You know your brand. You know exactly how you want your company and products or services to be perceived by your audience. Are those potential buyers reacting as you expected? Do they understand—really understand—why you created your business?

If you feel like your brand isn’t resonating as you expected, it’s possible you missed one or more of these keys when composing your brand. Let’s take a look.

Consider Your Buyers

Let’s go back to the beginning, when you developed your product or service. Who did you develop this for? Who is your target customer? Are there other people who may want or need your product outside of the primary buyer persona? Who makes the final purchase decision? Is that someone different from your primary buyer?

With these questions answered, reevaluate your brand. Does it appeal to the person making the final purchase decision? For instance: If you develop men’s fashions, have you considered how many wives, girlfriends, mothers, and sisters may be making those purchases for their loved ones, too? Does your brand speak to those buyers, or just the men you expect to ultimately wear the clothing?

Investigate Your Competition

When composing your brand, your first instinct may be to imitate the more established brands you’re competing against. Similar imagery, similar voice, similar content. After all, you’re going after similar buyers, right?

Your success depends on you doing the opposite. Where are those gaps in the market that your competitors left open? What sets your brand apart from brands with similar products or services? How do you convey these differences with your marketing? Most importantly, do your buyers agree that these differentiators are important?

Commit or Recommit to Your Vision and Mission

This one seems like an easy one: Your mission is to somehow make life easier/better/more fun/more profitable for your buyers, right? The problem is that every other brand out there, including your competitors, will have the same basic “why.” It’s time to look beyond the basic.

Surely there is something more. What kind of real impact do you want to make? Do you want your employees to make more money so they can experience financial freedom? Do you want your vendors to generate more revenue so you can be sure you’ll always have a solid resource for your products? Do you want to give back to the community through charitable causes? Think big; think impact. Your real vision will reveal itself to you.

Establish Your Brand Position

When you know who you are, why you’re in business, and how your brand is different, your brand position, or unique value proposition, is the last step. Where does your brand live in the marketplace?

Let’s consider a specific scenario. You market your brand as a concierge bank and introduce an electronic phone system to better guide customers through the options so they can get the help they need as quickly as possible. Do you think this fits the “concierge bank” narrative you’ve established?

We love helping new and existing businesses evaluate their brands to make sure they’re doing all they can to reach their desired audiences. If you’d like to examine the four keys of your brand to make sure the composition is as solid as possible, reach out. We’re here to help.