How to Build a Brand
Building and sustaining a brand is one of the most difficult things to do and take a lot of practice, patience and learning. It’s also incredibly rewarding if you get it right. To get you started, we’ve put some tips together to help you build your brand!
Get to know your audience
One of the first steps to building a brand in any industry (creative or not) is to define your audience.
Knowing your demographic can help you tailor your content and products to said audience. From this, you can begin to develop a relationship with your audience and gain a deeper understanding of their needs and wants as consumers. A great example of this relationship is often seen in the music industry between artists and fans. As the artist grows and develops, trying new things with their music, the relationship between the artist and fan strengthens. Personal, emotional connections with your brand as an artist is a great thing to establish and will help you to build your public brand within the industry. Using social media platforms like Tiktok and Instagram is a great way to build personal connections.
A Harry Styles Case Study
Next, you need to establish a brand ethos. What are your values? What is your personality like as a brand? This may all seem quite abstract now but so much of the industry is about pitching yourself and your talent to consumers.
Take a look at Harry Styles, arguably one of the most popular music artists in the world. He has a strong brand ethos of ‘Treat People with Kindness’, a clear and defined personality and a strong emotional connection with his fanbase, often conducting comedy-style crowd work mid-concert. Fans now expect this from Styles and love him for it. His brand is so well defined that he has is recognised globally for his work, the ultimate dream of so many creatives!
Stand out from the crowd
Now here’s another question to ponder on… What separates you from your competitors? Whether you’re a budding filmmaker, graphic designer, game developer or music producer, you’re ultimately going to face some competition within the industry.
Say you’re a video editor and you’ve developed a really unique style of editing – make sure you show this off throughout your portfolio and social media! Anything that can distinguish you from the crowd is going to help your work gain traction and establish your brand.
Visuals are key
Within the creative industries, it’s important to recognise the weight that visuals can carry. Don’t limit your creativity to your body of work. Let it flow out into every inch of your brand, including any merchandise, copy and imagery, and even things like how you dress. The opportunities are endless.
Get yourself out there
This brings us rather smoothly to arguably the most important piece of advice. Do not underestimate the power of portfolios, showreels, websites, social media etc. Whilst they may seem tedious to set up and maintain, they are useful tools for introducing your brand to the market in a really accessible way.
Hopefully these tips will help you to start building your own brand. If you want to look deeper into brand building, as well hone your product, register for our next open day to find out how Access Creative College can help.