Brand Building 101: The Viral Strategy that can help Skyrocket your business in 2022

Brand building is something every business owner, freelancer or even a YouTuber has to do. It takes a variety of strategies to actually make people relate to you and buy your product or service.

You must’ve gone through hundreds if not thousands of blogs, courses and whatnot trying to get your hands on that one strategy that will make your brand stand out and go viral.

Well, the the strategy we are going to talk about has been tried and tested. It has delivered results that the brands that used them did not even anticipate. (Sounds Interesting, right?)

But first of all, let’s clear the basics.

Read on to learn a bonus strategy.

What is Brand Building?

brand building

According to Singlegrain, brand building is the process of generating awareness and promotion of the services of a company through direct advertising campaigns or sponsorship. Brand building strategies bring consumers closer to the brand and provide value for them. So that they can know, feel and experience the brand.

Okay, now we have the basic understanding of what brand building is, and we can move on to the strategy.

The Brand Building Strategy you need to try:

CRED

Okay, now, if you’re not from the Indian subcontinent, you must be wondering. What is CRED and what does it got to do with brand building strategy? 

This is a case study we are going to use to talk about the strategy.

CRED: Nostalgia Marketing.

CRED  is a members-only credit card bill payment platform that rewards its members for clearing their credit card bills on time. So, how does a bill payment platform become a household name?

It’s through clever marketing and brand building using Nostalgia as the main factor.

Instead of hiring the top-charting actors or athletes, CRED chose to bring back the stars of the ’80s and ’90s. They incorporated this with quirky and creative scripts that disrupted the Indian advertising market. A big part of their creative advertisement was the realisation of how short-form video content was taking over the market. Each one of their ads has never been longer than the 3-minute mark, most of them not even being more than a minute. 

The marketing strategy was made keeping in mind their prime target base, young adults and early boomers. The young adults were kids in the ’90s and the early boomers in their teenage or early twenties. It provided sufficient traction for the ads to spread like wildfire on social media, television etc. 

The inclusion of stars like Kapil Dev (The star of the 1983 Cricket World Cup), Bappi Lahiri and Kumar Sanu (Prominent playback singers in Bollywood cinema in the ’80s and ’90s) made the content relatable even to the older generation. 

This marketing strategy proved to skyrocket CRED’s brand building mission through the roof.

Click here to read more about CRED Ads.

How can you use Nostalgia in your marketing strategy:

  • Align what features you want to showcase for your product or service: For example, you have an EV Company, and you want to showcase its rapid charging feature. You have to choose what ’80s or ’90s pop-culture icon/reference would suit your product or service.
  • Do market research or a survey for the pop-culture icon/reference: You cannot just go and pick any celebrity or reference from the ’80s or ’90s you have to know if they are still relevant today. Otherwise, you would end up spending hundreds of thousands and still not get an ROI. 
  • Getting the right target audience: For nostalgia to be a winning factor, you have to pick your target audience carefully. For example, you chose Doc and the McLaren from “The Back to the Future” franchise to showcase your charging speed. It won’t work on an audience who haven’t even watched “The Back to the Future” series. (Honestly, if you haven’t watched it, you should, it’s a gem of a movie).

These three steps combined, and you have a working Nostalgia marketing strategy. Nostalgia marketing is a strategy not only used by CRED but thousands of other companies in the world as well. 

Bonus: 

CRED became a household with another bang on strategy that you can use just as easy. 

It’s called moment marketing. It’s a promotion technique that uses trending news, events, or instances.

A perfect example of this technique is when CRED brought in Olympic Gold Winner Neeraj Chopra for an ad right after he came back from the Olympics. It utilised his popularity at the time to make the ad go viral on social media platforms. 

Marketing Evolution has a fantastic article if you want to learn more about moment marketing.

Moment Marketing can be combined with Meme Marketing to further catapult your brand awareness and sale.

I hope you liked reading about this strategy that is bound to keep you entertained as well. Do you share this article with your friends!

Debashis Konger
Debashis Konger
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