What Makes a Successful Health and Wellness Brand?
Wellness branding creates your marketing pipeline. It’s not your logo. It’s not your colors. It’s not your fonts. Branding is the relationship you build with your ideal customers and clients. Visual identity is part of your overall branding. It helps make your brand recognizable. But, the holistic power of your brand is in the conversations that you initiate and the relationships that you nurture.
If you’re designing a logo before doing brand strategy, you’re painting a house that hasn’t been built. So there is nothing concrete for your customers to relate to. And there is no foundation to develop your marketing pipeline. So, what makes a success health and wellness business? A brand foundation.
The wellness brand DNA
Branding is the foundation of your marketing pipeline. Does your message resonate? Branding is the first critical step in marketing and selling your product or service. It’s also the most overlooked. Brand development creates your holistic brand foundation. To look deeply at the anatomy of branding, we need to reframe the way you might be thinking about it.
A successful brand has a clearly defined ‘brand DNA’. This DNA is made up of many elements that weave together to create a cohesive whole. Just like your body's DNA holds the instructions for how to develop, grow, and survive - so does the DNA of your brand.
Let’s look at some of the top brands that operate in health and wellness, across markets: Calm, Goop, Buddha Tea, HUM Nutrition, BetterHelp.
What do these brands have in common? They connect to their customers in a deep and meaningful way. Their messages resonate across all their marketing channels, and their consistency in communication style creates awareness, loyalty, and trust. In essence, their brand DNA is clear and easily recognizable. What are the values, vision, goals, messaging, visual design, and positioning that make up your brand DNA? These elements create your wellness branding.
What is wellness branding?
Before we go further, let’s just quickly define branding to make sure we’re using the same definition. So, what is branding?
Branding is the connection between you and your customers. It’s your relationship. It’s how you represent yourself to the outside world. And, it’s how the outside world views you.
This relationship in the health and wellness industry is deeper than the average, “everyday” brand. So, creating a meaningful connection matters even more than it does for everyone else. The perception that a wellness brand is critical as your customers must come to believe that you can in fact help keep or inspire health or wellness in their lives.
In the health and wellness industry, you're looking to transform your customers' lives. Many times in deeply personal ways. Whether your business deals with mental health, self-realization, nutrition, CBD, spiritual development, personal care, self-love, or healing, you are digging below the surface.
Wellness customers are savvy and expect a level of intimacy that other audiences don’t. Wellness branding is intimate, transparent, and respectful.
You’re venturing into some delicate and sometimes uncomfortable places. So this relationship has a level of intimacy and you must be careful and respectful in this place. Your brand should hold the space for these deeper connections to occur. Not force them. And, once you earn your customer's trust, you have to hold this trust respectfully. The most successful wellness brands do this seamlessly.
So if branding is the relationship between your customer and your business. And, the way the outside world views you. What is wellness brand marketing?
What is wellness brand marketing?
Brand marketing takes your branding and presents it to the world. Wellness brand marketing focuses on promoting and building your brand's image, values, and reputation. It involves creating a cohesive and consistent message across all your marketing channels to create a strong, authentic, and distinct brand identity.
The goal of your wellness brand marketing is to create a positive and memorable brand experience for your customers, that speaks to health and well-being, rejuvenation, growth and connection. Having a grasp on your customers intrinsic wellness desires is how you will be able to increase brand awareness, customer loyalty, and ultimately sales.
Okay, so we’re aligned on wellness branding and brand marketing. How do you build out each of these components for your brand? The way to develop a comprehensive brand foundation or brand architecture is to create a solid brand foundation.
The wellness brand foundation
Here are the elements you need in your brand foundation:
Market Research
Brand Development
Visual Branding
Brand Voice & Tone
Brand Guidelines & Brand book
Branding Strategy
Let’s break them down…
Market Research & Analysis
This includes your market research and your competitive audit. This could be gathered in survey, interviews, reports, or focus groups. If your audience is small, you can get this from your Instagram and Facebook followers. No audience or industry is too small to market research. Once your market data is gathered, you analyze the results that kick off your brand development process.
Brand Development
This includes your purpose and mission and your “big why”. This includes your niche and your brand positioning. Your value propositions are defined here along with any unique selling points. This also includes your ideal customer persona (or target audience) development work.
Visual Branding
This includes your logo, colors, fonts, and how you visually represent your brand to the world. This also speaks to your photography styling, your video style and any packaging to support your product or service.
Brand Tone & Voice
This is your brand personality and how you speak to your customers. It’s the way you present your voice to the outside world. This is how your team knows how to write.
Brand Guidelines (Brand Book)
This is where you outline how your visual branding (logos, colors, fonts, spacing, usage) should be incorporated. This also outlines how you speak to your audience, and use photography, images, and social media to communicate and convey your message. This is used as an internal guideline and to share with external team members. It is used to onboard new and freelance designers, copywriters, or marketing members that you will hire.
Brand Strategy
This is where you outline how your business goals map to your brand across content and channels. This outlines the tactical details you need to execute marketing. Brand strategy is different than your marketing strategy. Don’t assume because you have a marketing strategy that you’ve adequetly covered off on your brand.
Conclusion
In conclusion, your brand is only as successful as the strength of your brand foundation. The competitive advantage that makes you stand out, resonate, and authentically connect to your target audience should be woven into your brand’s DNA.
It’s so easy to skip over brand marketing and just start running campaigns and media, but without this step, your audience is not sure what you stand for. And, most importantly, why they should care.
Hopefully, this overview of how to create a successful brand foundation helps you as you embark on your brand journey.
If you’re looking for support with your health and wellness branding we’re always here to help. Sometimes a second set of ears in the room makes a world of difference.
You can set up a free 20-minute brand audit to go over your top branding questions with one of our brand consultants and learn more about how we can help. Book an appointment here.
https://calendly.com/holistic-design-group/free-20-minute-branding-session
About the HDG Brand Development Work
We’ve help companies create authentic brands that customers covet and connect to. If you need help aligning your vision to your concept, reach out for a free discovery call. We can guide you to the becoming the brand you’re meant to be. Learn more.
