What is a Brand Wheel?
To create a strong brand identity you need to define what your business stands for as a brand – you need to personify your business. Whilst most businesses focus on building their brand externally, some fail to recognise that building an internal brand is just as critical to achieving success. For this to occur, every member of your team needs to understand what your brand stands for, and the easiest way in which they can truly connect with your brand is through visualising your brand. This is where a brand wheel comes into play.
Your brand wheel encapsulates several characteristics.
These include:
Brand attributes
The benefits your brand extends to your customers
Your brand values
Your brand personality (personification of your band)
Your brand essence
Consider your brand attributes
Your brand attributes are the personality traits of your business, not only do these create the first impression your customers have of your brand, but they are also the deeper values and characteristics that your customers don’t necessarily pick up at first glance.
Just like a person has characteristics, a brand has characteristics too. Is your brand a fun-loving brand? A luxurious, sophisticated brand? A caring, family friendly wellness brand? Is your brand known for outstanding innovation? The look and feel of your brand make up your brand characteristics, also consider your brand culture and your tone of voice.
What benefits are unique to your brand?
What benefits does your brand offer your customers versus others? Why would people come to you first and foremost? What is the unique experience your brand provides? This creates an emotional as well as a functional connection with your customers.
What are your brand values?
Brand values are what enable customers to connect with you, they are looking to build a relationship with brands that align with their core values. Living in the digital age – which is so inherently dependent upon transparency and authenticity, people are looking to connect on a far deeper level with brands. This has become so much easier, through reaching out via social media and online reviews. Your brand values guide your employees and your customers in making decisions as to how they interact with your brand. They are also the elements that build most recall of your brand in your consumers’ minds as well as support your employees in making the right decisions when working in your business on a day-to-day basis.
Brand Personality
Brand personality can be tracked back to the fields of consumer behaviour. Consumers often project their true or aspirational selves through their brands. Just consider for a moment celebrity brands, and how a celebrity is associated with a brand – or for that matter an influencer.
Brand personality underpins celebrity endorsement and influencer marketing. It is therefore critical to develop a personality that inspires and truly connects with your target audience. We could define brand personality as “the set of human characteristics associated with a brand.” This is one key ingredient in developing emotional attachment with your customers.
Brand Essence
Simply defined your brand essence is the core of who you are as a business. This is the promise that your brand makes to your customers, about what you will deliver as a brand. This promise goes beyond your benefits, it needs to relate to and mutually reinforce your brand values.
Your brand essence must support the information from the other four categories, and vice versa. There are many ways for brands to be positioned. Each model has its own strengths and weaknesses. The brand wheel allows us to assess how well our brand is perceived in the marketplace.
If you have a great idea to develop and launch a brand in the beauty and wellness industry and you are looking for support to make this happen, get in touch.
BeautytoLife® is a beauty accelerator program. Through our online masterclasses, and over a period of three months, we will be working with you to teach you how to build a brand from ‘concept to shelf’.
Get in touch at hello@beautytolife.co.uk. Enroll today to become a successful beauty entrepreneur.