How to Build a Brand for Your Retail Business in 2023

Imagine you are thinking of buying a gift for your friend, will you go with a low-value product, or with a popular brand name? A brand is the heart and soul of your company, which is responsible for influencing your audience’s perception and differentiating yourself from competitors. 

Moreover, retailers are not product suppliers anymore, but are becoming lifestyle partners and entities which allow consumers to build long-term relationships on memorable experiences. Roughly 77% of B2B marketers say that branding is highly important for your business. 

However, in 2023, there are a few important steps you need to follow to build a brand in your retail business. 

6 Rules to follow for building a brand for your retail business

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1. Identify who your target audience is 

When you seek brand building, it’s important to identify who you’re trying to reach out to. You need to carefully think about the products you’re selling and who they’re going to serve. You need to be highly specific with your customer’s choice and focus on specific niches. For instance, if you choose a specific niche, you will have much less competitors to worry about compared to if it’s larger. 

Identifying your target audience allows you to choose your brand’s voice, design, and even find the proper marketing strategy for connecting with the right buyers. You can build the right audience by acknowledging the following: 

• Creating the right buyer personas: You need to think about what your ideal customer looks like. Create a profile by outlining their gender, age, demographics and more. 
• Conduct a competitor analysis: What are your customers doing that you aren’t? What can you do more that will distinguish you from your competitors? 
• Examine existing customers: Do you know anything about your existing buyers? What is their age group? Where are they coming from? What do they like about your business? 

Boutique example 

For identifying your target audience, we can take boutiques as great examples. Overall, boutiques are the core of retail and if you buy from one, you’ll notice that they have many things others don’t. 

If you are opening up a boutique, your target audience will be people who are into fashion. High-end boutiques will usually target customers with higher incomes who are seeking to purchase luxury clothing, but lower-end ones will usually offer budget-friendly products (targeting a lower-income audience). 

2. Tell your story and create an experience 

Branding can’t ever be completed without the right story because it reveals who you are and what values you stand by. A brand story is what helps you connect with your customers and which allows you to stay connected with them.

It’s also what helps earn customers’ trust and allows you to differentiate from competitors. In short, it helps increase customer revenue. 

After, we need to talk about creating the right customer experience. What your brand stands for and how your customers feel is the starting point of providing a unique experience. You can try hosting in-store events for your shoppers and this won’t only help you earn their hard-earned cash, but their loyalty as well. 

In fact, roughly 86% of buyers are willing to pay much more for a better customer experience 

3. Choose your business name 

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Many might think that business names don’t matter, but the way you position your brand is highly important. Your business name is what defines your brand, so choosing the right name should be a concern for you because it defines what you stand for in one word. 

Try to think of one word that will define your business. Try to make up a term that defines your clothing in a word. It can later on be used as a term that people will remember. For example, here are some terms you can use: 

• Your style is permanent 
• The only wardrobe you’ll need
• The premium clothes you’ll ever need 
• Your closet told us it needs an upgrade 

These are just some ideas, but your creativity is unlimited and whatever you can think of is a bonus point for you. Moreover, here are the kinds of names you should aim to use for your brand: 

• Descriptive names: Titles that describe businesses. 
• Emotive: Names that will trigger an emotional response. 
• Origin: Names that come from the person who made the business. 
• Compounds: Names that combine words. For example: LinkedIn, Facebook. 
• Acronyms: A short version of the actual name of the company. VW, FB, IG, etc. 

Before you create your brand name, make sure to research before choosing a name. The last thing you want to happen is to have someone else’s name and have to change it later on, or be sued for copyright claims.

4. Create a good logo 

Logos are crucial for your store’s identity. It’s part of the brand identity process, so you have a logo that stands for that identity. A brand’s identity needs to be anchored with a strong logo, but you need to make them work together in order to be successful. 

Add your logo to your receipts, shopping bags, price tags, product displays and more. A good way to blend both is to incorporate your logo into a product design. For instance, an iPhone. When you use it, you have Apple’s brand logo on the back of the phone. 

If you can’t think about what kind of logo to use, there are plenty of logo generators out there that you can use. Here are some we recommend: 

• Canva
• Shopify 
• Logo maker 
• Looka
• Tailor Brands and more 

5. Have a deep understanding of what your customers want 

Every market is competitive and if you can’t offer your customers what they’re looking for, they’ll go somewhere else. This is completely against the law of branding and will hurt your business. In order to understand what your customers need, you have to engage with social listening, which is overlooking social media channels to identify related keywords, brands & competitor brands. 

Another alternative for identifying what your customers want and need is checking out customer reviews, or social listening. Social listening requires you to identify your target audience and find out what they are saying. Customers will always tell you what they need and want. 

Moreover, reading reviews about your mobile app lets you identify how your customers feel about your product and brand. 

6. Keep everything simple 

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It’s quite easy to make things complicated, especially when you have many new ideas in your business. However, simplicity is the key to success and the main focus on businesses has to be on customers because ecommerce isn’t any different. 

Whenever you market to your target audience, you need to keep a few things in mind. Initially, to know where your customers are being inauthentic, you have to approach your customers by making them feel heard. Every time you show someone you care, that’s what makes them come back. 

72% of customers will be loyal to at least one brand or company. When you know what the customer needs, you know pretty much everything about the retail business. That’s where the experience starts and exactly the area where you win in a competitive analysis. 

The benefits of branding your retail business 

You know now about the steps you need to follow in branding your retail business, but what are the benefits behind it? Here are all the benefits you receive from branding: 

• Customer recognition: When a customer recognizes your brand’s color, logo, theme and more, they’ll choose your product over the rest. This is because they are familiar with your product’s values and it makes them feel good about it. 
• Customer loyalty: Branding is what makes customers want to come back every single time. 
• Consistency: Once a business finds its branding, company philosophy, and other values, it creates a sort of consistency. This is what upholds the image of the company and is one of the most important parts of branding. 
• Competitive advantage: If you have lots of competitors in your industry, branding will help you easily gain an advantage over your competitors. A personalized and unique experience is what makes your customers happy and guess what? When you have premium quality, you can also charge people a premium price for the quality products you are offering. 

Branding is highly beneficial for your retail business 

After learning what steps to follow for building a brand for your retail business, you understood the many benefits that come with it. Branding is something you can’t disregard when you own a retail business because understanding customer needs is the most important part of a retail business.