In Short
- A unique brand and USP (Unique Selling Proposition) distinguish your business in a competitive market.
- Building a strong brand involves consistent messaging, visual identity, and engaging customer experience.
- Clearly defining your USP helps customers understand why they should choose your business over competitors.
Tips for Businesses
To create a compelling brand and USP, focus on understanding your target audience and what they value. Ensure your brand message is consistent across all platforms and customer touchpoints, and emphasise your unique traits that set you apart from the competition.
In a crowded market, consumers are overwhelmed by choice and want to understand how your product or service differs from others quickly. It is, therefore, crucial to identify the unique benefit that sets your business apart from competitors and use this to guide your branding and marketing decisions. This is known as your unique selling proposition (USP). This USP should also be integrated into your brand and how consumers inherently perceive your business. This article will consider the key fundamentals when creating your brand and USP.
What is a Brand?
You may think that a brand is just something you see, like a business name or logo, but that is just a fraction of the brand’s story. Instead, a brand is a person’s overall perception of your business and is the first thing a potential customer or investor will see.
What is a USP?
Put simply, a USP is what makes your business stand out from other businesses in your market. A USP should highlight the unique benefit of your brand or product that makes it valuable to your consumers. A strong and obvious USP can make or break businesses in today’s competitive landscape, so it is crucial that you utilise your USP in your overall marketing strategy.
Your products or services do not necessarily need to be unique themselves for you to have a strong USP. It could focus on, for example, your story, mission, reputation, or market position. Ultimately, it will be the message you choose to focus on that sets you apart from the rest.
These USPs highlight a unique benefit of the product or service that other competitors do not have and are meaningful to customers.
This guide explains the essentials of trade marks and the steps required to register a trade mark.
How to Create a Brand and USP
It is not an easy task to build your brand and USP from scratch. We have outlined below some of the key considerations to help you get started.
1. Define Your Brand’s Purpose
Every successful brand is driven by its purpose and values. To help define your brand, you should ask yourself:
- What do you offer and why?
- How is your offering different?
- What problem do you solve and how?
This will inform the foundation of your branding as you build it, including through your name, logo, tagline, mission statement, USP and more.
2. Know Your Market
It is important to understand your market, namely who your customers will be and your current competitors. You can do this by simply carrying out an online search of your product or service to see who your competitors are targeting and analysing the typical traits of their customers. You can also try other strategies such as:
- speaking to people in your target market directly to understand who they currently buy from and why;
- testing out the market by creating a Facebook ad and analysing those who are receptive to your ad; and
- reading online reviews from customers who have bought from a competitor’s business.
The approach to determining your target audience needs to be specific. For example, if you are selling sportswear, targeting ‘athletes’ would be too broad. Instead, you should narrow this to a more specific and niche target, such as ‘athletes who are recovering from injuries’.
3. Make a Visual Impact
Without being able to experience your product or service physically, your brand’s visuals need to grab the customer’s attention and show what you stand for. These visuals make up your brand’s identity, such as your:
- logo;
- tagline;
- colour scheme;
- website layout;
- typography;
- shopfront; and
- much more.
Adopting a brand identity that is generic or similar to an existing brand can lead to difficulty in obtaining registration and enforcing your rights in the brand. For example, it is difficult to register a trade mark for a generic name such as ‘Garden Centre’ because other traders will need to use these words in the normal course of trade.
From time to time, you may need to change how you present your brand visually as your business and market evolve, which is important for keeping your brand relevant and current.
Example
For example, LegalVision started as a free online legal content service targeting individual business owners and startups. To keep up with our audience, we tracked who:
- visited our website;
- downloaded our content; and
- was talking about us.
Over time, our audience expanded to small, medium, and large enterprises, so we updated our branding accordingly.
Key Takeaways
The process of developing your brand does not happen overnight and is much more than choosing a name or logo. The brand development process forms the groundwork for informing how the world will see your business. As part of this process, the following key principles are crucial:
- understand and define your brand’s purpose;
- know your market by determining your target audience and researching your competitors; and
- create a brand that is visually distinctive and memorable.
While you build your brand, creating a powerful USP that clearly defines what makes your business different from competitors in the market is particularly important. These fundamentals will inform the focus and position of your brand in the market and should be conveyed consistently across the entire business. Once you find your USP, the next step is to protect it from competitors.
If you need help with protecting your branding, contact LegalVision’s experienced IP lawyers on 1300 544 755 or fill out the form on this page.
Frequently Asked Questions
A USP, or unique selling proposition, is the message that your branding promotes to stand out from competitors. For example, it can highlight something unique about the design or ingredients of your product or promote the brand’s values, mission or story.
You should consider a number of factors, including the views of your target audience, your brand’s purpose and values, and how you will visually communicate your USP.
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