How to properly communicate your brand difference

Marketing a business? Here’s a question: What sets your brand apart from other similar brands? Every marketer worth their salt should know what truly differentiates the brands they promote from their competitors. However, unearthing that brand difference is tricky business. Once it has established a solid differentiator, the brand needs to communicate this to its stakeholders. This article discusses one way to find your brand difference and how to communicate it effectively:

Finding your brand difference

Mark Di Somma, Senior Brand Strategist at The Blake Project, believes that to be effective at selling, a company needs a genuinely remarkable brand. The products and services offered might be phenomenal, but success will ultimately lie in the organisation’s ability to communicate its true brand difference and value effectively. Di Somma provides some questions that every brand should ask themselves when in search of what makes them different from the crowd:

1. What did you see that you wanted to change when launching your brand?

Let’s use the fictitious retailer, Sandra’s Scented Soaps as an example. Did Sandra want to provide society with better-smelling soaps, perhaps containing aroma-therapeutic essential oils for increased bath-time relaxation to reduce lifestyle stress levels?

2. How can you making that change make an even more significant difference?

Could Sandra’s Scented Soaps really decrease stress levels, and if so, could they even be contributing to a potential decrease in adult burn-outs? Dove started out selling soap products, but their higher mission has become about increasing self-esteem amongst women.

3. What change do people want to see in the world, and how does your brand fit in?

Today’s society is cause-driven, with more consumers aligning themselves with brands that engage in ethical, transparent activities. A critical question to ask as a brand is: What do our audiences care about, and how are we supporting these causes.

How to communicate it

The answers you pen to the questions above will help you find your brand difference; the thing that makes your company more human, and more relatable to your stakeholders. Sandra might have discovered that her essential-oil scented soaps could actually help prevent heart attacks, and realises that it is something unique about her products. Now she needs to get the message out into the public eye. Rebecca Geier, Co-Founder and Brand Strategist at Trew Marketing, shares three ways to communicate your brand difference immediately:

• Website ‘about’ page

Once you’ve found the thing that differentiates you from your competitors, expand on the idea for a few sentences. Explain why you are different and what you hope to achieve in simple English, and add this to your website’s ‘about’ page.

• Company tagline

Every brand needs a tagline. It spells out, in no more than five words, the essence of your brand. Examples of iconic taglines are Nike’s Just Do It, and Apple’s Think Different. Geier believes that the perfect brand tagline is:

1. Five words or less
2. Memorable
3. Tied to emotion
4. Unique
5. Inclusive of a benefit

• Social media

Social media is where many consumers turn to discuss and find information about brands and their products. Another essential avenue to promote your brand difference is on social media. Use your profile information, branded content, and the third-party content you share to show just what makes you unique.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Take a leap into the pulse-racing, utterly fascinating world of marketing management with a Marketing Management course from the Digital School of Marketing. See the rest of our available online digital marketing courses and find your passion today!