Where Does Branding Come From?

When people imagine our job as a branding agency, they usually picture a marketing whiz sitting in a closed off boardroom, brainstorming and crafting a perfect brand.

Well, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The reality is, branding doesn’t come from your company or from an agency you hire. Branding comes from your customers.

Your brand lives in your customers’ needs and desires, as well as their perceptions of you and their connection to you.

Let's look at Fresh Direct as an example.

FreshDirect is an online grocery store on the East Coast. When you order from FreshDirect, you can place a grocery order online today and receive delivery at your home or office the next day.

Since 2002, the company has featured a large selection of popular national brands, as well as their own private-label products. The company has direct relationships with regional growers and producers to ensure that the food you get is the best-tasting, healthiest, and most nourishing product available.

But as you are no doubt aware, the world has undergone a seismic shift since 2002. This food procurement space is becoming increasingly crowded every year. This leaves you wondering how can an established player like FreshDirect compete with energetic, innovative, tech-savvy and extremely well-funded competitors.

Well, the company started looking at opportunities to play a more meaningful role in its customers’ relationships with food. Management asked themselves one of those deep existential questions that defines a brand, “How do we extend our value beyond just the procurement of food?”

Instead of sitting around in a boardroom brainstorming, FreshDirect spent a lot of time and effort learning every aspect of their customers’ relationships with food.

These new insights have enabled FreshDirect to expand its view of who its customers are, what its customers are trying to achieve, and how it can succeed in conquering its customers’ food challenges.

After talking to customers and surveying the competitive landscape, FreshDirect was better positioned to understand what customers wanted. They didn’t just want a supermarket that delivers. They wanted a partner that was a part of their entire food life cycle.

The company’s branding evolved with by understanding the needs, expectations, and the changing types of relationships that its customers want to have with them.

Always Talk to Customers!

Most companies don’t have a six-figure budget for market research, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other options available.

You can learn who your customers are by actually finding and having a conversation with them. Those conversations can take place through informal market research, such as chatting with customers at Starbucks, fielding customer service calls and inbound sales calls or hosting a pizza party with friends and family.

The above ideas are free, or extremely inexpensive. Entrepreneurs in early-stage startups and companies without market research budgets should take full advantage of all of these and devise other methods that put them front and center with customers. On the opposite end of the cost spectrum is formal market research, such as depth interviews, ethnographies, focus groups, and surveys.

For FreshDirect, we actually observed the entire food procurement life cycle. We followed people around while they shopped. We used video cameras and asked customers to show us what it looks like in their houses during the dinner hour. They showed us what it was like to shop in traditional grocery stores. They showed us what the insides of their refrigerators and pantries looked like.

FreshDirect is a major company with a big budget, but even a company that has only four employees and makes $250,000 a year has enough customers to conduct meaningful research. Talking to customers face-to-face is one of the most valuable things companies can do to understand their brand.

Whether you’re doing it in a scrappy, inexpensive way, or in a formal, expensive way, companies of all sizes should be asking their customers about their needs.

Pro Tip: Smart companies don’t just ask this of their own customers; they ask their competitors’ customers too.

Customers should always be a central part of the equation in brand strategy. Unfortunately, there are many agencies out there that believe they can do branding in a black box without talking to customers.

To do branding in a vacuum without putting the customers’ point of view front and center is a massive mistake. In building a strong brand that connects deeply with customers, you must conduct discovery so you can gain an understanding of your customers’ needs and the trends, forces, and brands that compete for their attention.

The goal is to safeguard against what other brands are doing and gain insight into your company’s unique role in the marketplace and your unique relevance to your Ideal Customer.

If you need help getting in touch with customers, reach out to one of our experts below. We'd love to help!