Free Brand Pyramid Template: How It Can Save Your Company’s Branding
Last update: 9 November 2023 at 02:35 pm
5.00/5A brand pyramid is used to answer fundamental questions about a brand. Building a brand pyramid is a crucial step new brands should take. It creates an understanding of the company’s core values and benefits and, as a result, defines the brand idea.
The brand pyramid model was first introduced in the late 20th century. This symbolic framework benefits new companies trying to enter the market for the first time. It’s because brand pyramids help determine the brand and market positioning.
Brand Pyramid Template
Creating your brand pyramid template can be challenging if you’re unsure of the elements they should include. Here’s one we’ve made to save you time on research and design.
What Is a Brand Pyramid?
There’s a simple reason it’s called a pyramid: it moves from base to top, starting from the most tangible aspects of the brand and ending with its essence. Building a brand pyramid for your company’s branding is vital to answer the questions a new brand encounters:
- What’s the core idea of your brand?
- What are the brand’s core values?
- How should a customer feel when interacting with the brand products?
- What’s your brand’s value proposition?
- Which customer problems are you trying to solve?
- What’s your brand’s vision?
- What’s your brand’s emotional value?
Building a brand is much like building a pyramid. In both cases, the “builder” slowly and carefully approaches the top, the final destination. You can’t reach the brand essence without having a deep understanding of the brand; you can’t have an account unless you’ve already gone through the fundamental aspects of your business.
A brand pyramid consists of five tiers, including:
- Features and attributes
- Functional benefits
- Emotional benefits
- Brand persona & core values
- Brand Essence
The primary benefit of brand pyramids is that they give clarity to the very essence of the brand. Brand pyramids help businesses understand their goals and purposes better and, as a result, clarify the company’s brand strategy.
Many companies now turn to specialized branding agencies to help them with essential business tasks.
How Do You Make a Brand Pyramid?
Without profound internal research, a marketing team can’t determine its brand’s external appearance. The team should learn what the brand stands for, its target audience, and how it wants to be viewed. That’s where the brand pyramid comes in. When building a brand pyramid, marketing teams must start at the bottom and move upward.
Brand Identity: Features and Attributes
Features and attributes define what the product does and how it does it. If your brand proposition involves innovation, your product should include the latest technologies or specs.
Features and attributes describe the purpose and functionality of a product. Facebook offers a news feed. Messaging apps provide synchronized communication, certain emojis, video calls, and group chats.
Functional Benefits
Functional benefits are a little deeper aspect. It depends on what customer problem you’re trying to solve. Why should customers use your product? What’s the expected outcome?
Messaging apps solve the problem of instant communication; sportswear companies offer clothing that enables high performance during sports activities.
Emotional Benefits
No matter what products your business offers, there’s always an important question: how do these products make customers feel? The emotional benefits tier describes the dynamic feedback from your customers after interacting with the brand. This includes the products, customer service, the company’s website, and every other point of contact that may reward you with customer loyalty.
The emotional bond between the brand and the customers is essential to the path to success. In many cases, associations with a certain brand attract the attention of potential customers. It is more related to emotional benefits, not the functional benefits.
Brand Persona & Core Values
A brand persona is the personification of a brand, presenting the brand in human characteristics. Many successful brands worldwide use personification to reach out and communicate with the audience.
The brand persona reinforces product development and connects the brand with its customers. What are the most important values to this person? The persona’s core values are also the brand’s fundamental values.
Having a representative of your brand persona is an excellent way of creating brand awareness, as it’s more relatable to a customer. That’s why almost every great brand has tried to express its core values through a person. It may be a fictional character – for Disney, it’s Mickey Mouse.
Mickey Mouse portrays every characteristic and every brand idea Disney wanted to express: dreams, happiness, and fun. Disney wanted to be perceived as entertaining and lovable as a brand, so Mickey proved to be the best brand personality.
Brand Essence
At the top of the pyramid, there’s brand essence. It is considered the core component of brand positioning. It’s described as the most essential characteristic of a brand, the one to create an emotional response in customers.
The ultimate goal of building a brand pyramid is to provide the brand essence. Early-stage companies should keep an eye on that because if your current brand strategy isn’t clarifying the brand values, you’ll need a new brand pyramid. It is fundamental to success; you know your customers feel it when you evoke positive emotions.
Brand essence isn’t necessarily something that’s repeatedly articulated. It’s something felt by the customers when interacting with a business. In other words, the brand’s essence is the brand’s DNA. Let’s have a look at some of the most successful brands’ core characteristics:
- Apple – Simple Elegance
- Coca-Cola – Happiness
- BMW – Driving Pleasure
- Aston Martin – Reserved in the Road Trip
- Volvo – Safety
- Disney – Magical
- Adidas – Relentless
Apple’s Brand Essence
Apple’s brand essence is Simple Elegance. The simplicity and elegance of Apple’s products are consistently felt by its consumers. The company promises to “think differently” to improve the lives of its customers by developing next-generation technology.
Apple’s brand has had a fantastic impact throughout the years. Apple focuses on three different goals: Simplicity, Difference, and Innovation. One of the main reasons Apple stands out in the ocean of device manufacturers is that the company stays true to its standards in the brand essence.
Apple strongly focuses on the latest and up-to-date technologies, including artificial intelligence. But these innovations can sometimes be hard to understand, so Apple is always trying to keep the perfect balance between progress and maintaining simplicity.
The manufacturing giant wants to make these technologies accessible and easy for everyone. Moreover, the company often takes unique approaches to create a different value. That includes the product design and introduction of an exclusive operating system (iOS) for iPhones. This is how Apple aims to realize three other brand ideas simultaneously.
What Is Brand Essence in a Brand Pyramid? Important Characteristics
As you can observe above, different businesses have different essences of their brand. However, there are some parameters every substantial brand essence statement shares.
The brand essence is the soul of the brand. It can evoke strong emotions in customers. Without these emotions, the business or a brand feels empty, so it’s hard for a customer to relate.
A strong essence statement is unique. It allows a business to stand out in the competition, successfully reach its target audience, and gain customer loyalty. It’s never about finding the information that’s better than others. Instead, it’s all about finding the one that best suits your business and its purpose on the market.
The essence of the brand isn’t something you decide to have. You build it based on your understanding of the brand and customer relationship.
The essence statement is constant. Unlike other brand symbols, such as names and logos, the essence of your brand can’t be changed anytime. It should be sustainable, making it possible for your brand to be distinguished from others, even if you change the logo or the name.
Based on the above discussions, it’s safe to say building a brand pyramid is essential to your business. Brand pyramid helps you understand your business better and allows you to define the brand’s essence. Creating a brand essence is the key to success.
