Lesson 5:

Building Smart Branding to Drive Growth in a Crowded Industry

Veronique Powell is the Director of Strategy and Planning at ThirdLove, an eCommerce lingerie business co-founded by an all-star team of eCommerce and marketing experts who have previously worked at Google, Aeropostale, GAP, and more. But even for a business led by such experienced professionals, branding is still central to success. In this lesson, Veronique explains how growing businesses can build branding that furthers their growth.

The 2 Key Elements for Building a Brand That Lasts

Branding is more than a pretty logo and nice story. It’s vital that your branding stands for something, because otherwise it won’t stand the test of time. Here are the 2 key elements for building a brand with substance:

1) Solve a real problem for your target audience

You must identify a big pain point that isn’t being solved for your customers and build a brand that backs that up every step of the way.

At Third Love, we saw a huge opportunity for targeting a woman who didn’t follow the Victoria’s Secret Angel type of mentality but still wanted bras that were comfortable, high quality and that made them feel beautiful and sexy.

So, that’s what we set out to do, design bras that have the great comfort, the great fit but that are also really, really beautiful and that women feel sexy wearing.

The problem you’re trying to solve will drive who your target audience is – not the other way around.

2) Build a brand people can believe in – and don’t disappoint.

Fashion brands – especially lingerie brands – face a huge issue in earning customer trust because many consumers have fears over fit and comfort when ordering online.

Your branding needs to establish trust at it’s foundation.

How can you do that?

By consistently being authentic and honest about what your customers can expect from you.

The #1 most used negative word in fashion reviews – by an enormous margin – is disappointment.

It’s absolutely imperative that you are honest about what you’re giving your customers.

Don’t brand yourself as sustainable, or quality, or good value, if you’re not. Today’s consumers are intelligent and well-researched and they’ll see right through it.

For example, we use the highest-quality materials and find our bras to be long lasting, but we’ve also spent a lot of energy communicating to our customers the best ways to take care of a bra to extend its life longer than your average bra.

Because, in reality, most bras break frequently or last anywhere from 6 to 12 months. Communicating the truth of the matter is key.

Don’t tell your customers your products will last forever when that’s simply not true. You can’t build a strong brand by disappointing people.

How to Build Branding Into Every Part of The Customer Buying Journey

Your branding shouldn’t just be part of marketing – it needs to carry through every part of the buyer cycle. Each aspect of your customer experience and every touch point needs to have your brand built in.

Integrating branding with product development

You shouldn’t create a brand and then try to develop products that match it. Just as you shouldn’t start with a product and then try to create a brand around that. Product development needs to continuously evolve with the brand.

It’s not like we made a brand promising comfortable bras and then tried to find a product to match – every step of the way we were iterating to ensure that we were continuously developing a product that matched our brand and our customers.

When it comes to our product development, we don’t guess what customers want: we let our customers decide what they love, and we listen.

We were experimenting with different styles when we developed our memory foam 24/7 bra. It turned out that it was a tremendous success.

Right away, we reshaped our entire brand around this bra. Because we saw that what we thought our customers wanted wasn’t necessarily right – they showed us what we wanted, and all that’s up to us to do is listen.

Not all content marketing is created equal: picking the right strategy for your brand

It’s also really important to develop content that matches your brand. So for us, a huge part of our brand is fit, which is why we have an entire section on our website called Bras 101 that’s about educating women about the different types of breasts, bra types, common sizing issues, etc.

When it comes to content marketing, you need to figure out what is valuable for your audience and what matches your brand.

Just because everyone else is blogging or on Instagram doesn’t mean that that’s right for your customers and your brand.

Think about who your target customer really is at their core: what questions do they want answered? What are their problems? Then create content marketing that matches that.

Matching Customer Support to Branding

Again, this goes back to matching all aspects of your buying cycle, from start to finish, with your brand. Even our customer support supports our branding.

Rather than just regular customer support specialists, we also have fit specialists on staff who are available to shop with customers over live chat, on the phone or over email to work with them one-on-one and coach them individually about their best fit.

There’s more to bras than just measurements, and so a lot of times actually having conversations with a fit consultant can result in a better fit than just taking your straight measurements.

Communicating Your Belief In Your Brand to Earn the Trust of New Customers

If you don’t believe in your eCommerce branding, no one else will. You need to stand strongly behind your belief in your brand.

We’re so confident in our fit and comfort that we have a “try it before you buy it” program, which is an opportunity for women to try our bra for 30 days for free.

They only pay for shipping, they can remove the tags, wash it, wear it, and if at any point in the 30 days, they decided it’s not the bra for them, they can return it, no questions asked.

We also offer free returns – but our “try before you buy” is a way to take our belief in our brand one step further.

If we can gain a return customer for life, and gain their trust, that’s worth so much more than the cost of shipping the product back and forth a couple of times to get them to the right size or the cost of a single bra that we give them to try.

Why Customer Feedback is Your #1 Branding Tool

I can’t say it enough: Your customers define your brand, not you.

Here’s an example: when we first launched we actually decided to not label our product with sizes because bra sizing can be super confusing and varies from woman to woman, store to store, and style to style.

We figured we would create a brand with this app technology we had developed so women could measure themselves and get the right size.

But we got feedback from customers that when they wanted to come back to make a second purchase, they didn’t want to repeat the buying process of sizing through the app just because they didn’t remember what they were last time – so what did we do?

We didn’t hope our customers changed: we changed our brand.

Never stop listening to your customers – they’re your #1 tool for building the best brand possible.