager or marketer, you need to think of yourself as a movie director, not as a business person, think of yourself as a movie director. You have a specific product that you need to place in specific environment with specific kind of people, and this kind of thing, need to send a specific message to a specific group of audience and need to give them a specific kind of feeling. Now, if this group of audience or the customer engage with your story, engage with your situation and your environment, and you make it believable for the customer to connect with that thing, they will buy from your brand. However, if your story is not believable or if the image that you create is boring or not engaging with the customer, the customer will not engage with your brand, and they will not buy your product. It's that simple. Now, in order for you to do that, as we said, you need to be very good. You need to be excellent at storytelling and actually making the people believe in things, but not any kind of story, you actually need to be good as telling stories about people. You need to make people believe that they are different. You need to make people believe that they are unique. You need to make people believe that they are sophisticated. You need to make people believe that they are no one else like them. And that's only happened in an advanced economy. Why? Because at that point, people actually already went beyond their basic needs, and they want to now buy more expensive things that satisfy the wants and desire. And the other reason is that at that economy, people have something called credit. And with credit, people now can afford more expensive goods and services. However, when you go to a less advanced economy, you will suffer in creating a small business brand. Why? Because in this kind of economy, in most scenario, the government or the people who are related to the government control mass production facility that they create a lot of product at a low cost. And they oversaturate the market with such kind of product. And in this kind of market, you cannot make a lot of money because the customer can only afford one thing. Low price product, and you cannot create a premium brand in such economy, it's going to be very, very difficult. Now, in order for you to become a great at branding, as we say, you need to create a word or universe around a specific group of customers and no one else only a specific group of customers. And now, this universe or ward need to have two attributes. The first attribute it needs to reflect the customer situation, and I need to talk to the customer. And you can see that so many brands actually create Products and services and advertises products and services in ways that actually reflect the customer's wants and needs and their situation and their hopes and the things that they like the most and that the customer will only buy from this brand because it reflects their self image. Now, the second attribute that your brand need to have is that it needs to play with the human desire. It's really need to tease people into buying more expensive goods and services because it can make them better socially. And you can see premium brand or luxury brands such as Luis tan Christian Dior and Chanel and so on and so forth, they play with that kind of image, which they make you work very hard in order to buy expensive thing and look socially different and better. Okay. So what is the main job or goal of the brand? The main goal of the brand is to make the customer fall in love with the brand and attach to the brand, so they can come back to the brand and buy more and more and more more expensive stuff. And in order for the brand to do that, the brand must stand for something specific. It must stand for something specific because it's generic. It cannot. Connect with a specific group of customers. And you can see that so many brands stand for some different thing. Some brands stand, for example, for being bold and speed, and other brand, for example, stand for coolness and happiness, and other brands stand for human desires and lust and power, and some brands stand for performance, and other brands stand for precision and accuracy, and some other brands stand for power and self confidence, and other brands stand for human discovering other areas around the world. So brands stand for human support and help. You see? All this brand stand for something because if they don't, they cannot attract a specific group of people with specific design. Well people are different. And the brand does not do that, they fall into one big gap, which is the gap of having a commodity product. All brands fear is to become a commodity product because for one reason, a commodity product has an intrinsic value, which is the customer understand how much it costs to create product in most scenario. And the brand understand that if they are going to sell a product, they are not going to make a lot of money. Therefore, they understand that they need to shift that from a product to an experience because they understand once the customer buy a product, the customer always negotiate the price because they are buying goods or services. They are not buying an experience. They are not buying an image. However, if they take that same product and now they connect it to a human cause, they make it more sophisticated than just a product. And now they take that human cause and values and connect it to a a social story, and they make you look better or feel better if you use the product, and you become socially different than other people, and you would have a much better life. Now, my friend, they are selling you an experience, not a product, and here where the money is. Now, think about the fish market. You go to a fish market. What is the price of the fish? Well, $8, $9, I don't know. $10, but there is a market price for the fish, and everyone in the market or the customer understand the price of the fish. Try to look for two stores that sell the same kind of fish, one store set at $8, and the other stores set at $10, and there is no different. In most scenario when people go to the $10, they will tell them, why do you set it for $10, that st set for $8. At that time, the business has no power to negotiate. However, if we take that fish and now we want to brand it. So we attach it to a social cause, and we say that we care about the ocean life and the marine life, and we want to have a sustainable fishing. And now we take that ten fish, and we present it in a more desirable way, and we package in a more convenient product. And we mentioned that we are environment friendly and responsible brand. As you can see, right now, we are a brand. We are not a commodity product, and we can sell the product at a more premium price because we stand for something and we have a story and we present it in an appealing way. You have to understand that a commodity product doesn't matter if it's made in China or if it's made by you or if it's made in America, it has its intrinsic value. And in most scenario, the customer can find that price, and they will negotiate the price. However, if you take the same product and now you package it in a more appealing way, in a more desirable way, and you build the story and illusion around that product, you can now charge it at a much higher price. You have to understand that you as a marketing manager or brand manager or an entrepreneur, you have tools just like any magician that you can play with in order to create that illusion or in other words, lie around your product and make the customer believe in your product and your brand and buy it at a more premium price. What are these tools for the marketing manager? Well, the first tool is the brand positioning and your brand differentiation. Without the right positioning, you cannot attract the right kind of customer and without differentiation. You are just a commodity business, just like any other business. The second thing that you have is your brand visual presentation and brand personality. With your bold brand visual presentation and your brand personality, you can reflect your customer image visually and you can attract him to buy your product. The first thing that you have is your product and your marketing and your distribution expansion. You want your brand to be recognized everywhere, and you want your customer to be able to buy your brand from everywhere, and you also want your customer to buy different products and services from your brand and become a lifestyle brand. These are the three core structures of creating any successful brand. Get them right. And you are golden, get them wrong or inconsistent. You have failed as a brand manager. It is really that simple. That's what we are going to focus on in this course. I need you to understand that in branding, it's just like coding, you control the code, you control the experience, you control everything. You have the power to control everything, and the customer will react to whatever that you create. It's not the other way around. There is nothing random. The customer will always react to whatever you put in front of them. Therefore, you have to be very strategic about how you present your brand. All right? So, this course is not going to be a long course. But what I really want you to do is take this course seriously. I want you to go through the examples. I want to go through the assignment. I really want you to watch the videos over and over and over unless the idea of branding and the structure of the branding s in your mind and understand them on the level. Don't rush it. If you have any question, I want you to send me a message or leave it in the Q and A section. I don't want you to be frustrated at any point. I'm here for you. Trust me. I will try to get back to you as fast as I can. Other than that, just chill out and take it easy. You are going to learn a lot of nice and unique stuff in this course. Just enjoy and have fun. I will see you in the next video. Okay. 3. Chapter2: Developing A Solid Brand Positioning: Welcome back. In this video, we are going to talk about one of the most important topics when it comes to branding, which is your brand position. Your brand positioning is a skeleton, backbone and structure of your brand. If you get it right, you get yourself a solid brand. If you get it wrong, your brand will fall down just like a human body. It's as simple as that. Then what is positioning? Well, positioning is how the customer perceive your brand and see themselves in your brand. So with the right positioning, You can attract the right kind of customer until them come to me. I got something special for you, and now you have to pay me for that. With the wrong positioning, you send a random signal, which has no specific point, and you will not attract a specific group of customers and will not send a specific message to the marketplace? It's scattered. It's all over the place, and that's why most brand fail. In order for you to understand positioning, you need to understand a little bit about human psychology and how they think of themselves. And you also need to understand a little bit about economics and how people like to spend money in order to buy goods and services. So let's look at some example. I want you to look at this lady. How do you think of her? Do you think she's a rich lady? Do you think she's a poor lady? Think about her. Think about her environment. Where does she live. Think about her surrounding environment and the people who live around her, and what is the social image of that place? Now, think about how does she spend her daily activities. Where does she go? How does she spend her time? Think about what kind of people does she spend time with? What is the social image of that environment? Also think about what kind of goods and services does this lady buy? What kind of car does she buy, and so on and so forth. Think about herself image. What does she think of herself? And what does she believe that people believe about her? Think about that. Now, let's go to the other end of the spectrum. This lady is the mother of one child and she worked on a law. Paying jobs. Now think about her? What kind of problem does she have? What is her mindset? Think about her situation and her mindset and her thinking when it comes to money and buying goods and services. Think about the places that she goes and buy goods and services from and the environment of that thing and the surrounding people of that thing. And their mindset. Now, think about what kind of thing does she look for when she want to buy goods and services. Also think about her self image. What does she think about herself when it comes to money? What is her confidence when it comes to buying goods and services and her self image? Now, think about this lady. Okay? Who is this lady? Do you think that she is very rich? No. But she looks like someone in control. She looks like someone who is having a very good paying job. And she want to buy good stuff. Her job required her to meet a lot of sophisticated people, and therefore, she need to take care of her stuff quality. And therefore, she buys for quality over price and she looks for a minimal style. Think about her self image of herself? What does she believe of herself? Well, she thinks that she's competent. She thinks that she is powerful and she thinks that she want to prove herself and she want to accomplish. Do you think that these three ladies have the same self image when it comes to buying goods and services? Of course they don't. Do you think that they have the same perception about the world? Of course, they don't Do you think that they buy from the same places. Of course, they don't. And that's why there are different brands that serve different group of customers with different wants, needs, and desired and different self image and beliefs. And each one of these brands promote its product and services in specific way to a specific customer. So Louis Vitan promote power and high social hierarchy. And Masimo promote style and confidence, and all Navy promote discounts. It's as simple as that that's the first thing that you have to understand when it comes to brand positioning. In order to position your brand correctly, you need to rely on the four piece of marketing. And the first thing is that product. That's include the quality of the product, the manufacturing of the product and the packaging of the product. The second thing that you have, you have the price, right? You have low price, you have high price, you have premium price, you have the price on a budget. You have a cheap price and so on and so forth. The third thing that you have, you have the placement, and where you sell the product. Do you see it in a retail store? Do you see it in a high premium retail store? Do you see it on a website? Do you see it direct to consumer and so on and so forth. And the first thing that you have, you have the promotion and how you promote your product. Do you promote your product, by, for example, discount? By one git, one for free, or do you promote it and associated with celebrities and actors. Now, don't worry about this. We are going to talk about this in examples in depths. Okay. So let's look at the example, and look at positioning from low to high. So first, we go with the Amazon essential, and you can see that the price and the quality of the shirt is an average. It's below average, to be honest with you. And in most scenario, you can see that this shirt you can buy for $5 $16. There is nothing fancy about the shirt. And because this shirt is massively produced, the quality will suffer, and the packaging will suffer, and the customer will not be satisfied about so many things, but that's what you're paying for. Now, where is this product sold? What is sold on Amazon. What is Amazon? Well, Amazon is known to buy one of the cheapest product on the Internet. You don't expect to buy the shirt, for example, from Louisv Tan store. You buy it from Amazon store, or you buy it in a marketplace where you can find cheap product and services. How is this product promoted? Well, in most scenario, it discounted or it's sold at a low price or it's buy one it one four free. Who is this shirt for? Well, this shirt is for someone who is working on a low or a minimum wage or for someone who want to use this shirt for convenience rather than style or quality. So this shirt for this specific customer. Let's take it one step further. Zara. Well, the price of Zara is $49. Don't make this picture fool you because the quality of Zara is not that much better. Than the Amaton thing. But because the positioning is positioned toward style. You might think that this product is more expensive. Where is this product sold? Well, this product is sold at Zara stores. Now, don't let the look of Zara store fool you because this is a huge size but use cheap materials. The materials of the store is not that expensive, who is the Zara for? How do they promote it? Well, they promoted it was low level celebrities or low level actors, and they promote it as fast fashion at an affordable price. Well, who is this product? What is this product for someone who want to have some kind of fashion, but they don't want to pay a lot for that kind of fashion. So it's fast fashion on an affordable Okay. What is the next level? Where is the next level, you get the low premium product? Well, this is a good quality shirt. It's made of fine quality materials. As you can see that the price of this product is around $125 $235. Now, this low premium thing, it's actually range from, for example, from $79 or $99 to $125. So there is a price range in this low premium product. Okay? Where is this product sold? Where is this product sold direct to consumer, which means that the brand sell the product on its website. And that actually helped the brand to cut its marketing cost. It does not have to sell at any retail store or at any luxurious retail store and does not have to pay a lot for marketing. That cut the cost of marketing and allow the brand to invest in the quality of making the product. How is this product promoted? Well, it's promoted just by ordinary people who like style and quality of things. It's not a lot of style, just little style, but with good quality. It's also promoted with a small discount to attract people to buy this kind of product. Who is this product? Well this product for people who are littly sophisticated, they meet important people and they have good jobs and they want to address something with good things of style and actually good quality style, but they don't want to pay for the mid to high premium product which we are going to talk about in the next step. So the next level of positioning is mid to high premium brand, such as Doc and Cabana. And as you can see that Doc and Cabana tried to use and create the most exotic design and use the most expensive materials in order to create such an expensive product because they want to sell it at a high price. They cannot only justify the image of the brand without having the great quality product. And this kind of quality of product also have a price range. So you can buy, for example, from Georgia and Many as 290 euros, to 1,000 uros and so on and so forth. We got it from 290 or 350 to 1,000 or more. As we say that because they want to create that kind of product, they need to hire the best crap people in the world, because they want to create the best quality product and the presentation of the product need to be awesome. Otherwise, they cannot sell the product and they cannot justify only because they create an image of the brand. If you look at the placement of the product, it's placed in luxurious retail store. And if you compare this kind of store to Zara store, now we can see that this is lurious and that one just below average. Because the brand need to create that kind of luxurious image to justify for the price of the product, and as to asiate the product image. The brand also sells the product at high end retail store that is owned by other retailers, but only sell expensive and luxurious product and nothing else. If you look at the promotion of the brand, it only associate its image with high end actors and celebrities and models. You don't see any kind of low end celebrities or model or you don't see any buy one get one for free or huge discount because that will devalue the brand. The brand also hosts a lot of shows and events that create the halo effect to make the product desirable in the eye of the customer, and that's how the brand actually uplift its brand image. Who this brand is for. When this brand is for people who are highly sophisticated and have a high self image about themselves. And they think they are unique, they are different, they are rich, they are powerful, and they need to express that. The other kind of people is for the people who want to show up. Some people, they go into credit or they borrow money just to look rich, expensive because they want to scam other people or because they want to cheat other people, and so on and so for so many reasons, and that's come because insecurity. And this brand know how to place on people in securities in order to make them buy these goods and services. If you put these five brands together, if we look at their positioning from low to high, you see that the first positioning we get is cheap to affordable brand, which is around 15 to $50. The second positioning is you get is low premium brands, which is around $80 to $140. And the third level, which is mid to high premium brands, which is around $350 to thousand $1,200 and sometimes above. You have to understand that for you as small business, the best area to compete is in the low premium brand. Why is that? Well? In the chief to affordable, you cannot compete with that because the brand has spent billions of dollars in building the most efficient infrastructure to create massive quantity of product and compete on price. And when it comes to high premium product or met premium product, you don't have enough resources and relationship and budget in order to spend and create that kind of exotic brand image. Therefore, the best place for you is you work in the middle. You serve a little bit of sophisticated people, that they look for quality and some kind of style and you serve them with a great quality product, and you can make money because these grow of people, they are willing to pay for premium product and they don't look only for the cheap price. Possible. Now, once you understand positioning, now you have to understand how you can differentiate your brand inside your group of positioning. And differentiation is really just attracting a specific group of people beside their money. So they have different things that they want to look for beside how much money they want to spend. And these things are first, we say the price. The second is the function of the product, and the third is the side of the product. Now, don't worry, we are going to talk about these things separately. So the first thing that's look at the function. Look at this. What is this? Well, this is an average athlete watch. It has all kind of function, and the price is around $13, and you can see that so many people buy this kind of watch. But it's an average watch. It's like everyone watch. It's nothing special. It's not professional watch. Now, if we take this watch and we move it one next level, and now you see that this watch is for a swimmer, and it's designed specifically to serve people who want to become a swimmer. Therefore, anyone who wants to buy a professional watch and they are swimmer, this watch will be a professional watch for them, and that's how the brand differentiates itself in terms of function. Look at this. What is this? Well, this is a bread, an average bread. Everyone can eat the spread and everyone can buy the spread. What is this? Well, this is a gluten free bread. So if you have a problem with gluten, This brand is an authority brand. This is one of the best brand when it comes to gluten product. If you have problem with gluten, you cannot buy an ordinary bread. You need to buy a high quality gluten free product because it has to do with your life. You need to buy that product, and that's how the brand become authority when it comes to this kind of product. What is this? This is a spoon, just an irs bon It has nothing special about it. Now, let's look at this, some people have problem with eating, and this spoon is designed specifically to help people who has problems with steady hands. That's how the brand differentiates itself in terms of function. Let's talk about style. So what is this? Well, it's a minimum style, but it's an average dress. The model is average. Everything is average. You can see it everywhere. If you go to Zara, you can find this kind of stuff. But how about this Fashion Nova? Now, look at that style. Now, this kind of style is designed to specific kind of ladies with specific dreams and specific desire, and they want to describe themselves in a specific way. The way that the brand is presented is quite different than what you saw on Amazon. And the people who want to buy from this brand, they are not interested on average Amazon stuff. Look at the sneakers. These are average sneakers. There is nothing special about these sneakers. Now, let's look at the van sneaker. These sneakers has person they have specific kind of design language that attract specific kind of people. And if you look at the product line of vans, you can find that if you are a unique person and you want to buy unique stuff, you don't want to buy from MS you are going to buy something that is more sophisticated that is designed toward you. What is it? Well, this is just an ice cream. An average ice cream. Let's look at this ice cream. The same ice cream, but now we take that ice cream and we scale it. We make it more interesting. We make it bigger, we make it smaller, we add more color and so on and so forth. This is by this thing by changing this kind of thing. Now we make our product differentiated than other products in our competition and we become more and more a to new customers. They want to buy an ice cream, they want to experience something new and that's how we differentiate our business than just an average ice cream. What is this? Well, this is a coffee shop, just an average coffee shop. You can feed it at starbucks, you can see it anywhere. You have nothing special about this. What about this coffee shop? You see? That's a unique coffee shop. As by your knowledge, this coffee shop did not require a lot of investment like the previous coffee shop, but it's more unique. And the people who want to try something different, they will go specifically to that coffee shop and they want to try it and they want to take picture inside that coffee shop. Okay. So if you look at these things together and you want to have a right positioning, let's say that we want to take a swing watch. Now, let's look at the price of things, and let's look at the style of things, and let's look at the group of customer of things. Let's try to come with si positioning. Well, we can go with an affordable and we can say that we want to make an affordable swing watch. It has to be colorful and we are going to design it for kids. We can also go. We are going with low premium. We are going to go with a minimal style, and we are going to design this watch for adults, ordinary people, just ordinary people. Or we could say, You know what, we are going to met premium and we are going with sporty style and we are going to design this watch for athlete and professional. Understand that over time, you can actually become the king of that niche and only serve this group of customers with different product and services. Or we could say, You know what? I'm going to take both positioning, and I'm going to offer different product to different group of customers, and I'm going to become a lifestyle brand, and we will talk about this concept. Don't worry about it. So let's look at this watch. This watch is really cheap watch, and it's just like everyone watch. There is nothing unique and the quality of this watch is average. Okay. So the next level is you get a swing patch, but it's not for professional, it's only for hobbyist, and the price is not that expensive. And the quality is not that good, as you can see that the people are not very satisfied from the common reviews. Now, the next level, we go for swim the swim is at a more expensive point, 199 and it's not for top notch professional. It's just for serious people. Who want to have a great watch when it comes to their swimming. And the next level, it's you get mid to high premium swimming watch, and it's designed specifically for professional and high end athletes that they want a high precision when it comes to swimming. You have to understand that positioning is really what matters the most when it comes to branding. With the right positioning, you get the right brand, and you understand who is your competition when it comes to marketplace and who is playing against. You are not playing against everyone in the marketplace. For your assignment, I want you to study three brands in the same industry, but with three different positioning. And then I want you to look for their positioning in terms of price, how much do they charge their customer. I also want you to look at their function, how each brand position itself in terms of function. I want you to look at their positioning in terms of style. These three things. I want you to come up with images or videos. I will provide you with links to video website to look at what kind of people. Or what kind of customer would buy from this brand. Who is it for? I want to tell me that this brand is for this specific customer with specific psychology and specific wants need, and desire. If you can't do that, my friend, you are golden, you sold 50% of branding. And if you everything else come after this point, it's not going to make sense to you. I want to rate the slow down. I really want to slow down. I want you to understand your brand positioning and your customer psychology. Now, in the next video, you are going to see a couple of videos actually about brand visual presentation. The first video is a bonus video from my marketing course, which will take you over your brand pictures, images, and your product images, and it will also take you over your logo design, and it also will take you over your packaging design. In the next video, you will see another video, which is a video I made for this course, which will take you about your website design, and it will talk about your brand personality. So I want you to watch both video, and slow down, and then you will have an assignment and after that, I will see you in another chapter when it comes to scaling your business. If you get this right, my friend, you are golden. I will see you and then it feed you. Take care, get up, stretch, and I will see you later. Bye bye. Okay. 4. Chapter3: Developing A Solid Brand Visual Presentation: I Welcome back. In this video, we will learn how to create a visual presentation of your brand that attracts mirror, and send the right signal to your target customers. There are so many ways to present a brand visually. However, to simplify things, we will group these types of visual presentation image into three main categories. First, is a premium brand image. In this type, your photography should emphasize the high quality and craftsmanship of your product, lecture lifestyle, and the attention to the smallest details. Your images must reflect the heritage and the history of the brand. You also associate and capture your product in a high end luxurious environment. You can see in the following example, how each of the following brands focus their imagery on the craftsmanship and the exclusive lifestyle of their customers. The second brand presentation is the lifestyle brand. You put your effort into capturing a specific group of people in a different environment and places, highlighting how the brand offers the coolness and freedom of the lifestyle that your customers are looking for. As you can notice, that the product is not the star of the image, but the companion and partner in the customer journey, narrating the mood and the story of the customer. Here are a few examples from different brands. Note how they focus on the journey of the customer while keeping the product as a supporting element of the story. The third brand presentation is a theme based brand presentation. Different people around the world are fans of different theme and generals. Strong and unique brands need to present itself in a specific theme or style to attract those customers. These themes could be Bohemian style, a minimal style, a casual style, a colorful style. Or a thing that is built around humor. In all of the above styles. What we are trying to do is to sell a dream and the lifestyle that your customers wish to become. Experiment with different ways of presentations to find the tone that matches your brand style and speaks to your customers. If you sell food related products. Focus your visuals on displaying the desirrability and deliciousness of the product. Try shooting your product in different setups and composition. This is what social media is all about. Feed the eye and the mouse will follow. You can see in the following examples, a simple and great use of the product colors and different compositions to make it look lovable and desirable. Remember that in every image you capture, you want to sell something. Therefore, when you think about capturing your images, ask yourself, am I selling confidence or luxury? Am I selling a sophisticated design or a trended style? Is it about a cool lifestyle, or I want to sell that desire? Do I want to communicate inclusivity and equality? Or do I want to project the sense of self control and freedom? Does my product represent happiness and the brighter future? Or do I want to make it about ease and comfort? Or perhaps maybe I just want to capture the style and aesthetics of my brand? All of the above images represent the same product, which is female underwear. Still, for each brand and image, we communicate to the customer with specific visual language and values using simple but well thought out graphics and photography. Now, let's contrast what we learned with the following images. What does the following image sell? What about this one and this one? These images sell the model rather than the product or the story. With time and more experience, you find that not every model or environment can properly represent your product and the lifestyle of your brand. For each brand, there are specific models with specific looks and features, unique environments for the story to be told and particular details to be communicated. Relics captures the attention to details and luxurious of craft and shifts. Swatch highlights the lifestyle of the product while Cassio highlight the functionality of the product by pushing it to the limit. For your website and catalog images, if your product requires a model, then find friendly and neutral model. It is favorable to find different models from different ethnic groups and skin colors. Nowadays, brands rely on social equality and inclusivity to include different customers, and that's how a brand should be. Models need to reflect the look of the ordinary customer of your brand. The images also need to show the product from different views with simple pauses and movement, avoid any exaggerated pauses or any kind of unrealistic pauses that do not relate to the product. Or high some product features and details. The point of the images is to sell the product, not the model. Observe how Levis beautifully capture the essence of the brand on their website homepage and social media. Then with simple images, they showcase the product images in the product category and product sales page. Nike and Jim Shark, as well, have done a simple yet great job of stealing both of the brand story and the product. If your product does not require a model, then a simple top or three or four quarter review of the product with a clean studio lighting, and the minimal background will do great. If your product had special features and functionality, then improve it visually. The style of your images can be colorful and playful. However, keep the main thing, the main thing, which is a clean presentation of the product. Avoid all the visual distraction that takes the viewer's attention away from the product. We also want to avoid any of the distorted views of the product. Such angles provide no information for the shopping customers. Just keep it clean clear and presentable. If you want to shoot your product with the model and in a lifestyle theme for social media, then a close up shot would be perfect. Just keep in mind the context and the lifestyle of the image. Position the product in a story with a matching environment and setting. You can see how VMT does a nice job in separating between the product imagery on the website and the lifestyle imagery on social media. Bombas also does a nice job of capturing the clarity of the product on their website while telling the story of the brand on their social media. If you have a generic product such as package bottles or basic box packaging, you can always find predesigned mokps sold on the Internet for a low price. You only need to apply your graphics on the top of the mocup. This could be easily done by you or by any person who can use photoshop, on fiber.com. If you sell fashionable items, you could use plast dot T. You can upload your design, and it will automatically be placed on a mocap of a human model. This tool could also be used to generate videos with your design for social media as well. This will save you a ton of money compared to other choices. Now, as a disclaimer, I do not work for any or with any of the above companies. I just find them useful and would like to pay them to you. Regardless of what method you use, you should by now have a clear idea regarding how to avoid a weak presentation of your product, such as poor lighting, unclear selling point, and random poisons. All right, so let's move to your logo. It is by far one of the most critical elements of your brand. It is the symbol that present your brand and gets remember and recognized by your customers. Your logo will be everywhere. Therefore, look for the following when you plan to design or redesign your logo. First, your logo should be identifiable and separated from the competition. People will visit an online or local store and need to identify and recognize your logo from a far distance and be able to buy your product. Therefore, always study your competition logos and try to separate yourself from them. Second, your logo needs to be bold and simple. It will be printed, displayed, viewed, and photographed from different distances. Therefore, if you add so many details to your logo, it becomes unscalable, busy, and noisy. A logo is not a complicated illustration, rather an identification and a symbol of the brand. You can see that smart brands keep their logo clear. Try to put your logo in contract with other logos and notice that only the bads logos will pop out. Third, your logo need to communicate the aesthetic of your brand. As you can see that each of these brand is a fashion brand, but only by playing with the fonts and color choices, each brand displays a unique attitude. For example, a might reflect the image of style and sophistication. HMM is more of a free spirit and device, more of a bold and dubilious style. Force, your logo sells the spirit of the brand and not what the brand does. As you can see that the swoosh of Nike communicates movement and action. Disney's handwritten effect with the magic one logo tells the story of magic and happiness. None of those logos displays a por shoe or a Disney character. Once your logo is ready, depending on your business type, apply it to all of your social media accounts and brand extensions. There are different tools to help you with your brand logo design and stationary at a low cost, starting from fully automated tools with as little work as possible, moving towards some tools that simplifies the interface of designing your graphing and comes with different pre designed templates, which will take all the heavy lifting design work from your shoulders and make you focus more on your message. However, if you want to take your brand visual presentation to the next level and got the budget for that level, you can work directly hand in hand with the freelance designer. There are a couple of reliable platform that can offer you help with that. 99 design and dribble. Before you hire any designer, go through their portfolio, then communicate to them your brand vision and what you want. It is also recommended showing them some examples of things you like, and that's where our market research plays an important role in clarifying what you want and communicating your message. And last but not least, let's talk a bit about your product packaging design. When people visit a store to shop for products, they get overwhelmed with the amount of the product displayed on the shelf. Therefore, their eyes over the years have developed mental shortcst to look for specific things. First, if they already have a brand name in mind, their eyes will blur and filter out all the noise and look for the logo of that brand. Everything else is noise and distraction. That's why we said your logo needs to be bold and identifiable from a distance. Second, if there is no specific brand name in mind, the eye gets attracted to intense, highly saturated color contrast, colors such as red, yellow, and orange, or light against dark and vice versa. You can see in the following example that the less saturated and more dim the color is, the less it will pop up. And this screw, mostly black, white and red are the dominant colors of the composition. While in this example, you can see that bright and saturated colors are very contrasty and will jump out of the screen. A third factor that attracts the eyes is your packaging size in contrast to the surrounding packaging. The larger or smaller packaging compared to the surrounding composition, the more noticeable it becomes. The fourth factor the eye looks for is the shape of your packaging. Packaging that comes in unique shapes comparing to the ordinary and boxy packaging will attract more attention. Keep in mind that consumer read and research the product carefully. Therefore, you need to make sure that all of the information required for the purchase to happen presented on the packaging eliminates any kind of frustration, especially with today's impatient consumers with no time to consider, they have tons of options out there. The front side, which is the face of the product needs to be bold, clean, and sell the outcome or the desirability of the product. It's the first impression and it must be beautifully designed and attractive. The content of the product need to be identified and spot from a far distance. Packaging should also display the name of the brand and the information that the customer care about the most at first glance. Don't treat your packaging as a poster or a magazine page. Keep the front side clean and bold and use the backside for clarifying and simplifying the extra information. Use your packaging to see, not to show the component. Unless the components are designed beautifully and act at the ceiling point of your entire package. Let's look at the following protein bars packaging and try to analyze them together. The first bar looks clean and bold. Still, if I am just out of the gym and feeling hungry, the packaging does not tell me quickly what the product is or sell the desirability of the product. Unless I already know the brand name, it will be a hard sell. The second one is fantastic. I see the product in its most desirable image. I can have a feeling of what it is and how it looks like. I also see the name of the brand clearing so that I can relate to the credibility of the brand. I can also quickly scan the most important facts that I need to know. The use of red is grades, which will make the packaging pop out from a distance. The third bar has the same issue at the first one. It's hard to tell how the product looks and fail. And unless someone recommends this brand, I might just pass by it. The fourth part is good, but the design is busy. When this gets presented on a shelf, I bet it would blend with the surrounding product. The dimensions of the product does not allow the design to be packed with much information. The fifth packaging looks outdated. The brand did not spend the time or effort to study the recent market and upgrade its looks to appear desirable compared to the rest of the competition. The last part, the brand name is clear, but I still have to spend an extra effort to understand what the product is. The contrast between the image and the background is low. The image of the cookies isn't clear and desirable enough to my eye. Now, let's role out some designs. Number five is out of the game. Number two and four seems to look the best in this group, but in the end, I have decided that the winner is number two. Great overall visual presentation. However, we are not done yet. Let's compare our winning packaging side by side against one of the biggest players in the industry, Nestle. The NetFit packaging is very simple. Los desirable, and it shows the name of the brand. Let's make a test and duplicate that product on a product shelf and try to see it from a distance. Which one you think wins? For me, it's NetFit regardless of the power of the brand name. NetFit design looks the clearest, most readable design from a distance. And that's what we are trying to achieve when we are in a market, distinguishing our product on a shelf side by side with hundreds of different products. However, the more we move toward premium products, we simplify our design and focus more on the quality of materials and aesthetics of the brand, such as higher quality packaging materials and sophisticated printing techniques to communicate luxury and increase the perceived value of the brand. A luxury, less is more, which translate to less stuff but better quality. You should always visit the retail store that your product would be displayed at and understand the aesthetics of the store. Always try to distinguish your packaging from the packaging of the competition, be it from a far distance with B contrast differences to a close distance with differences in small details and aesthetics. As you can see that the more you sell low cost products, the more things rely on simple flat graphics. Your packaging loses its quality and things blame together. And it becomes difficult to separate. It is not a good idea to compete head to head in a retail store unless you have a deep pocket for marketing or can set up your own stand. You need to advertise for your product and then probably send your customer to a retail store for a convenient pickup. Otherwise, comparing to a larger brand with an unlimited marketing budget, your chance of winning might be minimal, if not zero. And that's why direct to consumer marketing through your website is the best way to go as a small business. We will talk about that in the next video. Another thing to consider with your packaging design is that different people buy a product for different reasons. Therefore, if your packaging and presentation are just so so, then you give the customer No other reason to choose but to compare on price. However, if your packaging design is created for a specific group of people with specific occasions and needs, then you give people a reason to buy your product that helps them achieve a specific outcome. What is suitable to buy for a lover or a gift for going out on a date differs from what is suitable to give to your family members or your colleagues. Always ask yourself, How can I make my product offering fits and attract a specific need, outcome or desire. Keep in mind that to build a strong brand, you don't need as many products as you might think. You can always play with different theme of your packaging to widen your product line and make it look fresh and interesting. Also think about how consumers buy a product. Starting from an entry level where people want to give you a product a test. Moving toward maybe your product is becoming a habit. Finally, let's buy a lot and save ourselves some money. You should also think about how customers will consume your products. Some might eat it on the go, while others like to eat it with friends while watching a movie in the theater, and others like to keep it aside on the obvious table. Some will store it for later use and others will just gift it. All that might be a lot to think about. But if you are just starting out, you don't have to worry about so many things. Keep everything that we talk about in the back of your mind for later use and do not overwhelm yourself. Take it one step at a time. For now, give an extra effort to personalize your packaging. It's the first physical interaction between your brand and your customer. Do not make it feel generic. Make it the best first impression possible. You can always find affordable and easy ways to make your packaging looks unique, personalized and beautiful, treated as a personal gift, not as a shipping box. All right, we have gone through a lot of information, and you might need to have some rest. But before you go, here is your assignment for this week. I would like you to pick a product. It could be your product, or you could find a random product on alibaba.com. Then I would like you to find and visually research four unique brands that comes with four distinct looks and aesthetics of the same product category. Then I would want you to pick one brand style that fits your brand type. Break it down and start learning and emulating it. Start by copying and then slowly evolve it into your brand style. You might find that customers have gotten used to a certain visual language associated with specific brand aesthetics, which would make it easy for the customer to identify the perceived and expected value of the brand. Therefore, know what you want to communicate. Present it try and your customer will mostly react. It is only a matter of perception. All right. Take care for now and have a rest. I will see you in the next video. 5. Chapter4: Developing A Solid Brand Personality: Welcome back. I hope that you enjoyed our previous video and you learned a lot about how you present your brand visually. Now, let me summarize a little bit what we have gotten through until this point. The first thing we said that your brand positioning is the most essential thing when it comes to your brand. Everything else will follow from your brand positioning. The second thing we said that even if you sell the same product category, you should not present your product in a similar way to all kind of customer. Each group of customers have specific self image and have specific positioning that you need to capture the product in that specific environment and moot. We also said that whenever you want to present your product images, you need to be clear and bold. You need to avoid any kind of visual noise. We also said that we need to personalize your product packaging and make the customer believe that this brand is a premium brand and not just an ordinary or a generic brand. We also said that you should not only picture your product, but should also capture the story that is associated with your product and the image that is associated with your brand and how customer perceive themselves when they use your product. Now, in this video, we are going to talk about your brand website in a simple way, and we are going to talk about your brand personality. And I will tell you about a few ways of how you can find inspiration for your brand. Now, let's talk about your website in a simple way. The first thing that you have to understand that you have a home page, and if your product is beautifully designed and require a visual element, now you have to display your most beautiful photography, along with the best selling product and the most important product category. At this point, what you are trying to sell is the wall factor, and you want to sell the brand image rather than only focusing on selling the product. If your product is more of a function product, then you need to focus on the most appealing offer that you want to offer your customer, along with your product category. And if you have any kind of social proof, show it. And you also want to show your latest offer so you can ask for the customer to bundle the product into different bundles because you don't want to only sell one product. And then you want to show the customer that you are a legit brand. You exist and you provide support. And if you have any video about how the brand is made or how the product is made, that's awesome. If you don't, no big deal. As you can see that purple, it's the same positioning as Casper. And as you can see that the header of the brand, it just lilt offer because they want to attract customer as fast as possible. Then they will have the best selling product. Then they will have the product category and the offers of the brand, and then they will show you some of that best selling product. And they will tell you about the story of the brand and then some social proof. And again, the contact information because they want to look legit. Now you have the product page. If the product is a simple product. We talked previously that you only need to take the photography of the product with a simple background, and if the product require any kind of movement, take a v. Now, take extra care of your product typography and make clear information about your payment fees and all the shipping fees, and you have to understand that you need to provide a clear description about your product, and you want to show the agreement about delivery and terms of your product. If you sell more of an expensive product, now you want to take an extra effort into presenting your product photography in a specific environment that is designed toward a specific positioning. And as you can see, this is a premium low premium product. And as this long sales page, you want to actually justify the value of the product. You are asking someone to buy a product for $1,000. Therefore, you need to talk a little bit about the story of your brand. You want to show the risk free guarantee of your product, and you want to show the lifestyle of your brand, and you want to describe the product any more detail because this is a $1,000 purchase. This does not mean that you are going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a website. If you have a website Chao fi, you just can buy a theme, and I will provide you with a lot of samples of create website that you can learn from. If you are a good designer and you know how to design, you can actually subscribe for a software, an app, and this app will actually allow you to use this app to drag and drop any kind of visual element and design your website in a way that actually pleases you and pleases your customer. The point is not to become complicated. The point is just to make your website presentable. To make it look appealing, to make it look desirable, to make the customer fall in love with your brand, and to make the customer believe that this is a trust worthy brand. As you can see, at this product page, the product presentation is very simple. It's nothing complicated, but the topography and the copywriting is very clear. The shipping fees and the product description are also very clear. In addition, some kind of social proof and instagram fee. What you want to avoid is you want to avoid the look of a drop shipping store. This store has no brand name. There is no effort into branding. The store is just an ordinary store. And this is not a trustworthy store as the previous brand. If you sell on Amazon, you also want to invest a little bit into the lifestyle photography of your product. And if you can, you can take a video. The entire goal is just to show that you are a legit brand, and you actually support your customer. You also want to invest into the title of your product, and you also want to write a very appealing product description, and it's benefit oriented, which means that you show the customer the benefit of buying product. You also want to invest in the branding presentation of your sales page. You want to show the customer that I'm a brand that I actually invest into presenting my product, and I have a high quality product. If you look at this product, we guys talk about this kind of stuff. When we talk about your packaging design, you want to present the most important information in clear and simple way, so the customer can understand what your product is. And then you want to have specific style when it comes to presenting your brand visual presentation. And you want to also invest in the title of your product. And the copywriting of your product and how you describe your product benefit, so the customer understand and know what they are buying, and then you can invest a little bit in the visual presentation of your branding. And if you look at all of this element in a simple way, they're all the graphic design stuff. You don't have to invest a lot of money to making this kind of image. You can work with a freelancer to create this kind of visual element at low cost. Now, if you look at this store, you can see that they did not invest into the presentation of their sales page. And even if it's a great bit, it's really doesn't look like a great bate because they did not take an extra effort to spend maybe a few hundred dollars into making that sales page look legit and presentable. Okay. Other thing I want to tell you about is that you need to be consistent across all your website elements and your social media elements. As you can see that this website, the main tone and the main positioning is black colors with bad typography, and you can see that this style goes across the social media elements. So you don't want to the website have one kind of style, and then you have your social media images, I different style. It's not consistent. If you look at this cope shop, if you look at the brand element of this copy shop, you can see that they use the same type of colors, the same kind of typography, the same kind of pattern inside the store, and you can see that they use the same element outside the store, look at the umbrella, look at the chair, look at the element of, for example, look at the cp, at the interior design of the store, look at the wall, look at the typography, look at even at the coffee machine colors, and so on and so for all of this kind of element gives your brand the sense of unity and consistency, and that's how you look bold and have a unity when it comes to presenting your brand. In order to have that kind of unity, you need to have a brand personality. So what is a brand personality? What a brand personality is something that unify your brand visual element. Think about the person who is crazy. If a person is crazy, they are not going to speak in a very nice way or they are not going to speak in a very, very simple way. They are going to be crazy. They are going to wear crazy stuff. Think about someone who is bold. They are not going to speak in a very soft way and so on and so forth. They are consistent. That's the first job of brand personality. The second job of brand personality that it reflects your customer personality. And the customer can say, this is who I am, and this brand actually match me. Okay? So There are 12 kind of brand personality, and I talk about them in depths in my brand in fundamental course. However, if you do not take that course, don't worry about it, I will have a bonus video after this video that talks to you in depth about each brand archetype, with a lot of examples. In this video, I'm going to go fast just to understand the point of brand personality. The first kind of brand personality or archetype is the pure person. It's the person who does not do any harm to any other kind of people or animals. The second kind of archetype or person is the person who like to discover different areas around the world. The third archetype is the Sage archetype or the person who like to provide knowledge to other people and educate people and improve their daily life. The fourth kind of brand archetype or person is the person who is a warrior or a hero who like to fight in order to achieve greatness. The fifth kind of brand archetype is the bilious or the person who is not satisfied about everyday activities, and they want to change the word. The sixth kind of brand archetype or personality is the caregiver, it's the person who takes care of other people. The seventh kind of brand archetype or personality is the magician. It's the person who makes things out of thin air. The eighth kind of brand archetype is the powerful person, the person who care about power and prestige. The ninth kind of brand archetype is the average guy, the everyday guy and the tenth kind of brand archetype is the creative person. It's the person who creates new things over and over in an imaginative way. And the 11th type of Brand archetype is the romantic guy the guy with love and stories. And the 12th kind of Brand archetype or personality is the entertaining guy. It's the joker. It's the person who makes you smile and tell you entertaining stories. Now, remember that the point of this video is not to talk and gift about these things, and you will find that in the next video. The point of this video is to connect brand personality with the customer visually. Now, look at this guy. Who do you think this guy is? Do you think is a funny guy? Do you think he's a simple guy? Probably he is a rebelious guy? Now, look at the use of the color red in the background? It's a very bold color. Look at the use of the typography. It's a very bold typography. Look at the emotion of the model. He's not smiling. He's not happy, he's not satisfied. He's very cold. This brand is called diesel and it's positioned for this kind of rebelious customer who are bold customers. Let's look at Old Navy. Who do you think this guy is? Do you think he's a serious guy? No. Do you think he is a powerful guy? No, he just an average person or she's just an average person. Look at the use of the colorful background. Look at the use of the topography. Look at the use of how they choose their word and how they communicate to the customer. This is all Navy positioned to ordinary people. Let's look at these people first that check. Look at the use of the golden color and look at the use of the black colors and dark clay colors. Look at the use of the images. What does this image tell you? Who is in control? It's all about control and lost and the human desire. Does this a tell you anything about being funny? No. This image represent and reflect confidence and power. Let's look at these people. Who are these people. These people are people who like to discover different area around the world. Look at the storytelling element. What kind of stories and places do these people go to. Does this brand tell you anything about power? No. Does this brand talk anything about being funny? No. This brand talk about one thing and one thing only. Discovery. And that's what brand personality has to do with your brand visual presentation. Now, brand visual presentation and brand personality should make the customer understand that this is who I am. Oh, my God, that's me, I want that, or I'm not that person, but I really want to be like that person, and oh, my God, I want to make so much money and I want to buy from that grand. What you want to avoid is this. I don't know what this brand is. I don't understand what this brand is, so I'm just going to ignore it. The last thing that you want to talk about is how you can find inspiration for your brand. Let's talk about a few simple way and we talk about a little bit more complicated way. The first way is just to go to websites that have a lot of images from creative people, average creative people. And I will provide you with a couple of websites. The first thing that you have to understand how these creative people try to create specific kind of look for specific kind of theme. You need to look at the color style. You need to look at the models. You need to look at the style of the model. You need to look at the storytelling of this kind of style. The second thing that you can look for industry and you can see that in one industry, these creative people, they come up with different looks that actually can serve your brand position. The second way that you can learn is you need to actually learn from a lot of established brand, and you need to see how this brand that they have a similar position to your brand present their product in terms of story and how they position the acton and how they position the product in the entire frame and what kind of color choice they choose and how they present the product in a storytelling way rather than only placing the product. As you can see that this brand is a smaller brand than fans, but still they sell towel, but they present it in a very attractive way. And if you look at the pose of the model, and the body top of the model and the dressing of the model, it's all to attract attention because sexiness attract people attention and they want to sell the towel yet, but they need first to attract a customer. And it's actually positioned for people who live beside the beach. And that's why this is a lifestyle brand that actually presents its customer in this kind of environment. The sirplus that you want to learn from is magazine, and there are a lot of magazine, and what is the job of the magazine? Well, the job of the magazine is to sell the story to an audience and make them buy product or services or buy this magazine over and over. Therefore, this magazine need to invest a lot when it comes to presenting their product and taking photography. And you can learn a lot from this magazine of how you can position and compose your images and present your product attractively to the customer. And there are so many brands that learn from this magazine because this magazine hires a bet photographer in order to create pictures that are desirable and attractive for the customer. And you can see that there are different kind of magazines that have different kind of positioning that you can learn from. As you can see that from this picture, you can learn a lot about storytelling. You can learn a lot about composition. You can learn a lot about how you choose your colors, and you can learn a lot about how you can position your topography and a lot about how you can, for example, add different elements to make your brand visual presentation more interesting. All of this information is for free, and I will provide you with a list with a great magazine that you can learn from. Now you can subscribe and read this magazine in digital format, or you can just go to a bookstore and read this magazine for free. What matters the most is that you need to understand how to present your brand. And in order to do that, you have to look at different way of how you can enrich your visual library. However, you have to understand that there are also different tools and options that you can choose from if you don't want to all this kind of stuff. And there are a lot of studios that work around your area locally that you can work with at low cost in order to create that image of your rent. And if you want to take any kind of storytelling images of your brand, you can always work with a freelance photographer in order to take this kind of images. But what I want to think about is that you need to do this kind of investment because it's important. Visuals are pretty important when it comes to positioning your brand visually correct to the customer. But first, you need to understand how to communicate with these people, and that's where we come to your assignment. Your assignment for this week is to study different brand has the same positioning of your brand. I want you to collect their logo. I want you to collect their color palette. And then I want you to go to their website, and I want you to collect their product photography. And as you can see that Nike and New Band, they have the same positioning when it comes to running shoes. And you can see that the presentation of the post plant is similar when it comes to brand photography and product photography. And that's where you go to the Instagram feed, and you can look at different pages and different images. And you can see guys is pretty similar, and it's for a very simple reason. This brand has invested billions of dollars into creating this image around the customer, and the customer is already used to this kind of specific image that trigger a specific kind of emotion. They spent a lot of money. So why don't you leverage this information and build your brand, okay? So the only thing that you have to do is just look for an inspiration and then communicate with the photographer or take the photography yourself. What matters to you understand right now is that you already have solved 75% of your branding problem because you have the right positioning and you have the right visual perception about your brand. And if you do that, my friend, right now, you have a powerful brand, okay? You don't have to worry about the rest. The rest of the course is only about scaling your brand, and it's optional. You can scale it or you don't have to ski it's up to you. I know that this chapter has talked a lot about new stuff, and it might be like you are talking to yourself right now and you don't understand. Go back and watch these videos over and over and over again. They are the most important thing. And take it easy, right? Just take it easy. Watch the next video that talks about brand archetype, and then go to assign. And I will see you in the next video. Take a risk. 6. Chapter5: Bonus - Developing A Solid Brand Archetype: Personality and archetype. Why do we need to have personality? Well, as you know, if we don't have personality, then everyone would look the same. And if everyone looks the same, customer won't know the different between one brand and the other brand. No brand would stand out. But if we have our archetype and we can stand out from the rest of the competition, we will look special. Also, keep in mind that people see their self image in our brand archetype. If we can match our brand archetype with our audience self image, then we will be able to attract this type of audience and create a tribe or group with shared vision and need. And our brand will become the source to provide them with services and product which helps them to raise their goals and desire. Now, in the next chapter, we will start talking about 12 type of brand archetype. At the beginning of every archetype, I will be explaining to you what does this archetype means and in which kind of industry we can find it. Then we will go through a few brand examples. At that point, you will not be hearing me talking a lot. I will be giving you a space to explore and observe the brand. I might be giving you a few hints to look for a specific point. But most of the time, you will be inspecting the brand, design, and image. What I really need you to look for is the emotion expressed in the images and the way the brand choose specific words to inspire that type of specific audience. Because we're trying to spend short time to present this class, explaining every thought behind every design of the brand might take a long time. At any point, if you feel that there is something that you can't understand, Okay. Please make sure to send me an e mail or a message. I will be more than happy to explain the process behind the brand design or message. Now, let's begin. The first step of archetype is the innocent archetype. Innocent brand represent optimism, purity, and honesty. The main goal and desire of innocent brand is to deliver happiness and joy. They tend to communicate with their audience with transparency and clarity. Mostly seen in industries such as food, healthcare product, or entertaining family and children services. Now let's look at a few examples. Again, as we said, please look at the style of the images, the emotions they're trying to connect with, and the word they use to try to inspire you to join their brand. Can you find any sign of happiness or optimism? As you can see the sunlight of the image, which describe a bright, beautiful day and also look for the emotion of the characters and the word epic to communicate with your emotions. Optimism and happiness. Pure, clean and simple. I hope by now you begin to notice how Brand uses images and words to communicate specific idea and desire with their audience. The second type of brand archetype is pl brand. Explor brand communicate freedom. The goal of Explor brand is to help their audience discover every corner around the world. They provide their audience with reliable, efficient and easy to use product. We see this staff archetype mostly in brand that creates services or produced product, which tells people who like to explore and visit every place, every environment around the world. Now let's examine a few examples. Land rover above and beyond. You can see the land drover is a kind of a car that takes you all around the world. It's tough, and it will serve you and protect you in any risky environment. The impossible journey. American Express is even encouraging you to travel to space. Take the car with you and don't worry about the risk. You may still need to be worried about paying back the money. Probably the target audience is for upper class. So money might not be a big problem since the car can solve all the problems. The third type of brand archetype is the Sage brand archetype. Sage Brand tries their best to communicate with them knowledge and deliver truths. They always seek to provide trustworthy knowledge and fact. Sage Brand tries to play an important role in media and education. Be aware that Sage brand are surrounded by audience who speak the language of reasoning and fact. Now let's look at some examples. CNN. Notice what they trying to communicate through their tag line. CNN will bring the news if from the source. The headlines, great mind don't always think alike. Let's look at how they communicate to their audience on their website. As you can see, not too many photos, but a lot of new headlines. They tend to exaggerate their headlines to grab your attention and make you interested. They always claim that they are the only source for truths and try to convince suitable leaves that. Harvard University, The first type of brand archetype is the hero archetype. Hero brand forces themselves to achieve a higher and harder goals. They try to go beyond the limit of average accomplishment. Consumer of this kind of brand perceive themselves as heroes and tend to think as nothing is impossible. Their duty is to save the award and must be seen in sport and energy d industries. Now let's look at some example. Under armor. Again, please play attention to the storytelling inside the pictures, how are they trying to show you that athletes are heroes and you can be a hero like an athlete. Adidas Impossible is nothing. At least but not last. The famous Nike, do it. As you can see, this type of brand use athletes or heroes to present a self image of the brand. So if you love sport and you have a passion for sport, when you see these advertisements, you think that if you use their product, you will be transferred from an average person to a hero like an athlete. And that's what the brand is trying to make you believe. And this is why they price the product at a high price because being hero and doing the impossible. It is what really matter. The fifth style bran Architect is the Altebran archetype. The Alt brand are against the rules. They try to gain their freedom by breaking these rules. They rely on destruction and revenge to get to their goals. Now let's look at some example. Harley Davidson, motorcycle. Let's look at their images style and the message behind these images. By looking at their message, you should be able to feel and hear a voice of freedom talking to you and asking you to get out, enjoy the right and be free. It's heartbeat, stronger than ever. So will yours? What they're trying to say is that he will provide you with tools that makes you stronger to achieve your goals and freedom. The sixth type of brand archetype is the caregiver brand. Caregiver brands are the Earth savers. The purpose of their existence is to provide safety to Earth, animals and humans. This kind of brand tries to avoid or hide subjects of profit and business. Normally seen in health insurance, education, non profit organization, and safety product and services. Now let's look at some examples. The American Red Cross. Together, we can save a life. As you can see, they're trying to communicate with volunteers and donors to join them. This is why they have to communicate on a human value level. Values such as love and help and support, they're seeking to educate the world that we're all brother and sister, and we have to help and support each other. Check brand first priority is children's safety product first. And Volvo. Volvo is the number one brand for car safety. Their advertisement might be a bit direct and scary, but just for the purpose of making you being aware of being safe and secure. We don't want your life to be at risk, and our job as a car manufacturer is to take care of your and your family safety by providing you with the safest car ever. The seventh type of brand archetype is the Magician brand archetype. Magician brands communicate and present their product and services through sense of magic. They have a long term vision into the future. They want to change how people behave and interact with the world. They try to provide high tech tools to empower the individuals. Sometimes they tend to be manipulative because they probably are trying to convince you to believe their vision. A great example for this type of archetypes apple. Let's look at the website and how they present their products to their audience. They show it in a way as a magician is unveiling something that you have never touched or seen before. Notice the way of using This is the iPhone seven. Now imagine a magician is telling you. This is the iPhone seven. It has a lot of great tools. I use my magic to make it so great and easy to use. You don't even need me to teach you how to use it. Now, I'm going to give that power to you, and you're going to use it through your imagination. Now, here it is, take it, and it's only for $700. As you can see the price is very high. But if you feel it just amazing, you're going to pay 700 bucks even without thinking about it. And really, what is called Halo effect is just an illusion. But probably after you buy the product, you would think, oh, I really need that product? Do I really need to change my ph six to ph seven? If you go back in history, they presented phon six in the same way. They are not presenting phone seven, but it was new and fresh. And they keep going on that style over and over and over. D. The next area of driving is here. The eight type of brand archetype is a ruler brand. Rulers are all about power, monopoly and control. They desire wealth, order, and efficiency. They try to dominate the entire market. You will see this type of brand in industries such as automobile, real estate, banks, fashion, and watches. This specific brand, customer desire is power, and they're willing to pay whatever price it takes to look powerful and rich. Now let's look at some examples. Only by looking at the image, you can feel a sense of power and control. What Microsoft is trying to say here that every kind of a person is using es seven at Microsoft almost own must of the market of personal computers. The nine type of brand archetype is the regular guy brand. To regular guy, everyone is equal. This type of brand tries to connect people together, simple yet easy and cheap to get and use. It desired satisfy most of the people and tries to avoid to be a specific brand for a small type of people. Their strategy depends on efficiency, productivity, and low price. Their design and visual communication. Suits the majority of people taste. You will see this type of brand in everyday products industries. Now let's look at some examples. Ika As you can see, a lot of middle class people enjoying and sharing a meal together. Everyone is equal. Please look at the red box where it's highlighted many people. No matter who you are. Walmart, save money, Live better. Again, middle class models, more family time. More life. And the pricing is specific for this type of audience. The ten style of brand archetype is the creator brand. Creator brands are created to innovate, inspire and connect with people emotion through creativity and artistry. They tend to perfect all the details of their products and services. Mostly seen in industries related to art, music, and creativity. Now let's look at some examples. Lego. As we can see in lego advertisement, that the main character of the story is the kid creating or imagining, while the father is a supporting character. They both together, build the future of the kid. The way that kids looks at go is different than a mature person, and that's what makes them creative. While looking at see from an imaginative different perspective. If Apple is giving mature people the power to create, the Logo is giving children the power to imagine and build. Sony, make believe. The 11th type of brand archetype is the lover brand archetype. Lover brand communicate love, friendship, and desire. It inspired people to be together and have great emotion toward each others. Mostly focus on the out of things such as beauty, physical, and visual attractiveness. Now let's look at some examples. Ha that combine desire of love and food to attract people into desiring their products. Now, these are the photos of product line on hacking that website. These photos were probably taken in a way that have subliminal message. A subliminal message means that images have subconscious meaning behind them. Now I'm not sure if that was on purpose or just happened by chance. But I see repeated shapes of tongues in almost all of these photos. Can you see it? Other brand uses their product message to create an illusion or brand self image, which tells people by using the brand products, you will become more desirable as a person. You would have better sexual relationship or have an attractive body or so on and so on. And last but not least, the 12 type archetype, the gesture brand archetype. To gesture, life is all about fun and happiness. Their goal is to get people out of their daily life boring lifestyle and bring joy into their life experience. This type of brand archetype might heavily depends on characters, visuals, and environment designed to support their story. M&M is one of the best example of this type of brand. As you know, M&M is only chocolate, but the brand focus on their branding effort is to make customer believe that it's not only chocolate. It's a product with a life. Have an emotion, story, and the purpose beyond its existence is to bring joy into your life. 7. Chapter6: Scaling Your Brand Marketing, Distribution and Product Line: Welcome back. In this video, we are going to talk about how you can scale your brand and take it to the next level. Now, this topic is optional, if you have a small brand. However, I recommend you this video if you want to make your brand bigger and if you want to actually make your brand more profitable. So in order to accomplish the scaling of your brand, you really need some kind of investment in addition to some kind of relationship and access to new market because at this point, you want your brand to be seen by as many people as possible. In different countries or market around the world or probably nationally in different cities. In order to do that, you first need to scale your marketing effort, which means that you need more people to see your promotion and become aware of your brand. The second thing that you need is you need to increase your product line. You need to have more products so you can upsell and cross the customer to different offers and make more money. The third thing that you have is you need to increase your distribution channel. You need to reach more customers, be it online or offline or by other retailers. Okay, so we are going to talk about these things separately. Previously, you probably used your social media accounts such as TikTok or Instagram to promote your product and services, and that was great when your brand is small. That's perfect. In some scenario, you probably use some kind of Facebook advertising on Instagram advertising on a small scale, which is good as well. Some people will actually use their, for example, Instagram feed or Facebook feed in order to place some kind of cute or beautifully designed picture to promote their brand, and that's good as well in your Instagram stories, and so on and so forth. That's good. But that's not enough if you want to grow bigger. The first thing that you have to understand that in marketing, you need to increase your organic content. The second thing that you need to have is you need to have a partnership content with creators. The third thing that you have to understand that you need to increase your paid advertising content. So let's first talk about organic content. What is organic content? What organic content is the content that you build around your brand, and you teach your customers about your product, and you actually make your brand look more legit. Now, the goal of this content is not to sell a product. However, if a customer want to look on YouTube for your brand, they need to find some kind of content around your brand that makes you look legit. There are two approaches to go with this kind of content. The first way is to go person, so you become the face of the brand, and the people had developed a relationship with you, they will like your product and they will buy your product. Therefore, the brand is attached to your face, and that's good if you are a small business. The other way is just to go at business branding. There is no specific phase that introduce the brand. However, the brand create different kind of video to educate the customer about the product. In the meanwhile, the brand is actually pitching the product, while is demonstrating the product. There is no direct pitch, there is only demonstration. Or you can post videos about behind the scene videos about your brand and to show that your brand is transparent. The goal is just to build a relationship with the customer and look legit and have some kind of content on the web around your brand. The second kind of marketing is partnership content, which means that you create content with different influencers around your product. So as you can see that this brand collaborate with different influencers to create different kind of content around the brand product lines. Now, the influencer will pose this content on their feet or their channel, and the brand will pose this kind of content on the channel as well. So it's a win win and the brand gets more exposure, and it's become more socially proved by other influencers and they attract more customer. And the influencer actually now looks more legit because they work with big brand, so it's a win win. You can find so many influencers on the web. There are so many market places that you can look for influencer and it's actually affordable for small business. I believe it's around $38 a month, so on and so forth. Okay. The other way is that you can attract ambassador towards your brand. So you can open your brand to looking for investor, and you can give them a specific kind of discount or early access to new products. Now, these are not influencer. These are just ordinary people, just like you and me, but these people fall in love with your brand, and they like your brand, and they want to promote your brand. And you can give them a link affiliate link, and they can bring new customer. To your business. As you can see this Sharp. Sharp also work with a lot of athletes. They have their own audience. The audience actually look at this influencer and they will like what they do. At the same process, this influencer now promote M Sharp. The audience love this influencer and the influencer actually cooperate with GM Sharp in order to bring a new customer. The third way is that you want to publish articles around your brand. And this publication is actually is when you publish stories around a specific thing, and then you pitch the product at the end of the story. This is not a pitch article. This is an article around a specific story. But at the end of the story, the publication will actually have an affiliate link that will sell your product. The publication will get some cut of your profit as their affiliate and they will probably get some kind of small fees in order to publish your story. Each publication had their specific want regulation, and they need to go through the article and you need to see what it is that they are looking for. You can write a story by yourself and submit it or you can actually if you look at the story, you can go and look for the publisher of the story, look at the publisher, and you can find them that this publisher actually publish a lot of story around this kind of topics, and they actually work with many small businesses in order to publish this kind of story in exchange for a small fee. Once you get the name, you can just go to Google and you can just Google their name, and you can find that in most scenarios they exist on Twitter. So once you go to Twitter, You find the publisher. Just follow her and just send her a message and see if there's any chance that you can work together to write an article or a story around your product. Of course, in exchange for a small fee, and that's what you agree with a publisher. If you don't want to go through all that way, just find a PR company. A PR company is a company just specialized in actually creating stories around your product. Then publishing these stories on the Internet. And that's how we see so many websites have that as seen on NBC Force Wall Street Journal, and so on and so forth. This is how they do it. Okay? The third thing that you have to do is you have to increase your paid advertising. Let's look at San Cloud as an example and see how they actually increase advertising. Let's use a similar web. This is a fancy tool. It's just a free version of similar web.com, and let's look at the sort of traffic. You can see that the majority of the traffic come from search and direct. I will explain to you what this mean later, and you can see that it's come from social from display and through feral. If we look at the search, it comes almost 63% from organic 37% from paid advertising. Now, if you look at social, it's normally come from 95% of the social traffic from Facebook, and then you get your display advertising. Don't worry about this. We are going to explain this later. Let's look at SAM rush and see where this said advertising is coming from. Search paid advertising. And we can see that they advertise on Google PPC, and they also advertise on Google display ads. So they have both Google PPC and they also have Google display ads. And if we go to Facebook and look at Facebook advertising, we see that they advertise on Facebook as well with different offer to bring traffic to your website. Okay, so let's put all these sort of traffic together and try to make sense of them. And then we get direct 37%. We got referral 2%. We got search 39%, which 62% organic and 38% paid, and then we got 19% social which 95% from Facebook, and then we got 1.3% from Google Display. Now, what does direct mean? Direct means that the customer or the person who want to search for this brand, they input the brand domain name directly in the grocer search bar. What does that mean? What does that tell you? That tells you that the brand has invested a lot of effort, probably money and time into educating the customer about the brand name. And that's why it's critical for your brand name to be simple and easy to memorize. And your brand domain name need to be simple as well. If you want your customer to remember your domain name. That's also come out of referral. Think about it. If I want to educate a customer about my brand, probably, I will work with other influential and make them repeat the name of my brand over and over and over in order to memorize my brand domain and tell them that they have to go to that website. It also comes out of search. You would say, how is it possible to do my search? Okay. Let me tell you something. At the customer when they go to Google and they search for something. Let's say that they search for Beach towel and they get this brand domain name. Sand Cloud. This customer is not going to search for this brand only once. They will search for it. Two times three times, they will go to YouTube search for this brand and so on and so forth. After three, four times, and it's because the search result, now the customer remember the brand domain name and they will input that domain name in the search bar. But that comes out of the paid advertising on Google. Social also plays an important role because social brings a lot of awareness around the brand name, and that's how the brand, over time, and a lot of investment makes the customer Memorize the name of the brand and the domain name of the brand, and now the brand can lower its marketing call because it doesn't have to spend so much money on advertising, but that comes later. I don't think this brand has reached these numbers yet. Now, referral, you might see that is 2%, but it's a lot because probably this domain might have 1 million visitor a month and 2%, that's not a small number. It makes a lot of profit. It also sneak about it. When you work with other referrals, the cost of acquiring the customer is not going to be as much as the cost of advertising. Your product on Facebook. The cost of advertising your product on Facebook will be much higher. Let's look at search 39%. That's a lot. 62% organic and 38% paid. Organic doesn't mean that the brand has created a lot of block posts and they have massive SEO. No, that's not the case. Let me explain to you. When you start a business, you don't have a lot of traffic. Therefore, you need to advertise, for example, on Google PPC. Once you advertise on Google PPC and people start looking for search result around Beach Tower. And the more people click on your domain ame is because advertised and it's at the top of your search engine, the more people will click on that thing, and this key word Beach Towel, it will be associated with your domain ame. And over time, when people look for beach Towel, your website domain name organically will appear on the top of your search result. Why? It's because Google right now understand that your domain name is a high authority domain name when it comes to Beach Two. And when people search for the brand name over and over and people don't click on the advertising anymore and they click on the organic result of San Cloud. Now, what happened? The domain name also become stronger, and now the result of this domain name will get higher. In addition, this brand domain name, as I told you before, they have a lot of partnership with a high authority domain ame like Wall Street Journal, and these magazines have a high authority doin name, and they are connected to this website. Therefore, this website over and over time, and with more investment into marketing, it will get a much better organic result. But that comes out of paid, not out of block post only. Then you've got your social. And in most scenario, we have seen that the brand advertised a lot on Facebook. In some scenario, the brand might post organic content, but in most scenario, it's because advertising on Facebook. The last thing you saw is Google display, and it's only 1.3%. The brand has to figure out a way to balance its source of traffic to bring different kind of traffic from different places and to lower its marketing costs and to increase its authority and to increase its perceived value. The customer now have more trust in the brand and more customers now are aware of the brand. That's very important for you to understand. The second thing that you have to understand is that once you have all this marketing. Now, the cost of your marketing overall will increase, and the cost of acquiring your customer might increase as well, because now you have different channel paid and partnership channel. So what do you do? Well, you want to make more money. At the beginning stage of your business, you probably sold one product, and that's fine. That's not bad. However, over time, in order to make more money, you want to have more product and services. And that comes when you scale your product line, and you have different product and services in order to sell the customer more services. This strategy mainly happens because the business spend so much money and want to make this money back. And the business can do that when it's scaled product and services and now sell the same customer more product and services. So you acquire a customer, for example, for $50 and you sold them something for $60, but now you want to sell them something else at $80 or $90. Or now you can reach new customer that they have the same positioning and personality as your brand, but they are looking for different product than your core product. And at this point, as well, if your product is expensive, now you can acquire a new customer at a new product, lower price point, so you can get them into your brand universe, and over time, you can actually make them fall in love with your brand and sell them something more expensive. So now you acquired more customers. Let's look at two different strategy when it comes to scaling your product line. The first strategy is Niche brand. What do you mean by Nice brand? Nice brand is a brand who specialized in one kind specific product. Does not make anything else. So let's look for example. Look at rolex. What does Rolex do? Rolls only makes luxury watches. They don't do anything else. However, the brand have different watches made out of different materials. Some are made of silver and some are made out of gold. Some have diamond and some don't. However, the brand only make watches. Let's look at this quiz nutrition. You see this quiz nutrition also makes healthy food that people crave. There is no sugar inside the stuff or little sugar. Therefore, this is healthy for athletes who crave, for example, snacks. The brand has a lot of product lines, but it's all around one specific niche. If you go inside each product line, you will find also different variations of that product. Now, if you look at the price of product is around $24. Now, if you look at different product from this brand, it's also positioned around this price point. So the brand has one customer, and then the brand sells this customer different product and services at the same price point. Let's also look at Aquatar and look at the product AquatarFish, shrimp, crab, meals, and so on and so forth. However, now, if you look inside the fish, you also will see different product inside the fish, and that category. And that's how the brand actually increase its product lines and sees to more customers all sells the same customer, different products. The other way it's a lifestyle brand. A lifestyle brand is a brand that sell different product and services, don't belong to each other for two reasons. The first reason is the brand want to create a lifestyle around one specific customer. So if they want to serve the customer with different product or services. The second thing is this if the brand has a very expensive product, the brand want to acquire more customer at a lower price plant. Now, let me show you some example. Ver z. We all know ver z. Now look at how many products they have. Look at the clothing. Look at how many products they have. Look at the bag, look at how many products they have Look at the shoes, how many products they have and look at the accessories. Now, if you go into the clothing and you look at the price of the clothing, it's really expensive to the majority of people. It's not cheap. It's like $1,000, $600, $2,000 and so on and so forth. Now, if we go to the other major product line, which is the bags, and you also see that the bags, are very expensive. Now, these products are designed just to uplift the brand image. It's not for everyone. It's scarce and it's very expensive. This will actually create the brand image, the brand value. However, so many people also desire this brand, and they want to join this brand, and the brand also want to bring more customer and make more profits. So the brand create less expensive accessory product. So this accessory product actually people buy to show up to show. You see what? I am a patch person. This is probably a low premium product. It's not middle or high end premium product. It's just a low premium product. This product the brand used to attract new customer and make more profit. Let's look at San cloud. Can Cloud, the major product is towels, and you see the towel is not that cheap. However, the marketing cost of San Cloud as we saw that because they advertise, it probably very high. And therefore, they actually create accessories and this accessory is actually pretty cheap to create. However, they charge it at a premium price, and that's how the brand can actually create a lifestyle. Around the customer. So it's not only towels, but also bottles and stickers. All these kind of product will create a specific lifestyle around a specific customer. So the customer when they buy from this brand, if the brand makes something, I will buy from that plan. I already trusted this brand. Why not? As you can see that the brand advertised for its different product and services in their e mail marketing campaign, and that's how the brand acquire first a customer and they make more profit out of that customer. This is another brand supply, and you can see that the chef machine is not that cheap $75. However, the marketing cost is also very high, and that's why the brand needs first to acquire the customer and sell them a different product. However, in my own opinion, this brand went a little bit too far. I don't think that this kind of product actually makes sense to the customer who buy from this brand. Therefore, Even if you want to expand your brand and become a lifestyle brand, just don't lose control or don't lose focus when it comes to what matters the most to your customer and to your brand image. Okay, so the last thing we are going to talk about is your product distribution. Well, what is the product distribution? Well, a product distribution is place where you place your product, such as your offline store or an online store in order for the customer, to buy the product. And because now you have spent more effort into marketing your product and creating awareness around more customers, now you want to sell your product in more places. So at the beginning stage of your business, you're probably going to sell on your website, which we call direct to consumer, no retailer. You just sell to the customer through your website. Now, let's look at this brand. After they got the investment from Shark Tank, they actually took that amount of investment and they invest a little bit into their other distribution channel, which is Amazon Store. Now, Amazon store is also direct to consumer where you sell your product when a marketplace. However, you make the majority of your product for yours. After that, the brand actually work with other retailers, and these are online retailers when you contact online retailers and you ask them to sell your product and they will get a commission fee, or you go offline retailers and boutique shops. Now you can go locally. You can go nationally or you can go internationally, and you can do that when you open your brand or your website to wholesale. And now you allow other small boutiqueshops to join your brand. And as this situation, you become actually a manufacturer rather than only a brand that sell direct to consumer or retail. Okay? The easier way to do that is actually to work with distributor. What is a distributor? A distributor is someone who import or buy product from different brand in specific categories. And then they get that product and then distribute to different store nationally or globally. It's a faster way to expand your brand. However, they will get a commission or distribution fee. So what did we do? Well, first, we expanded and scaled our marketing, be it through our organic content, or we collaborated with other people and we created a partnership content and then through paid advertising. We also scaled our distribution. So we went into more online store or shop, we went more into other retail shops and more stores. And then we got into different places around the world. We also scale our product line. So now we have more product to see our customer. The first two will actually help you to find more customer and bring more customer. The last one will help you to make more money out of your customer, and that's how you can actually scale your brand and become a much more profitable brand and become probably a national. Brand. For your assignment or exercise, I want you to study one brand, but I want you to study their marketing system, their product line, and their distribution channel. When it comes to marketing, you want to look for the organic content on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok. You also want to look at their paid advertising on both Google and Facebook app and I will provide you the tool. And then you want to look at their relationship market, and you want to go to Google and see if there are any article around their product. The second thing I want to look at I want to look at their product line. How many products do they have? Are they ahe brand or a lifestyle brand, and what is the price point of each product? And which products are designed in order to attract customer at low cost and which product are designed to be the most profitable and the core product of the brand. And the last thing I want to look for is the distribution channel. I want to look where does this brand sell? Does it only sell on their website? Do they have any kind of wholesale? Do they sell to any retailers? And you can search that online if you search for, I want to buy the specific brand where can I buy it or buy specific brand name, and then you see how many retail stores sell this brand. You also want to go to Amazon and see if they sell on Amazon. Okay. So that's the three primary thing to look for marketing? Product lines and distribution. That's going to be your exercises. Now, get out makes some move, relax. I know it's a complicated topics, but you will get it overtime. Trust me, do the assignment and you will get it from there, right? I will see you in the next and the last bye bye. Okay. 8. Chapter7: PopSockets Case Study: Congratulation. You have made it, it's not easy to study, Brad. I want to congratulate you. You are a hero. Now, I wanted to relax for this video. It's going to be really simple and easy. In this video, I'm going to remind you with few things to consider while you want to build your brand. In addition, I want to show you an example that tie all things together and show you the picture. The first thing that you have to understand is that you really need to have a great quality product. You don't want to compromise the quality of making your product. In addition, you really want to have a great brand presentation when you want to communicate with your customer. You don't want to have a sloppy brand communication, be it visually or verbally. You really want to have a high quality presentation. You don't want to compete with cheap stuff. This is not where the money is. So stay premium. The second thing that I want to tell you about is sell the story and the experience rather than only focusing on the product. The experience is the most important thing. These people, they want to visit stores that have an exciting experience because they want to show other people that they are having a great time. And if you consider this kind of experience into your product design and into your store design, this will actually help you to promote your brand at a low cost because other people now will start promoting your brand on social media. The third thing that tal about is your customer service. This is one of the most important thing guys that make or break a small business. I told you that the customer need to have a trust in your brand, and they want to like your brand, and that comes out of your customer service. So in some scenario, the customer will dislike your product, and that's totally fine. Take the time to reply to the customer. Explain what they can do. If they don't like the product and always tell them that they can return the product. No big deal. Don't argue about it. Make the customer feel that they are always right. It doesn't work. The last thing I want to tell you about is if you can start a business with a purpose or a social cause because this kind of brand actually will attract some kind of customer who care about other people. And this kind of brand will actually position your brand as a socially healthful brand. And so many people will buy from M brand just because they want to support the cause that they care about. Now, this does not mean that you will have bad quality product and then attach your brand to a social cut. No. This means that you will have a great quality product and you will have a small portion of your profit, and you want to donate that part to something that your brand cares about. Let's put all things together and look at one example and try to see this advanced branding thing as a big picture. Well, let's look at this brand. Pop socket. Some of you might know this brand, and some might not. They sell mobile phone grips, and the function of this thing is that it helps you to hold your mobile phone easier or it helps you to position or place your mobile phone on a table. Now, let's look at the price of this thing. Well, this sink is $20, $25 $17 is not a cheap sin, and it's actually considered to be a premium product. If we compare it to other manufacturer, which is $1 or $2 less or more. If we go to their social media page, we see that this brand is a colorful brand. So the style of this brand is a colorful style. And if we look at this archetype, what do you think? Well, we think is more of a creative person? This is not a serious person. This is not an average person. This is more of a creative person who creates a lot of creative work. This brand personality is a creative person, and the style is a colorful style. Now, if you look at the product line, we see that they have grips, they have wallet, they have phone case, they have mounts, they have mega safe. They have wireless chargers, they have accessory and they have nails and face Mac. What does that tell us? What does that tell us that this brand is a lifestyle brand, and it's not brand. So if you go to the website, you will see the most appealing and the newest offer. In addition to their services and their product categories, their product collections, and then you will see the most selling product, and then you will see the risk free shopping and shipping. This will make the brand look more secure. Now, if you go to the product page, you will see a clean and clear presentation of the product with white background. You will see clean typography, and you will see clean and clear product description, that will make things easier for the customer, and this will actually make the brand looks more legit in addition to some kind of reviews, and again, risk free shopping. If you go to the YouTube channel, you will see that they will have some videos that educate the customer about using the product. In addition, they will have some kind of promotional videos. I believe the video are used to advertise on YouTube because the views are many. It's like 760,000 views. So that's what I mean is an advertising content, that they will use this video to advertise and push this content to acquire new customers and new viewers. If you go to their Instagram page, you will see that they have a lot of colorful images. And you don't see any kind of promotion images, which means that you don't see by one it one for free, and so on and so forth. They don't want to devalue the brand. And you can see that also they work with micro influencers. These influencers, they have around 50,000 to 60,000 followers, so they are not mega or large influencers. Now, if you go to their Facebook advertising, you also see that they invested heavily in their Facebook advertising, and you can see that it's the same images and put the same style, and you don't see that they have a lot of discount promotion. They really don't want to devalue the brand. If you see the Google PPC, they also invested a lot in the Google PPC in addition to the Google display, and that's how they now acquire more customer. If you go to publication, they also have published a lot of stories around their brand in different publication. Now, this brand sees mainly direct to consumer on their website. In addition, they also sell direct to consumer on Amazon store. However, this brand also worked with other retailers. This is target, and they sell at Target, and the brand actually make a portion of the profit and Target also make another 25%, I believe to 35% of the profit. They also open the brand for wholesale. So if other people want to have this product internationally or locally or nationally, they can contact the brand and the brand would manufacture the product and sell it to the retailers. This is not a joke plan, guys. This plan actually last year revenue is around $169 million with 184 employees. Compare this plan to other competitor brands, this is actually a huge brand. It's not a small brand. However, this plan really starts small. And what I believe that the most important point for this plan, it was when they got funding, and they got funding in 2014, and this funding actually what I believe it pushed them forward. If you look at the brand history, you see that the brand started in 2012. And if we go to the brand website in 2012, you see that the brand website would take us to a Kickstarter page. And on Kickstarter, the main offer was a mobile grip with a mobile case. In 2015, and after they got the investment, they start to ask their customer to customize their own design. And I think that's where the point the brand actually differentiated sale from other manufacturer. In 2016, they expanded into different languages, which means they expanded into a different market, and they now have more unique design. And today to sound 21, they are actually more of a lifestyle brand that they offer different product to their customer, and they upsell and cross sell the customer and make more money. By now, I hope that you learned that I did not make any things out of clean air, and I taught you everything that actually exists in the market, and it's 100% practical. By now, I hope that you decoded the code of advanced branding. And by now, I hope that you understand that your social media images or your social media feed and Instagram stories are not your branding. They are only a small small tiny portion of your branding. And by now, I hope that you understand that the court stuff when it comes to branding is your brand positioning and differentiation, having the right customer. The second thing is that your brand personality need to be tied together with your brand visual presentation, which will give your brand unity and cohesive look. And the third thing that you have to understand that you need to expand your brand products, your marketing, and your distribution, and you need to reach more customer and generate more profit by upselling and cross selling products. You need to tie all these things together with a great product quality. You also need to gain your customers trust and they need to believe in your brand and your offer and experience, which means that you need to be consistent with your customer. And you also need to have a great customer experience in addition to great customer service. Okay. That's it, guys. That's the end of our journey. I hope that you enjoyed the course. And if you did, I would appreciate if you leave me a nice and beautiful review like yourself. This was Noor. Remember to have some fun while making some money. Cheers.