How To Launch A New Brand | 5 Effective Strategies

Executive Summary

• A creative launch helps introduce consumers to your new brand and set the foundation for lasting relationships.
• When launching a new brand, it’s crucial to define your brand identity and craft a brand story to present to consumers.
• Expand the impact of your brand launch by establishing an online presence and generating buzz around the event.
• After your launch, you can sustain success by gathering feedback, tracking sales, and analyzing your marketing data.

Launching a New Brand

Launching a new brand is an exciting experience, but it is no small feat—an effective brand launch requires extensive planning and strategizing for maximum impact and long-term success. Having a strong brand launch strategy will reel in new consumers, set the foundation for lasting relationships, and help you sustain momentum post-launch.

You may launch a new brand if your current brand is stagnant, you’re entering a new market, you’re rebranding, or you’re hitting the market for the first time. In any case, it’s important that your brand launch targets a specific audience and takes strategic steps to resonate with them. When exploring how to launch a new brand, there are five key factors you should consider so you can maximize your success.

5 Effective Strategies for Launching a New Brand

When launching a new brand, it’s crucial to make a lasting impact on the consumers who attend your event or brand activation so that they develop a positive impression of your brand and keep coming back for your services in the future. As you seek to make a big splash in the market, keep the following strategies top of mind.

1. Defining your brand

To get others excited about your brand, you must understand the fundamentals of your brand and what it’s about. Firmly defining your brand makes it easier for you to present it to the consumers who are most likely to interact with it.

To accurately define your brand, you should take the following steps:

• Understand your brand identity and values – Your brand identity and values describe what is important to you and why you offer the products you do, which will help customers connect with and relate to your brand.
• Conduct market research – Market research will help you understand the brands you are going up against in the market, gather some inspiration for how you can fill the gaps they leave, and learn how to best reach consumers.
• Conduct a competitor analysis – Conducting a competitor analysis will provide insight into what brands and products you are competing against, what consumers are looking for, and what you need to do to stand out.
• Identify your target audience and buyer personas – Refine your targeting by understanding the audience that will be most likely to buy your products or services. Crafting buyer personas allows you to understand the unique profiles that exist in your target audience and develop strategies for motivating them to buy.

Establishing your brand identity includes defining brand elements such as your logo, brand colors, and brand messaging. You should create these elements with your brand values in mind, considering how you want to present your brand and what impression you want your consumers to get from their first interactions with you.

2. Crafting your brand story

Storytelling is a unique way to connect with consumers, build relationships, and make your brand memorable. Crafting a compelling brand story will humanize your brand and offer an emotional engagement opportunity for consumers to relate to you, all while making your brand stand out from the rest. Pairing your brand story with your launch will help you maximize your momentum.

A strong brand story contains the following elements:

• Your unique value proposition – This proposition describes what your brand offers that is different from others and why consumers should choose your product over another.
• What pain points you solve – Your story should speak to the problems or inconveniences that your target audience may face in their day-to-day lives and how your product or service works to solve them while making their lives easier.
• Your brand values – Your brand values are the values that define why your brand exists and what societal or personal problems you aim to solve.

By speaking to each of these elements in your brand story, you highlight what makes your brand unique. Hearing your brand story should guide consumers in choosing to buy from your brand instead of just any other in the market.

3. Establishing an online presence

Research shows that as much as 72% of consumer interactions are now digital, it’s essential for brands to have a firm online presence to be successful—for maximum impact in a brand launch, online channels are especially crucial.

An online presence gives your brand credibility and provides context for who you are, while giving you an opportunity to share new content about your brand and what you have to offer. It also provides a strong touchpoint for both new and existing consumers to interact with you when they need support or want to learn more.

As you establish your online presence, it’s important to take all the following steps:

• Develop a memorable visual identity – Your brand should be instantly recognizable across all channels with visual elements that exemplify the values and identity of your brand, including colors, a logo, and font styles that stay consistent on every platform.
• Maintain a consistent brand voice and tone across all channels – Having a consistent brand voice and tone will ensure your brand has a recognizable and confident personality for your consumers to connect with.
• Create social media accounts – Not all social media platforms may be relevant or meaningful for your brand, so you should consider which ones make the most sense depending on your target audience.

4. Generating buzz around your brand

Whether you are conducting a product launch or a full new brand launch, building anticipation is key to getting the momentum rolling. Finding ways to build anticipation and create a conversation around your launch will help you reel in consumers and have them waiting to see what you have to offer on launch day.

Some ways you can generate buzz and hype up the conversation about your brand launch include:

• Release teaser campaigns and sneak peeks to build anticipation and leave consumers wondering more about what is going to happen next.
• Leverage social media accounts to interact with users and release teasers.
• Consider collaborating with influencers to spread the word about your new launch and provide their honest perspectives so you can reach a wider audience and build brand trust.
• Build an ad campaign that stands out among your competitors and excites your target audience.

Dollar Shave Club is a brand that exemplifies generating positive buzz. The brand utilized social media to build campaigns that got people talking. The most popular Dollar Shave Club campaign involved a funny, unexpected YouTube video featuring the memorable tagline, “Our blades are f***ing great.”

The video went viral and resonated with the brand’s target audience, leading to 12,000 new subscribers. The brand was able to capitalize off this buzz with their reliable and unique service offering to become a major player in the razor market today.

5. Planning your launch event

A creative launch event is a great way to get consumers engaged in your new brand and your product offerings. Planning an engaging brand activation will set the foundation for a lasting consumer relationship.

Examples of creative launch events can include interactive pop-up experience launches where consumers can try and interact with your product, social media contests, or other live events. When done right, these events have the potential to plant a positive experience with your brand in the memory of your consumers.

When planning your formal launch event, you should do the following:

• Think about the optimal time and venue based on the weather and your activity—you might not want to host a product trial outside in a New Orleans summer.
• Consider how you can use social media to either host your event or broadcast an in-person event to maximize reach.
• Find ways to make your activation memorable and provide attendees with something to take away, whether it’s an experience or physical swag.
• Coordinate logistics with team members and partners to ensure everyone is on the same page for event execution.
• Plan a way to collect attendee contact information so you can gather feedback and maintain contact going forward.

On top of the above tips, be sure to give yourself plenty of time for your launch event. Setting your event about two months away will generally allow you to begin preparation, strategize for the event, and effectively promote.

Post-launch strategies for sustained growth

Sustaining success doesn’t stop at launch. In fact, having a strategy for leveraging the excitement of the event going forward is crucial for building positive growth.

Some strategies for sustaining your launch momentum include:

• Continuing ongoing marketing efforts – After generating excitement and building a new foundation of interested consumers at your launch events, it’s important to keep your foot on the pedal and leverage that momentum into further reach through consistent marketing efforts.
• Gathering feedback from launch event attendees – Gathering feedback from attendees will inform next steps for your brand and help you tailor your marketing strategies to your target audience’s unique interests and demographics.
• Tracking sales data – Tracking sales tells you how well your business is performing post-launch and whether your new brand launch is resonating with your audience.
• Analyzing marketing data and customer feedback – Analyzing customer conversions, engagement, and feedback from your marketing efforts should be an ongoing process to assess your return on investment and determine how to pivot if necessary.

Altogether, the key to lasting success is consistently learning from your efforts and listening to your audience so you can refine your efforts for maximum impact.

Optimize your brand launch for success

Successfully launching a new brand requires careful strategy and planning grounded in a firm understanding of your brand identity. Once you have your brand launch strategy solidified, you can begin the outreach of generating buzzworthy teaser campaigns and planning your formal launch event. Building momentum before and after your launch will be key to developing and maintaining an audience.

At PETERMAYER, we help brands build an identity that is true to their values and speaks to the audience they want to target. Then, we help bring that identity and value to its consumers, building relationships. After launching our own rebrand, we have plenty to say about how to handle the process correctly and what pitfalls to avoid. As we help you establish your new brand in the market, we’ll help you unlock the inherent joy that exists in your brand and build relationships with this joy as the centerpiece.

Contact our team at PETERMAYER to learn more about what we do and how we can help you launch a new, memorable brand.

‍