The question „Are you testing your brand?“ does not mean whether you are personally testing your own brand, but whether you are testing the further development of the brand on your target group.
We experience how many companies or brands try to reinvent themselves with a repositioning or a redesign. It often hails criticism, so much so that it has often led to brands being forced to revert back to the old.
How can the risk be reduced?
One thing up front: your brand needs to evolve and stay agile. That means coming up with new ideas and innovating to strengthen the brand and stay relevant to the target audience.
It doesn’t always have to be new products, but ask yourself more about how the brand could evolve on its current foundation. How could it provide even better customer service? How could we increase our brand awareness with a bold campaign? How could we get even better at what we do?
Allow new ideas and test them.
New and bold ideas will lead to your brand, start-up or scale-up moving forward and becoming relevant. Brands today need to stay innovative. For example, if you have an idea to design customer service in a way that gives your target audience an entirely new experience, but you’re worried it’s too bold, invite a handful of people who match your target audience.
Simulate a customer service conversation. Solicit feedback on how your target audience felt about the conversation. Was it different? Was it positive? Or was it too much?
You can also test new packaging for your product. If your product is available in the supermarket, test the new packaging (field test) to see how many people reach for it or ignore it. Or does it perform better than the previous one?
You can test anything on your brand.
Testing gives you confidence and quick prototypes help you develop your brand quickly and continuously. If the test fails – it doesn’t matter – it was just a prototype and you know what doesn’t work before you invest a lot of time and money in the wrong further development.
Are you in the process of scaling your startup?
Then be sure to check out our Knowledge & Insights page. There you’ll find exciting downloads, our branding for startups & scale-ups podcast „Brands after hours“, as well as book recommendations that will help you build your brand.
