Research Before You Choose a Brand
Research before choosing the brand. Searching for information on the Internet is the simplest research method. The age of Newton and Edison is over. Today, an idea which occurs to you has already occurred to the other hundreds of thousands of people. Thousands of people are thinking about it, hundreds of people are following it seriously, and tens of people are already implementing it. Of course, this case has been going on in the past, as well. Interestingly, when cinema was invented in the US, it was also invented in France. Even in the US, in addition to The Lumière brothers, Edison was working on this project. During that time, when knowledge wasn’t streaming as much as it is now, different ideas would had occurred to several people because there had been a need. Nowadays, you are one of hundreds of thousands of people who are thinking about a topic and idea which you suppose is quite special and unique.
The method of doing research on branding is quite different from the method used for doing research on launching a business. Conduct a research to find out:
What is happening in the field you in which you want to do branding?
What people are your potential target market?
How is your status in comparison with your competitors?
What are the ways to take over the lion’s share of the market?
While researching the brand, you may realize that the brand in question has already existed before you! You may launch a restaurant as thousands of other people do, but when you want to choose a name for it, you should check and see whether that name already exists. You can manufacture sport shoes, but you can’t rebrand Nike. Brand means the name or the logo which has been recognized by consumers and other brands. This logo/name represents a company, so two brands cannot share the same logo or name.
When the internet domain of a name is already registered, you can’t turn it into a brand. If you decide to continue this path, you need to find a way to eliminate this obstacle. Therefore, before taking any action for branding, do research and check whether the internet domain for your desired brand is already registered or not.
While researching the brand, constantly take notes in a scratchpad. A part of your research for branding such as identifying the target market is in line with the research for writing the business plan. Therefore, you practically have a useful information at hand. A certain brand may contain a part of the target market for the whole company and you may conduct your planning on that part.