Branding abroad in Asia requires more effort in building fundamentals. From the last episode, we talked about the three simple steps to do before mapping out your branding strategy for the brand image. You have done the homework, now what? How to prepare branding strategy is one thing, but how to implement a branding strategy is completely the other. 

Forget about those willy-nilly preachings. These are the handy (and very simple) mindsets to have:

1. Don’t lie about your brand, ever: 

Before we talk about how to implement branding strategy, we want to set one thing straight. For many brands that just started or thought about rebranding, one dilemma they found themselves in is, they thought they were obligated to tell their stories, or even make up stories for the brands.

In fact, they don’t. To develop a branding strategy, a story is not mandatory. If you don’t have a legacy, let it be. Not every brand has some generations of recipe, not every brand has moving motivation to build the brand. It is OKAY. 

If you are implementing your own branding strategy, once you follow the simple steps from last episode, you will at least have some ideas about your brand's personality. And that’s more than enough to start with.

2. The long tail effect of branding: 

When you first start to implement your branding strategy, it is very easy to lose faith in it. Don’t. 

Rome wasn’t built in a day, the same goes with branding, hence patience is the key. In the digital data era, you have everything in the data, it’s easy to get too focused on analysing the numbers.

It is much like SEO, it simply impossible for the right branding strategy to reflect on the data since day one. But you will see the trend in the long run.

This is exactly why many brands are obsessed with advertising, because the data boost is fast, the conversion rate is visible, quite the opposite of branding implementation. Here is the thing, advertising is very effective when you try to boost sales, but if you want to have loyal customers, to maximise mind share  a.k.a. Retention, the only way to lead to it is that you already established a good brand image.  

So have some faith in your branding strategy. If you are really worried, give yourself a timeline, say, one or two months, to stick with it. See how your customers react to your brand during this timeline, and then make changes if needed.

3. Brand enhancement is never enough:

During the planned timeline of implementing branding strategy, to increase brand recognition with the attributes you designed, especially when you are branding abroad where no one knows your brand, you simply need to emphasize the message your branding strategy is set to convey. Implementing the branding strategy into every aspect you can think of: your posts, your product descriptions, or even the choice of collaboration. 

Brand attributes needed to be introduced to your customers, and repeated until your brand stuck in your TA’s heads. 

Now you have the branding strategy implemented. In the next episode, we will be talking about how to transition from branding strategy to brand image, which is the core of the brand value. 

If you fancy to hear more, please subscribe to our Apple podcast or our Youtube Channel for more branding tips to come!