When companies are trying to build a brand, several challenges come to mind that are essential to overcome for the brand’s success. Many of the challenges are common and can easily be resolved. Many challenges include factors like storytelling, marketplace, strategy, and customers.
First, a business not having a brand story is one huge challenge that many brands face today. Storytelling is part of human existence. When it comes to a brand, a compelling story is a necessity. What is the company? What are their values? How does it make people’s lives better and easier? A story that consumers will be able to remember whenever they hear the brand’s name is essential to the growth of the company. Without a story, a company is nothing more than a logo. Have a story that will catch your target audience’s attention and will give a brand meaning is key in this challenge.
Marketplace is another challenge that might arise. With current technologies and target audience, the marketplace compasses the entire world, which compounds the importance of a strong brand. A brand may appeal to one marketplace, while another marketplace may find the brand vague. Knowing your marketplace is key to branding success. A brand has to have a purpose in the marketplace. The brand has to open to expanding and change to stand out from its competitors in its industry.
Another challenge is a strategy; it is imperative for brands to stay with current trends in the marketing and advertising industry. If a strategy is considered lacking in technology and appears to be outdated, then that brand won’t stand out from its competitors in the industry. Building the strategy for a brand needs to incorporate trends such as social media marketing, digital marketing, and cross channel marketing. The brand strategy should be both internally and externally inspirational. For example, making sure employees and customers believe in the brand itself and always strive for the excellence of the business.
The customer is the target audience that is in control of any brand. Every brand needs to target a particular age group; not one brand can be a brand that includes every single target group. A brand challenge can be building short term relationships with their customers; they can lose consumers to their competition. A way for brands to overcome this challenge can be to target millennials since they are known to be big spenders. They can be targeted by social media or digital marketing that is not expensive, sometimes free marketing for many companies. Plus, many millennials don’t like big companies because they believe they can be misleading; this can be an advantage for small businesses. For bigger companies, they can try more engagement through social media outlets to let the millennials know they are listening to their comments and opinions.
At my current position as assistant manager of a local boutique fitness studio, one of our biggest challenges is customers and marketplace. Many of our competitors have copied our method of using heart rate monitors and high-intensity interval training, which makes customers want to try something different to see if they like that brand better. We will soon be relocating, and this has made us lose clients because the new location might be too far from them. Many of our customers do get bored after three months, so a challenge is for us is to be trying different techniques to make us stand out from our competitors and deter customers from leaving.