10 Rules to Creating a Killer Brand

Beauty is BIG business.  However, it’s also extraordinary competitive and flooded with brands and products that really don’t contribute much.

As I was traveling this week for business, I started thinking what are the 10 things I wish that my clients knew about creating a brand?  I made a list on the plane:

Before you create a product, make a “picture, profile or avatar of who your client is. You want to know why they buy, what moves them and what makes them connect.

This is the next step, before you create a single product do some research and know your customer’s wants and then build your brand and products around your customer’s needs.

For example, if your market is natural/organic make sure that your branding packaging, design, and story is consistent with your market.

If your market is men’s skin care, again make certain that your overall branding and messaging is consistent with that.

The market place is competitive, take a glance at your competitions and make a list of what’s going well with their brand and where there are opportunity areas for your brand.

There is so much that goes into creating a product line, beyond selecting the manufacturer. Having a healthy budget and idea of all of your cost will allow you to have a chance in a crowded market place.

Creating the product is the easy part. There are millions of manufacturers that make products.  Be sure to choose a product that is high quality and the marketplace, your marketplace, will receive well and want to re-order.

Once the fun work of product selection/creation is completed, the packaging is selected and the design is chosen the real work comes in marketing.  I teach in my Speed Product Creation Course that a good product is just the beginning.  We spend just as much time on developing a marketing strategy as we do on creating the actual product.

Unless you are a trained graphic artist please spend the money on hiring a professional graphic artist.  There are tons of options, 99Degigns, elance, but make sure they have packaging experience and not just design experience.

When my clients say that they want to be a low, reasonable or cheap priced product I cringe.   Beauty is the one area that you don’t have to compete on price.  I recently was visiting with an Ethnic hair care brand who was selling 2 products for $10.00.  We could choose from either shampoo, leave in, co-wash, treatments, or hair puddings all for $5.00 a piece.  It took about 30 minutes to convince them to raise their prices to just mid-range of their competitors pricing but it was worth it.  Consumers associate low prices with cheap products and expensive or at least competitively priced with a higher valued thus effective product please don’t be cheap, price your products correctly.

Launching 60 SKU’s to be a one stop product shop is a terrible strategy.  Unless you are Walmart, I prefer and teach to go a mile deep and an inch wide in selecting your product offerings.

If your Hero product is an amazing anti-aging product, build your line extension around that, do not offer a foot product.  If you are a foot care line, please don’t dabble in a face cleansers, it makes no sense. Unless you have a “theme” that ties the products together, for example all of your products are Argan Oil based products. However, if it’s not in your “theme” then just say no. Stay focused.

Commit to your business and your brand. It might be scary or you might be a “trend” hopper but my best advice and the most successful clients that I have are here to stay.  There is no plan B, or I am chasing the next trend, they are here to stay because they believe in the product, business or plan. Let that be you. Commit. Stay. Be here next year.