Your 7-step Guide To Brand Development [5 examples inside] 

What is brand development? Read this practical 7-step guide to build a strong brand that your customers will love.

Strong brands like Puma, iPhone, or Patagonia aren't just good-looking logos. They are a story, values, and vibe that customers share, trust, remember, and repeatedly choose their products or services for. 

From the business side, this translates into reduced marketing costs, increased sales, and a higher loyalty rate. And it's not just me—statistics support this.  

Companies with a consistent brand have 23% higher revenue than others. One of the reasons is that 89% of consumers stick with them. 

These are just some of the benefits of businesses with strong branding. In this post, you'll discover a seven-step guide on brand development with real examples.

Let's get started👇

What is Brand Development?

It's a pretty long process of defining your brand identity and personality, including logo, colors, tone of voice, values, and mission, and spreading it all on the market. In addition to the cover side, it's also how you satisfy customer needs. 

The important part of this roadmap is a clear understanding of the market, competitors, and audience. If done right, it creates a strong emotional connection between consumers and a brand based on resonance with its vibe and trust. 

However, it only works if the brand development strategy is consistent throughout customer communication within your business. 

But how is it different from the last one?

How it intersects with business development strategy

Let's say a new marketing product is about to enter the market. Its team outreaches cold leads via channels like email, launches ads, and speaks at industry events. Unfortunately, since nobody knows them, instead of closing the leads, each time they start a conversation, they explain who they are and why the audience should care. 

However, if they also invested in brand positioning and promotion across all the platforms, the prospects would already know the company name. Some may read their case studies. Others follow a company on LinkedIn. 

The result? A brand reputation and audience trust. This combo opens the door to profitable partnerships. But to truly leverage these opportunities, businesses need to develop a strategy that aligns with a customer-driven marketing approach. There are many more benefits brand development can bring your business 😉

Why you should implement it in 2025

84% of marketers set brand awareness as one of their priority objectives because they see the impact. First, it is about customer acquisition and sales growth, but there is a list of side effects companies see. 

With a clear vision of who you are, businesses easily reflect that in their marketing efforts, which results in the following: 

• strong emotional connection with consumers,
• their trust,  
• brand awareness growth,
• better communication of your product value,
• audience loyalty,
• competitive advantage,
• 306% higher LTV.

Sounds good? Here is where to start 👇

7-Step Brand Development Strategy

After an in-depth analysis of the best brand roadmap, we've created this detailed marketing guide for you. Let's skip the fluff and get straight to the must-have steps to develop a strategy for your business: 

How to develop a strategy that will highlight your brand’s uniqueness and help grow your business? Should it be customer-driven? What does it take to create the strategy?

We’ve outlined 7 steps to crafting the strategy that your marketing team can work on right away. 

1. Analyze the market

First, you need to have a clear vision of the market trends, its history, and customers' needs. A broad understanding of this ecosystem will give you insights on the direction to take in brand development to achieve what resonates with the audience.

1️⃣ We advise starting with an analysis of existing market research, industry reports, and trends. This will give you big-picture insights into competitors and target audience preferences. 

2️⃣ Research your competitors. To avoid mimicking other brands, it is better to understand what and how they offer and their weaknesses and strengths.

Here is a list of questions to find answers to after your brand research:

• Who are my competitors?
• What is their brand positioning?
• What unique value do they offer?
• What is their brand voice?
• What is their visual representation? Logo? Colors?
• What pain points do they solve? Where do they fall short?
• How does my product/service compare in features, quality, and pricing?
• What do their users complain about? Analyze customer feedback about their services on review platforms.
• What marketing channels do they use for brand communication with customers?
• What types of customer support do they provide?

This data will help you find stand-out opportunities during brand development.

Let's say you discover that most similar companies speak in an official corporate style, while your target audience is more fun. That's a clear sign that you should adjust your brand style to be more casual and clever. The same goes for the visual side.

But before making this business decision, you should analyze what your customers like.

3️⃣  Identify the target audience

The main mistake companies make is saying "everybody." The narrower your focus, the better you grow. This means you should have several customer portraits after this research to adjust messaging accordingly for each group.

Here is an example of data about one of the product or service customer groups collected in a buyer persona profile:

Ideally, you should have several portraits like this, including the portrait of a customer who is not a fit for your brand.

The more detailed it is, the better. Depending on the industry, you should include the following info: 

Here are the best methods to collect this data: 

• Collect quantitative data with large audience surveys. Ask target questions to understand their pain points, behavior, and preferences. For this, create a survey and engage people to pass it on your brand social media, messengers, email marketing, and add it to your website chat. Offer incentives instead.
• If you want to study the emotional drivers behind customers' purchase decisions, use a focus group method. It's a small group of your potential customers with whom, during a video call, you discuss questions related to your brand and products/services. The result is data about their opinions and attitudes.
• Website visitors' behavior analysis. Use tools like Hotjar or Clarity to record video sessions of your customers' behavior on your website: which elements they click or not, and their path through the pages.
• Conduct one-to-one customer interviews. Usually, you also offer some incentive instead. Then, prepare up to 30 questions about the customer, their purchase behaviour, knowledge of the competitors, etc. The more detailed your questions, the better data you'll collect. But keep the session no more than 40 minutes (it's about customers getting tired and the quality of their responses). 

Knowledge of your audience is vital for the next steps of your brand development strategy.

2. Design your brand's vision, mission, and core values

When you know what not to repeat, it's time to think over your unique reason for the brand's existence. Making money isn't the reason anymore. People want to see the human qualities in your brand, an outstanding and interesting brand personality.  

So, how do you want to show up in the world? Here are the must-have elements of brand equity to define: 

• The reason why the brand exists, for example,
  

• The business principles, aka values, lie at the core of your brand's decisions and actions.
  

• Your brand mission statement. Usually, it is 1-2 sentences describing the future you want to create or where your brand is heading. Ensure that it aligns with the preferences of your target market. Here are some examples from big brands:
  

3. Develop the brand's verbal identity

Since we try to humanize your brand, it’s time to give it a voice. How will it sound? What vibe will it give? Will it be professional? Funny? Playful? Witty?

For example, it is about choosing between writing your brand message by using constructions or in short conversational sentences. Or by choosing “us” or “we” marketing language.

Ensure it reflects your business personality, principles, mission, and preferences of the target audience.

Just compare these two:

Keep this brand consistency everywhere you communicate with the target audience: website, events, emails, socials, etc. 

4. Design your visual identity

Finally, the classic elements everyone thinks about when mentioning brand development - the logo, colors, images, typography, icons, etc. 

Sure thing, before you start, you should keep in mind the results of all the previous steps - mission, values, brand voice. We’d advise keeping them open on the additional screen, or on the visual Miro dashboard, or even better, just print them.

Now, you’re ready to create a visual translation of everything we’ve just outlined. So grab your designers and start brainstorming. Here are some examples of the basic elements you should define eventually: logo, colors, icons, and typography.

Glossier and Spotify logo, colors, font style guide. Images source.

Next, think about where you will use them and adjust accordingly. For example, the logo should look good on both a dark and a white background. If you have a text logo, it will look awful on a social media avatar, so you should have its simplified version.

5. Brand story 

Now, it is time for the emotional side of your brand. The story behind its creation.

You may see it in the “About us” section:

The Moz SEO service brand story. Image source. 

Its goal is to tell people how you came to your global mission idea, how you are related to the problem you’re trying to solve. Why do you care? How does your brand help to resolve it?

The most effective brand stories have this structure:

• Intrigue readers from the start with something unexpected or emotional. It can be some bold statement, or fact, or a memory of a situation from the past.
• Identify the pain point that your audience also shares. 
• Add details about the process of how your business resolves it. Show how hard it is. This will make your story more powerful and emotional.
• Present the moment of creating your brand as the turning point. Don’t be salesy here.
• Prove your approach works with customers' testimonials or facts.
• Announce the large vision of the future you’re trying to create. 
• Engage the audience to be a part of this story. Explain their impact. 

The last step is to follow your story across every customer communication and your brand actions. Just imagine the fast fashion brand with a mission of keeping the planet and oceans clean.

6. Share it everywhere your customers are

So everything is ready: values, mission, and design part. It's time to show it to the world and make your brand recognizable. So ensure it is on

• Your website pages and "About Us" section
• Marketing materials,
• Product packaging,
• Social media, emails, text messages, customer service interactions,
• Physical stores. 

Ensure you sound and look the same at every customer journey touchpoint. Put special effort into implementing all this on your brand website, product packaging, and social media because it is the space you can control 100%.

7. Measure your strategy performance 

There is always room for improvement, so you should constantly track the efficiency of your brand development ideas. For this goal, marketers use a dozen of KPIs, for example:

As you may see, there are metrics from different departments, each is measured in a separate service. For instance, if you provide call customer service, you need to focus on call tracking metrics like call time, duration, and location.

That’s why it is important to have a person who would collect and analyze this data regularly. Otherwise, you won't see the big picture and make in-time corrections to your brand strategy.

The theory is over, let's add some inspiration 😉

Top 3 Examples of Successful Brand Development

Here we’ve collected some of the best-performing examples and analyzed their elements. So, you’ll definitely know the secret of their success and can apply that approach to your brand as well.

Chipotle

Chipotle brand website. Image source.

It’s a Mexican fast-food brand that entered the market right when the more popular Taco Bell decided to switch to low prices (which led to low quality).

The brand’s founder, Steve Ellis, filled the market gap for fans of both Mexican and quality fresh food. These people like fast food, but want it to be nutritious. That's why they are conscious of where their food comes from.

And here is Chipotle's answer:

Health consciousness, customizability, and sustainability make Chipotle different from other fast-food companies.

In terms of the brand identity, they communicated this idea through a minimalist design, earthy tones, and a casual but premium feel reinforced with the “Food with Integrity” message.

On social,s their content marketing sounds like your best friend with a cheeky personality who’s up-to-date on all cultural trends.

This witty and sometimes raunchy tone of voice is another thing Chipotle fans love.

Key takeaways of this brand strategy: 

• Know the market gaps to be ready to catch the moment. 
• Build solid brand values that 100% reflect your audience's preferences.
• Ensure your business matches their tone of voice.

Nike

This sportswear brand is famous for its "Just Do It" performance vibe tagline and focus on innovation.

This focus on athletic excellence and empowerment is enhanced with elements like 

• product photos with sporty models who never smile because they’re focused on doing physical activities;
• bold typography, 
• Minimalist yet powerful advertising.

You definitely have heard about Nike's loud collaborations with famous sports personalities. In addition, they tell motivational stories about self-empowerment on the company blog. In such a way, they build an emotional connection with the audience.

Key takeaway of this brand strategy: Work on the emotional connection with your target audience through stories of your clients. Post them regularly on your website and social media.

Yitty

This is a shapewear brand from the artist Lizzo that promotes body positivity and inclusivity. As a solution to this niche, she collaborated with Fabletics to create a collection of shapewear in a wide range of sizes.  

This idea is based on Lizzo's personal experience with traditional shapewear. She basically speaks her audience's words by saying that it often leads to discomfort and body dissatisfaction.

Lizzo's brand claims a great mission to redefine beauty standards by empowering individuals to feel comfortable and confident in their own skin values. The diversity idea is emphasized by gender-affirming shapewear, catering to trans, non-binary, gender-fluid, and gender-non-conforming communities.

On top of that she cares about our planet: 65% of items are made from recycled fibers and packaging is crafted from 100% recycled materials. 

Key takeaways of this brand strategy:

• Follow the cultural trends when choosing your brand's core values. 
• Include the must-have elements of your niche, like sustainability in fashion.

To summarize

Now you know the key elements of a brand development process supported by three great stories from outstanding products and services that succeed in this process. The core lesson here is that consistency, authenticity, and a clear mission are the key elements of every strong brand building.

Start your brand strategy journey with a detailed analysis of your target market, customers’ pain points, preferences, and behavior. The more details you have, the higher your chance of standing out in a crowded industry.

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