Creating and Building Your Brand

Your brand is so much more than your company name or logo. It includes those things, but it also encompasses what customers can come to expect from you in terms of product quality, customer service, and communication.

If you take a deliberate approach to defining your brand, you and your products will be easily differentiated from other creators and their products. Let's take a look at the various aspects of creating or further developing your brand.

Consistency is Key

Think about your favorite brands. Do they have different logos or avatars across various social media platforms or at different physical locations? Do their products vary wildly in quality from one store or sale to the next? Typically, no—the most successful brands are consistent in both their brand presentation and product quality. When you open a Coke or go to McDonald's, for instance, you know what you are going to get, and you know what it is going to look like and how it will taste. These brands' consistency is what allows you to recognize them quickly and connect them with whatever brand associations you have in your mind.

To do this with your brand, you must first decide on things like:

Visual cues that signify your brand (e.g., logo/avatar, colors)
Standard packaging and product presentation (e.g., product documentation, FAQs, featured image format)
The level of customer service you will provide. How responsive will you be to support requests and reviews? Will you answer questions and interact with customers via social media?
The personality of your brand. Is it serious, trustworthy, sincere, no-nonsense, educational, playful, whimsical, nerdy, darkly humorous, or something else? Whatever personality you choose, it should carry through your packaging, visual branding, and customer service exchanges.

Once you have decided on these things—and perhaps other aspects of branding not covered here—make sure that you use them across all platforms on which your brand is active. Customers will then be able to start developing their perception of what your brand means in terms of product types, product quality, customer experience, and so on.

Visual Cues

Visual cues stick in our minds and are, therefore, some of the most important aspects of branding. They can include everything from logos or avatars to colors, fonts, product packaging, and more. Your logo or avatar should be easily recognizable and not too busy. Take the Blender logo, for example. You could recognize it from a distance because its color and look are memorable.

Want some information on color in branding? Here you go.

The product images that you display on Blender Market and in any advertising on social media (or wherever else you advertise) should reinforce the look of your logo/avatar. You don't necessarily need to slap your logo on everything, but product images should echo the message that your logo/avatar is conveying. Is it minimalistic? Bright? Futuristic? Whatever the look, carry it over to your product images by using reinforcing fonts and colors.

Shape Customer Experience

A big part of establishing your brand is setting a standard for customer experience. Since it's your customers' experience, you may be wondering how you can shape it. Here are some concrete ways to improve your customers' experience with your products and your Blender Market shop:

Provide thorough product documentation
Provide prompt and helpful product support
Manage customers' expectations so that they know what they are buying
Respond to product reviews—both the positive and negative reviews
Engage customers in non-transactional interactions over social media

Establish Your Brand Personality

It's not enough to make your products available and put beautiful logos on things. To establish a connection with customers, you'll need to imbue your brand with personality. Consider each of the following and what it would make you think about Brand X, which offers training videos:

Essential Blender training videos.
Making Blender Blend Again
I love Blender (And you can too!)
Snuggle up to your computer and come Blend with me
Loop Cut and Slide: Blender Basics for Beginners

Each of them gives you a different feeling or vibe about Brand X and the person or people who run it. Think about that as you write your shop description, product descriptions, and social media posts. What you put out there will be absorbed and processed by customers, allowing them to develop an idea of what you and your brand are like, and what it would be like to be your customer.