Building A Successful Retail Brand

If you want to be among the top clothing retail brands, you must outshine the competition worldwide. Start with dominating your niche. Your retail brand can evolve from a startup to magnificent with these six steps...

Create Your Awesome Retail Brand In Six Easy Steps

Retail is a pretty competitive industry. To stand out, you need more than good products. A strong brand is one way of setting yourself apart.

Below are six top tips for building a successful retail brand.

1. Identify Your USP

There needs to be something unique about your company to stand out. This is often known as a unique selling proposition (USP).

For instance, let’s imagine you’re launching a sportswear store. Selling sports clothing may be enough of a USP if you’re the only sports clothing store in town. However, if you’ve got local competitors, you’ll need a more specific, niche USP. This could include:

• Selling eco-friendly sportswear
• Selling sportswear for kids
• Selling sportswear for professional serious athletes

Your logo can even be an interest way of communicating your USP. Think about this when designing every aspect of your branding.

2. Understand What Makes Up A Brand

There are several components that make up a successful brand. Best retail branding includes:

• A snappy name: A brand name that is short and punchy is more likely to stick. Think Amazon, Costco and Ikea. It shouldn’t be anything over three words.
• An eye-catching logo: This is essential for visual branding and could help customers identify you at a glance. Hire a professional graphic designer.
• A defining color scheme: This is another important part of visual branding. You should examine a few famous retail brand examples for trends in brand color schemes. Choose colors that evoke reaction for your target markets.
• An identifiable tone of voice: When it comes to copy, a tone of voice can also help people to identify your brand. It will be particularly effective on social media and on your website. 
• A catchy slogan: This is optional, but worth getting right! Famous examples include Nike’s ‘Just Do It’ and KFC’s ‘Finger Lickin' Good.'

When designing each of these components, take into account your USP. Different colors could have different implications, as could different logos and different tones of voice.

For instance, when creating an eco-friendly sportswear store brand, it may make sense to choose a green color scheme or another earthy color. When creating a kids sportswear store brand, you may want to use brighter colors, a fun logo and a youthful tone of voice. When creating a sportswear store brand aimed at professional athletes, you might use a color that symbolizes trust such as blue, and a tone of voice using sport-centric language that suggests expertise.

3. Stamp Your Retail Brand Everywhere

A successful brand needs to be noticeable. Make it a mission to showcase your brand everywhere that makes sense to increase exposure and brand awareness.

With a physical store, this could involve incorporating your color scheme into the decor and into employee uniforms. Your logo could be placed on:

• Printed product tags
• Bags
• Receipts
• Signage

When it comes to online marketing, prioritize including your logo:

• In emails
• On your website
• In company page profile pictures
• As a favicon

Your color scheme and your brand voice should play a big part as well.

4. Keep It Consistent

Your brand needs to be consistent across all channels. When someone lands on your website or social media profiles, they should completely understand they are visiting one of your brand pages.

If the logo on your website is different to the logo on your store’s bag, it could create confusion among customers. Possibly resulting in some customers mistaking your brand for another.

For aspects such as your tone of voice, you may want to create a style guide for writers and social media managers. This paves the path for clear objectives related to:

• Designing packaging
• Creating social media posts
• Writing website copy

With interest of same tone of voice ... your brand voice.

5. Know When It Is Time To Re-brand

After many years, a brand may start to look and feel outdated. Attitudes within your industry can change, which may require you to adjust your tone of voice, your logo or even your entire USP. In other cases, videos and graphics may start to look old-fashioned.

Rebranding could help your company appear fresh again. It can be particularly worth doing if you’re also refreshing your product line or renovating your store. An updated brand could even be a way of recovering your reputation if you’ve started to get bad reviews, putting the past behind you so that customers no longer associate you with your past mistakes. 

When rebranding, change everything ... with consistency. You don’t want to continue to use an old website or old flyers if they no longer match your new branding. Consult a marketing professional for solid retail branding strategies.

6. Keep Your Retail Brand Legally Protected

Before building a brand, do business and competitor research. You don’t want to accidentally use elements of another company’s brand identity. This could result in them taking legal action against you.

Similarly, you may want to stop other people from stealing your brand. Trademarking brand name, logo and/or slogan would be a wise investment for many companies.