Brand Building in

the Digital Age

LESSON PACK

@Circus_St | www.circusstreet.com
Notes

Welcome to your Brand Building in the Digital Age Lesson Pack! This
pack is designed to help bring the key learnings from this lesson to the
workplace. Here are the important points you should keep in mind when
you are watching the lesson, or going about your day:

What is a Brand?
• Customers now expect far more of the brands they
interact with and a brand is increasingly associated
with the complex emotional response customers
experience when they come into contact with a
company and its products or services.
• There are a number of components that come
together to make a brand including slogan,
personality, visual identity and core values.

Key Qualities of Digital Branding

• Brands can engage with and appeal to their
customer base in a number of ways: from using
storytelling in their marketing to building authority in
the marketplace.
• Customers make powerful connections with brands
they perceive to be working to create the kind of
world they wish to live in, so approaching all
communication with authenticity and consistency is
essential.
• Customers report that they are more likely to be loyal
to brands that communicate with them on a
personal, meaningful level.

Brand Metrics
• Social listening tools, the number of branded
searches carried out on search engines and your
Net Promoter Score (NPS) can all give an indication
of how aware your target audience is of your brand
and how they feel about it.
• Customer lifetime value and your renewal rates can
give an indication of the loyalty of your customer
base and conversion rates and acquisition costs
can help you monitor how much your brand is
contributing to increased sales.

© Circus Street Ltd. 2

 Case Studies

Dove’s ‘Self-Esteem Project’

A well-known example of a company whose brand

messaging has been authentic and consistent for many
years is Dove with their ‘Self-Esteem Project’.

Based on the brand’s mission statement that “beauty

should be a source of confidence and not anxiety” the
brand uses ‘real’ women - not professional models - in
their advertising, helping to build a deep connection with
their customer base, many of whom are younger women
concerned with their self image.

The soap brand has become a powerful advocate for women’s mental health and has
continually done so in a consistent, authentic way, which has raised Dove’s profile from a
soap company to a powerful force for women’s mental health. This approach has also helped
to drive revenue from $2.5 billion in the early 2000s to $4 billion more recently.

Recently, the company created an interactive Ad Makeover campaign where women used
an app to make their own uplifting images. Dove then purchased ad space on Facebook,
overbidding on keywords used by more negative advertisers such as ‘plastic surgery’ and
then displaying the user-generated images. Overall, 171 million banners with negative ads
were replaced, reaching 5.5 million women, many of whom reported feeling more beautiful
as a result of seeing the campaign.

Did you know?

• 33% of US consumers consider switching brands after only one instance of poor service.
• The average consumer needs to interact with a brand 5-7 times before they’ll remember it.

© Circus Street Ltd. 3

Jargon Buster

Here are some key terms from this lesson that you need to be familiar with…

Brand
A name, design, term, symbol or any other feature that identifies one company's goods or
service as distinct from those of other companies.

Core Value
A principle or belief that a business views as being of central importance.

Customer Lifetime Value

An estimate of the revenue you stand to make from a customer over the entire course of
their relationship with you.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

A chosen measure of performance for a given business undertaking (e.g. a campaign).

Metric
A metric refers to a specific type of unit - that is, a standardised measurement for evaluating
something.

Mission
A mission statement defines a company's business, explains its objectives and outlines its
approach to reach those objectives. Essentially, it illustrates a business's reason for existing
and why it does what it does.

Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score, or NPS, is the percentage of customers that are likely to recommend a
company, product or service. It is represented as a scale from 0 - 10 where anyone who
scores from 0-6 are unhappy customers who might damage your brand, 7-8 are passive,
unenthusiastic customers and 9-10 are promoters are will keep buying from your business
and are likely to recommend it.

Slogan
A memorable or attention-grabbing phrase used in advertising.

Vision
A company's vision describes what a company aspires to be, or what it hopes to achieve in
the future.

Visual Identity
All of the imagery and graphics that expresses who a brand is and how it differentiates from
others. It describes everything about a brand a customer can see, from its logo, to the
typeface it uses and the images it uses in its marketing communications.

© Circus Street Ltd. 4