Picture this: you are on the hunt for some running shoes. Before you begin searching, you are probably thinking of brands like Nike, Adidas, or Under Armour. These names have built interest and trust within the shoe industry, the same way any brand hopes to secure a position within their respective industry.
When it comes to the CBD industry, it’s no different. Differentiating yourself from the competition and still becoming a well-known name brand takes careful consideration and strategic marketing.
Keep reading for three ways you can differentiate your CBD brand.
What is a brand?
A brand is every interaction of a name or design that differentiates a business, product, or service from another. Doing so encompasses everything from the positioning, the messaging/communication, visual and aesthetic design, target market, voice, promotions, and customer experience.
Designing a brand is designing the complete package. It is color, imagery, iconography, and typography, but also personality, attitude, and style. When done right, the result is a cohesive image that answers the question: “What does this company look like?”. In other words, your brand is the experience people have when they interact with your business– online, offline, or in person.
When it comes to CBD brands, the most important thing to communicate is trustworthiness. New products are constantly being added to the thousands of already established product lines and saturating the market. Brands have CBD-infused everything– from facial scrubs and hand lotions to CBD beverages and chocolate. Developing a product that fits your customers’ needs and marketing it accordingly is, therefore, key to building your brand identity.
There are several ways to communicate to your consumer –no matter who they are– all the ways that your brand stands out from the competition. There are three ways you can differentiate your CBD brand from all the rest: logo design, content, and user experience.
1. Logo Design
A logo is an easily recognizable design element that typically contains letterforms (logotype), symbols/icons (logomark), or both. It is essentially a quick, visual representation of your brand’s message and position. Your CBD brand’s logo will impact how customers perceive the brand, and while there are many additional factors, the logo and packaging is oftentimes the first messenger of this perception.
Your logo is one of the most important elements when building a successful brand. It represents the face of your company and should evoke some memory or emotion from the viewer depending upon their relationship with the brand. The right combination of basic design elements, such as shape/form, color, line, scale, space, unity, and harmony, can help achieve this.
A well-planned logo, combined with a brand strategy helps you effectively reach your audience, communicate your message, your value, and benefits, and visually attract more attention. With the CBD market becoming oversaturated quickly, it’s important to have a logo as original and unique as possible.
2. Content
Creating content is arguably the main technique used to build a brand. Whether it is a blog post, a social media post, or a physical brochure, all content created for your brand should represent and reflect your brand consistently. Anything you create provides your audience with useful information, attracts them to your website, and even retains existing customers through quality engagement. In fact, these websites, posts, and pages should all be optimized with keywords that drive traffic to the content you create, especially for e-commerce websites that sell CBD products.
Therefore, your content should set you apart from your competitors. Developing branded content about the specific benefits and appeals of your CBD product will help identify your brand as different from the rest, while also improving both conversations and search engine rankings.
3. User Experience
What a user experiences when engaging with your CBD brand is what determines your brand positioning. Therefore, branding should influence the user experience design in a way that bridges the gap between the intended effect you want your brand to have on a consumer and the actual experience they have when interacting with your brand. An example is the price of a product; a customer can assume that the higher the price, the higher the quality. A brand that is consistent in its positioning based on quality and price is one that is designing a strong user experience.
Overall, a brand is built and positioned based on many factors, particularly in the CBD industry where there is much room for growth and opportunity. The right combination of unique logo design, branded content, and strong user experience will make your CBD brand the Nike, Adidas, or Under Armour of CBD.
Contact us to get started on a branding project today.
