Successful branding is essentially a matter of capturing a) the zeitgeist, and b) the essence of your product and philosophy.

Think of how Nike’s developed the Air Jordan brand right at the cusp of Michael Jordan’s legendary NBA run (which also helped popularize basketball — and by proxy, Nike’s shoes — further).

As a small business owner, the question you should ask is: what does the zeitgeist hold for 2019? How can you tailor your brand to it?

In this post, we’ll show you how to build a brand by developing a 2020-ready branding strategy for your business.

Embrace Transparency

In today’s social media-dominated world, there are no more secrets. Customers want, even demand honesty from their preferred brands. They want to know what your products are made of, how you make them, and even how much they cost to make.

As Ashley Deibert writes in Forbes:

“Those that have embraced transparency and authenticity (Dove, Airbnb) discover consumers will do the marketing for them. Those that have fought it (Uber, Pepsi) continue to struggle to regain footing with an audience who will keep their every move, holding up to pounce when the first signs of negativity arise.”

Take benefit of this fact by making transparency a core part of your brand. Instead of hiding behind a facade of sophistry, show your customers who you are and what you care about.

Transparency in production

Even though it makes for powerful branding, transparency in pricing isn’t for every business. What you can do instead is share how you make your products.

How much you share is up to you. You can share details of the factories where you make your products (great for businesses that want to emphasize their ethical sourcing), the design and development process, etc.

Transparency in pricing

Businesses have long obscured their pricing to boost their margins. Their assumption is: if a customer knows how much a product actually costs to make, why would they pay our markup prices?

However, in a world where wholesale prices for any product are just an Alibaba.com search away, obscuring your pricing doesn’t always make sense.

You can brand yourself as a more “authentic” retailer by making your pricing transparent.

Adopt Video in Your Branding Strategy

There is no doubt about it: video will continue to dominate in 2020 (and beyond). If you aren’t on this medium yet, you are missing out.

However, how and what kind of videos people consume has changed a lot in the last few years. There is a stronger thrust on storytelling and authenticity. Being immediate and live is more important today than to be polished and professional.

Show off your production process

Presenting by how you make your products does two things:

• Authenticity: It makes your products come across as more authentic. This is especially important if you advertise the quality of your ingredients/raw materials.
• Storytelling: It gives you a chance to share the story of how you came up with the product, its manufacturing process, etc.

Additionally, the production process can give you several content pieces of varying lengths you can share across social media.

Use live video to reinforce your brand personality

Live video is the new frontier of video marketing. Led by Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Periscope and YouTube Live, this video format has shown sharp growth in the last few years. On YouTube alone, live video consumption grew 80% YoY in 2016.

Unlike recorded video, live video is immediate, raw and authentic. There are no scripts, paid actors or army of brand managers. This rawness terrifies large businesses (where every brand decision is made by committee).

For small business owners, however, live ecommerce product videos creates tremendous opportunity. You can be authentic, human, and allow your brand personality to sparkle through — all without a big production budget.

Update Your Design and Messaging

The two biggest branding mistakes small businesses to make are a) inconsistency in design and b) a lack of clarity.

For 2019, resolve to update and align your messaging and design. Your design should reflect the core value propositions of your brand. Every single aspect of your customer experience, from the packaging to the website, should have design/messaging consistency

Bold colors

Blame it on the resurgence of 80s nostalgia, but bold, bright colors are back in fashion in a big way. And brands have taken notice. From Dropbox to Nutella, brands across verticals are grasping strong colors. The best thing about this trend is that it can fit almost every brand.

Here’s Nutella’s new packaging as an example of this trend.

Authentic images

Although still widely utilized, stock images are losing favor with both brands and consumers. Even if they resonate with your brand’s mood, the lack of authenticity and product visibility counts as a negative.

The new trend for 2019 is to create your own images and graphics. Ideally, you’d want to include your products in the images in some way.

Retro, vintage and floral-themed designs

If the ‘80s-inspired designs are not for you, you can go even further back and adopt floral and vintage-themed designs. This is already a well-known design trend and promises to grow considerably further in 2019. The influence can be seen across verticals and mediums.

Conclusion

New marketing and branding trends emerge each year. Some fade away, some stick around. As a small business owner, you should seek to spot trends that have staying power, yet are unique enough to help you stand out from the competition.

Start by choosing a couple of trends for 2019 listed above. You can adopt authenticity and transparency in your messaging and back it up by adopting live video. If your brand hasn’t had an update in a few years, it might be a time to update your messaging and designs to some of the trends shared above.