To get started on your own brand, you’ll want to refer to your market research from ideation 7. You want to get to know your target audience really well. These are the people you want to sell to; your customers. This will help you focus on building a brand that really appeals to them, and makes them want to buy your product. Try answering the following questions to start getting a sense of your brand.

• Customer Benefits: What problem are you trying to solve for customers? Think about why would someone buy this product.

• Target Customers: Who are they? Be as specific as possible, try breaking it down into two parts:

  • What are their characteristics?

    • For example: age, gender, location, ethnicity, language, education, religion, income level, etc.

  • What are their personalities, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles?

    • For example: health conscious, busy, highly organized, family oriented, environmentally conscious, social, homebody, nerdy, etc.

• Brand Personality: If your brand was a person, who would it be? Try to match your company to a famous person you know. It sounds silly but it will help define what your business is about.

  • For example, Nike identifies as a talented athlete so you might think of their personality being similar to Usain Bolt or Simone Biles.

In this lesson, you will also name your business. A name does not have to exactly say what a business does, but can become catchy and memorable over time, as a business and its brand becomes well known. In the beginning, the words Apple, Google, and Coca-Cola were just words or made up phrases. But they became well known over time, as people interacted with their brands more and more. They can even be acronyms, last names, or a combination of words, such as BMW, which stands for Bayerische Motoren Werke.