Cosmetic Branding. How to build a brand in the beauty industry?
Competition in the beauty industry is fierce. Cosmetics branding is the key to help you make your beauty brand stand out from the crowd—if you do it right.
To succeed, you need to break through the clutter, grab your ideal customer’s attention and show them why your product is the one they need.
The best way to do that? Branding
Branding your cosmetics business and developing a solid cosmetics branding strategy is necessary if you want to succeed in today’s uber-competitive beauty market.
But how, exactly, do you do that? Let’s take a look at all things cosmetics branding—and how you can brand your company and products in a way that leaves a mark on the industry—and your target customers:
The basics of cosmetics branding
—
First things first, before we dive into a brand your cosmetics company, let’s first cover branding basics.
When it comes to branding your business, there are three basic concepts you need to understand. They’re known as the “three B’s”—brand, branding, and brand identity.
The differences between the three B’s are subtle but important:
Your brand is the perception of your company out there in the world.
Your branding is the act of shaping your unique, distinctive brand; think of it as the active practice of bringing a brand to life.
Your brand identity is all the key elements your company creates to portray the right image to its consumer-like brand voice and brand design, including your logo, your website, or your cosmetics packaging—to communicate your message to your audience.
All three b’s are a must if you want to build a successful, marketable beauty brand. Without active branding, you won’t have control over your brand. Without brand identity, you can’t move forward with your branding. Each of the three B’s builds off the other—and all three are must have’s if you want your cosmetics brand to thrive.
In an array of branding terms, disruptive branding stands separately.
While terms such as brand values, brand positioning, brand identity occupy a definite space in the branding realm and relate to all the different ways companies use branding to build, promote and sell their products, brand disruption is different.
Brand disruption isn’t a practice businesses engage in after the company or product is born. Brand disruption gives birth to the company.
Business is built around long-standing beliefs on how to make money. Established business models become obsolete in a disruptive age because brand disruption breaks existing patterns in the market.
Brand disruption forces businesses to look at profitability from a different perspective. It challenges our preconceived notions about how we approach business and brand building.
Disruptive brands are often outsiders who see industry rules as fluid, so they devise better ways to conduct business and make money.
Disruptive brands question our lifestyle choices. They make us see the world from a different point of view, instill new behavior and show us the positive effects of new behavior.
Here we take a look at:
- What brand disruption is in detail
- The two sides of brand disruption
- Branding and commoditization
- Strong customer focus on disruptive branding
- How to become a disruptor brand
- Four key characteristics of disruptive brands
- How four brands in very different sectors have successfully built their businesses very profitably using brand disruption as a strategic tool
“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are” – this statement once expressed by Roy Disney highlights the most important function of brand values that a lot of business leaders, owners, managers, and entrepreneurs, unfortunately, tend to forget.
I understand why they often aren’t given the attention needed. Sometimes, it’s a struggle to develop brand values that really mean something to your ideal customers, or they’re simply not seen as important enough to prioritize.
The fact is, brand values aren’t merely a superficial marketing term. Brand Values are key to your brand’s success because, when developed properly, they provide clarity at a strategic and operational level and shape organizational culture. They help differentiate your brand from your competitors, so you stand out.
Brand values drive faster, more effective decision-making and, most importantly, earn customer trust. Trust in your brand is critical because customers don’t buy brands they don’t trust.
Brand values are the standards you live by and believed in that drive the way you do things as a business — they guide what you will and won’t do as a brand.
So to help you outperform and exceed expectations take a closer look at this article because I’ve included:
- How to identify your brand values
- The four different types of brand values – core, aspirational, permission-to-play and accidental (not all brand values are equal)
- Five steps to choosing and validating the right brand values for your organization
It has to be said, though, identifying your brand values just gets you out of the starting blocks. Hanging them on the wall or posting them on your site alone is totally inadequate!
You have to act on them to become an integral part of your brand at an organizational and cultural level because brand values only have real power when they’re practiced, shared, publicized, and experienced by customers, stakeholders, and staff alike.
So to help you make your brand values a real living part of what you do, I’ve also included some direction on how you integrate them into your organization and make them part of your customer experience.
You can see how brand values have been developed and used very effectively in three entirely different business case studies included in the article, too, namely software, e-commerce, and consumer goods businesses, so that you can evaluate their approach and success relative to your own.
You must be logged in to post a comment.