Customers for your brand aren’t going to come from anywhere. For one thing, you’ve got to be properly visible. For another, that visibility must be continuously maintained. There are a number of different ways to do this, one of the best involves being more attractive to customers. Here we’ll explore tactics that can assist your brand in standing out from the rest.
Market Research and Application
What do your customers like? If you’re a death metal band, flowers and pink hues will do a lot less to sell your albums than covers with text that looks like somebody electrocuted a spider’s web. If you’re selling toys, whether they’re aimed at girls or boys will lead into their overall design. If you’re marketing a deodorant, aiming it at men or women is important.
These are broad marketing trends to consider, but there are more minor details as well. An MSP (Managed Services Provider) may be selling tech products to a multinational conglomerate, or a local school district. The way they market products or services should be such that it caters to whichever core demographic comprises the largest customer base.
Packaging Design Optimization
How you design the packaging of products does much to reach buyers at a basic, even subconscious level. Go to any department store and you’ll find that marketed alongside the candy are varying tech products like headphones. Some are even called “gummy” headphones, even though there’s no “gummy” snack inside; just rubbery earbuds.
Well, they’re marketing toward the impulse buyer. Some products do better when marketed this way, some don’t. You’re not going to “impulse buy” a lamp, for example. But if its packaging looks trendy and modern, that may appeal to twenty-somethings outfitting their first apartment. Packaging is important, and there are a variety of ways to capitalize on it.
For example, it can be worthwhile to take a lesson from Canada’s “Crown Royal” line of whiskey and, whether for a seasonal line of products or a perpetual packaging motif, commission some custom drawstring pouches. These have multiple uses, they look nice, and they give your product an expanded professional veneer.
Outperforming Competitors
In what ways do competitors keep from delivering on the same level your product does? Emphasize those differences. Let’s take a deep dive for this one: remember when video games were something you got excited about, and would spend $70 to $100 on each game individually? Back before smartphones and computers, when consoles were duking it out in public?
Around the early nineties, two major players dominated the market: Nintendo, and Sega. Nintendo marketed itself as more family-friendly, Sega marketed itself as more gritty and “adult”. Like the Yin-Yang, they filled the gap the other left in the market.
Ultimately, Nintendo produced new consoles that catered to both aspects of the market, as did Sega; but because Nintendo’s consumer base literally grew up with them, it had a slightly more loyal consumer demographic. The real reasons they won out are a bit more complex, but that’s a good summary for our purposes here.
Meanwhile, PlayStation came in out of left field playing both ends from the middle to begin with, and now Nintendo is fighting to keep what grip it has. So the lesson here is: don’t just find where competitors aren’t performing well, know where what you do does work, and then seek to make both aspects of your product shine in the market.
Continuously Improving
Being aesthetically pleasing means understanding the core aesthetic of your target demographic, and that requires taut market research. How you package the products you produce to serve that market is equally important in terms of aesthetic. Finding where you outperform competitors, and emphasizing that as well as other strengths is also key.
Between these three echelons of aesthetics in product design, marketing, and presentation, you should be able to find multiple areas of improvement. That’s the last point here: whatever you do, get better at it, and keep getting better at it as your company grows.