6 Elements of a Million-Dollar Brand It takes a lot of effort to make your company look like a winner.
By Andrew Medal Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
It's obvious that a path to a million-dollar anything will be immensely difficult and require a lot of dedication. Once you've decided that you can dedicate yourself to invest in a solid branding campaign, then you can really say that you're on the path to achieving the creation of a million-dollar brand.
What makes Givenchy fashion different from Gap and what separates the Bentleys and the Mercedes-Benzs from the Hondas and Toyotas? Here are some of the things that make successful brands popular and well-respected.
1. Have an attention to detail.
Steve Jobs' once remarked that: "It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.'' The more accurate word to describe this is meticulousness or thoughtfulness for your clients' user experience. Anticipating the little things that will impede user experience and coming up with innovative and sleek solutions to those impediments is the hallmark of a million-dollar brand.
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2. Don't ignore surveys.
Surveys can dramatically help you improve the ROI of some of the investments you make toward your brand. Surveys are a vital part of any branding campaign. If your branding campaign is a ship on the ocean, then surveys would be analogous to the ship's navigational wheel. Surveys allow you to pinpoint and characterize the public perception and reaction to your branding attempts, and that awareness is essential to any future improvements you might make.
3. Master online visuals.
Making your brand visual appealing is make or break. Visual aids have a big impact on SEO and visitor engagement.
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4. Focus on feeling.
One reason certain brands are worth so much more than others -- especially when it comes to fashion -- relates to the feeling that customers get from things like the illustrious and storied historical reputation of certain fashion houses as well as the unique blend of materials they use. But the modern definition of a luxury or an exclusive brand is sitting on a paradox in the sense that more and more people have the money and the means to afford those "luxury" products.
The Economist article, "Exclusively for everybody," highlights the social repercussions of widespread luxury brands: "As luxury-goods sales have expanded geographically, they have also spread across the social scale. When Coco Chanel created her No. 5 perfume in the 1920s she reserved it for her best couture clients, but in the following decade she sold it in smaller bottles so that more women could afford it." Nowadays, it's completely within the realm of possibility to effectively duplicate the characteristics of quality.
5. Make use of influencers.
In the current market climate, branding is all about association with popular, informal figures called influencers. Did you know that select Instagram influencers can bag upwards of a few thousand dollars per sponsored post? Platforms such as Instagram are crucial for branding because they gather a large number of people with similar interests, feelings, attitudes and a high level of trust towards a certain figure, which can be converted into very positive outcomes for branding.
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6. Exemplary customer service
Covering all of your bases is part of the process of making an excellent brand, and customer service stands as one of the pillars of a great branding campaign. If you think about it, customer service is the department that involves the most person-to-person interactions, so how well your customer service representatives deal with your clients will have a major influence on their thoughts regarding your brand. Customers are very likely to associate an image or feeling that they get from dealing with a customer service representative with the entirety of your brand, so it's doubly important to really have a regimented, comprehensive customer service approach.
