Building your brand platform is the very first step towards strong and clear brand identity, both in form and content. For it to be able to fully play its role, it should be shaped according to the values of your brand, consistent with the raison d'être of your company, or with the added value that you intend to bring to your customers and to affirm what sets you apart and your mission.
What is a brand platform?
Between ever-increasing competition in the domestic market as well as in the international market, and ever more intense technological changes that are shaking up the most solid companies, brands are now called upon to position themselves as visible and recognized entities., and build their brand image.
Establishing a "brand platform" has thus become essential for all companies wishing to develop and implement an impactful and effective communication strategy. The term can be confusing, however, because the word platform is not used here in its usual sense. Nothing to do with an e-commerce platform or with social platforms. You can also use social platforms for wiki page maker.
The objective of providing you with a brand platform is to guarantee a strong brand image, which is fully consistent with your actions and your words, vis-Ã -vis your customers and all of the stakeholders of your sector. It helps to form the representation that prospects or consumers have of your brand and the business project around which your teams will work together while clarifying your positions and serving as a red thread for your communication.
Among digital start-ups, it is often the founders who are responsible for laying the foundations of the brand platform. And this, from the beginning of their new company. But designing it this far in advance is more the exception than the rule. Usually, the platform is initiated at a more advanced stage in the life of the company.
In the brands already established, which decide to adopt this reference document after several years, even decades, of existence, it is possible to be more inclusive in the design of the brand platform. If this is your case, you can invite a certain number of employees to participate in its construction, for example by organizing individual interviews with employee representatives of your various professions.
Co-constructing your brand platform with your employees by associating them with your strategic vision can prove beneficial in terms of management and internal cohesion, by uniting them around a common and well-formulated culture. After all, the identity of a brand is also above all the people who work for it...
Many companies also choose to call on experienced marketing agencies as part of the formalization of their brand platform, and content production experts if ever content needs to be added or reformulated, to make them consistent with their new platform.
How to build your brand platform?
To design a good brand platform, it is important to follow certain specific steps to properly frame the project, especially if a large number of employees are invited to participate in its development. Here's everything you need to know about it!
The right questions to ask yourself at the start
Before embarking on the formal creation of your brand platform, a preliminary step is essential: an introspective analysis to properly mark out your project, consisting of asking yourself the right questions to achieve the right positioning.
What are the fundamentals of your business? This is about defining yourself precisely and with great finesse, by identifying what constitutes the specificity of your brand, what is special about you compared to your competitors, what your particular story reveals, what your slogan means for you, and what motivated the founders to create the company in the first place or the idea that gave birth to the company, etc.
What is your purpose? Your mission? Beyond your brand history or the presentation of your company, you have to dig deeper by trying to define your raison or destiny, the role or the function that your company must play within French society or of your sector of activity, the goal that you pursue within the framework of your activities. This vision, if it corresponds well to the concerns of your target audience, can strongly sensitize your customers, and create in them a real attachment to your brand. Anyway, that's the goal!
What are your medium- and long-term goals? To accomplish its mission, your company must concretely anchor it in reality through goals to achieve, objectives to fulfill, or aspirations to satisfy. Creating a brand platform is the perfect time to formalize them well if it has not already been done to lay out your business strategy, and the different stages of development in the future.
What values do you hold? Ambition is a healthy thing, provided that the actions of the company and its employees are properly framed, with ethical rules to follow (respect for nature and communities, improvement of well-being, and quality of life). The reference document must therefore also include the main principles that the company intends to defend, and which will guide it daily. Be careful, however, to stay consistent, and not change the value system overnight...
What is the promise made to customers? All the elements must combine to form your brand promise: the needs of the customers that you will meet, the added and value that you will bring them while committing yourself through a contract of trust with them. The competitive advantage that you claim to offer them must be easily identifiable, concrete, and even demonstrable.
The study of the competition in your market
This preliminary introspective analysis will ideally be supplemented by a benchmark of the market in which you operate. This will have several advantages when designing your brand platform to establish your positioning, differentiate yourself from the competition, and finally determine realistic, yet ambitious goals.
By studying your sector as a whole, and especially the leaders of your market, you will collect valuable information: the number of competitors present in your geographical area, their economic and societal performance, their offers and price ranges, their distribution channels, and of communication, their marketing operations, their online content, their working methods, their language elements, etc.
Based on this information, you will be able to determine what differentiates you from your competitors, and your main strengths and weaknesses compared to them. This benchmark will help you to clarify your development potential, to discover promising niches, but still little exploited, and establish the communication actions to be carried out to stand out. In short, knowing your rivals better will help you know yourself better!
Creating your brand platform
Based on the previous reflections, you will now be able to find your voice and build your company's personality, aligned with your global vision and values, and allowing you to distinguish yourself from your competitors. This brand platform must correspond to the perception of your company by consumers, and make it possible to identify you both in substance and form.
Concretely, it is a question of determining which are the most appropriate modes of expression for your brand platform, the type of language you should adopt, the visual elements and narratives to push in your texts, as well as the main traits of character that must emerge from your content. And, more generally, everything you need to implement to deploy coherent communication actions, whatever the media used, to make your "marketing DNA" understood.
You, or the editors of the agency to which you have entrusted the production of content, have the possibility of using storytelling to maintain the imaimage your brand and to ensure that each word used is carefully chosen to establish a link between natural and symbiotic between your brand identity and the content you publish.
This brand platform will have a direct impact on your editorial line, via an appropriate content strategy, aimed at translating your identity into words as well as the ambition of your company. The topics to be addressed, the marketing channels to be used, the frequency of publications to be resand pected, and the language elements to be inserted in the content can be usefully included in this new reference document, which will also define how to present your brand on each network.
The creation of your brand platform will finally turn your visual identity or graphic charter upside down. Serving as a basis for your creatives to design logos, colors, typography, visuals, or even photos, this charter brings together all the graphic elements that make your brand easily identifiable or make it stand out from the crowd.
