Stimulate Your Brand Using These 5 Practices Tested by Top Companies

You want to boost your brand and give it a fresh stage where it stands out from the crowd? Well, then you have to stimulate the brand you love so much. Learn about top methods to create brand awareness and stay ahead in the competition.

stimulate your brand

Let’s break it down:

Your brand exists. It’s doing fine. You’re getting decent results. But now, you want more—something bigger.

You want your customers to feel stronger loyalty and to be genuinely excited when they talk about your brand. You even want the world to go crazy about it, even if it’s just for a short while.

So, what do you do?

You add a catalyst to your campaigns. You create a buzz with slogans and irresistible offers. You make a statement that there’s a new hero in town—your brand. And you ensure everyone hears what this hero has to say.

So, how exactly do we promote a brand to create a fresh stimulation?

After doing intense research on what industry experts say, I have curated this list of 5 concepts you can follow to stimulate a brand and find a new audience for your brand’s story.
Here is how to achieve brand stimulation:

To Stimulate a Brand is To Reinvent Its Identity

Donald Trump was not actually that ahead in polls before he decided to follow his son’s idea of creating a new ‘Brand Trump’ who talks to podcasters and goes to YouTube channels instead of national television.

He decided to sit with people who are popular among the new-age voters, who talk fearlessly and sometimes even ‘shamelessly’ about everything and anything – people like Joe Rogan! This new ‘Brand Trump’ was cool, calm, funny and free! Even Elon Musk stated that young voters definitely liked that, and he was now the hero I was talking about in the first part of this article.

He became a hero everyone was listening to!

Whether you accept it or not, Donald Trump won this election by becoming the ‘cool guy’ who hangs out with other cool guys like Elon Musk.

This is what I mean when I talk about stimulating a brand. It’s not just like pressing a refresh button. It’s like clicking on the ‘Update’ icon. You need newness. When you stimulate a brand, you give your brand a new face that is brighter and mightier.

Create a new voice for your brand and stay consistent about it

Have you noticed how some of the biggest brands are consistent in how they present themselves? And I mean everywhere!

A brand is often associated with a message, an image, an idea… So, when you think of that idea, you think of that brand. When it comes to brand voice and marketing genius, there is no better example than ‘Nike.’

YouTube player

By the way, did you watch the video I added above? The one in which Steve was talking about Nike? Did you notice that he insisted on not making the campaign about your product but about an idea?

That brings me to my third practice.

Make the campaign about something personal for your audience

You have already established yourself as a brand that sells a product, service, or some content. It’s not necessary that in order to promote your brand, you need to always talk about what you are offering.

You can make your campaign to be about your audience rather. Or even better, about someone else.

A third person.

You, your brand, and your customers are all focused on a third person together.

Makes sense?

Let’s understand this by an example.

In the USA, Coca-Cola was seeing a consistent decline in consumption for about 10 years when the ‘Share A Coke’ campaign brought a rise of more than 2% in Coke’s US sales. Although it started in Australia, ‘Share A Coke’ became an instant hit in the USA and stays relevant even now through various modifications.

‘Share A Coke’ was a campaign in which Coca-Cola’s logo was replaced by the slogan ‘Share A Coke With’ followed by names of random people on one side of the bottle. This was one of the most creative campaigns ever.

The campaign wasn’t about the brand or the product. It wasn’t about the buyer, either. It was about a third person altogether.

But at the same time, this was a great example of how to stimulate a brand through personal connections and emotions. This campaign talked about a sense of friendship and sharing while being personal, as it used the names of people.

Coca Cola's 'Share A Coke' campaign was a great success in terms of brand stimulation.
Image by Mike Mozart via Flickr and Wikipedia

This method also tackles an important problem- Over-promotion of your brand’s product of service. By making your campaign about something else, you are saving yourself from over-promoting your brand.

Using this practice, you are also balancing your campaign’s promotion and engagement. By including people in your campaign, you are making sure that your audience remains interested and engaged without feeling like being a part of an ad campaign.

Creative ways like these stay with your primary customers for the long haul.

Now, once you have covered the three practices that get you to connect more with your consumers and community of followers, you need to focus on letting them know about your campaign.

Yes, we have reinvented our brand, found our new voice that we are also going to be consistent with, and decided that our campaign will connect with our customers personally – How do we get people to know all this? If they don’t get to know about our idea and our campaign, all our efforts shall be of no use at all!

That’s where our fourth practice decides to help us.

Spread your brand’s story until they start trusting you

This is a harsh truth of product marketing – You must keep telling people about yourself.

I won’t take credit for this one suggestion because everyone knows this already. However, how you do this might not be tailored to current times. Luckily, you are on the right page, and I am going to tell you exactly what to do with the beautiful campaign you have created using our first three steps.

To spread your brand’s story and promote your brand in the best way possible, you need to find answers to these questions:

  • Where does your target audience spend most of its digital time?
  • Which public figure do they resonate most with currently?
  • What format of content is trending the most among your target demographics?

Once you have these answers, I want you to tailor your marketing campaign accordingly.

  1. Focus on the type of content that is trending right now among your target audience.
  2. Create a story in that format and specifically for the platform your consumers are spending most of their time online.
  3. Try hiring one of their favorite public figures to deliver your story, or if that’s not within your budget, use them indirectly via the following methods:
    • Use their social media followers as the target for your ad campaign. Select them as ‘Interest’ of your target users.
    • Copy what they do and associate yourself with them via hashtags or slogans.

One of the best examples of how a brand can benefit from indirect association is Arby’s tweet about Pharrell Williams’s hat.

During the 2014 Grammy Awards, Pharrell wore a hat that resembled the hat in Arby’s logo. When Arby’s social media manager of then, Josh Martin, noticed that people were tweeting about this funny resemblance, he at once chose to use the moment and tweeted

Arby’s Famous Pharrell Tweet
Arby’s Tweet via Twitter/X

Okay.

Let us assume that you now have a voice, you are going to stay consistent with it, and you have also got it out in the open. People love your campaign and feel like they can identify with you.

Congrats, you’ve got a community of people who love you.

Now what?

What do we do do to ensure that they stay with you? Every time there is a moment of silence in the community, something must stimulate the brand again to activate the community.

That brings us to the final concept of brand stimulation.

Celebrate your community by being a member yourself

Yes. You have to be your own customer. Warren Buffett is known to be one of the key investors in Coca-Cola, and his company, Berkshire Hathaway, got about $776 million in dividends from Coca-Cola in 2024.

Buffett often cites his love for Coca-Cola as a consumer. It’s known that Buffett consumes five 12-ounce Coca-Cola cans every day. And he is 94.

You see, he is his own consumer. A fan.

He is a part of the community of his consumers. He celebrates the community publicly. This is a more brand-effective community involvement than just a business relationship.

As a brand, you have to be your own customer and, through that, a part of your customers’ community.

Once you have found your voice and your audience, you now need to celebrate that.

Organize meet-ups, do what your community loves to do, and be there with them.

He gives regular shoutouts to those who align with his ideas and vision, and he tweets like a maniac, which means he justifies spending time on X himself. He is not just the owner of X, he is one of the most active users too.

So, when you have people who now identify with you, you need to show up with them, too. You need to be one of them, and then you can stimulate your brand every day.

Respond to their comments. Hold Q&A events. Organize charitable projects as a part of your local community involvement.

You can also join hands with local partners who have the same policy as you. Join their local workshops as a part of community engagement. Accept direct feedback from your primary customers as well as local challenges.

Zomato’s founder, Deepinder Goyal, is known to deliver food himself occasionally and meet customers, restaurant owners, and fellow food delivery associates.

He lives the work-life of delivery guys, waits with them outside the restaurants, and posts these events on social media.

People connect with him when he does that.

Being a part of your community helps you learn more about your brand than you can do in a boardroom. When you go out and look at your business from a consumer’s POV, you see what’s lacking in your product or service. You see the happiness as well as the frustration of those who follow you.

In order to stimulate your brand, you need to know what is holding you back and what is working for you.

Agree?

Well, I am happy that you have come this far and read all the observations I collected and curated for you. ‘Stimulation’ is a very uncommon term for brand promotion, but I love this term because it stands out a bit and conveys something that is very important for a business to survive.

If you have any queries related to this, I would love to talk and discuss your perspective and ideas. Got any suggestions, criticism, or comments?- You can click the button below and contact me directly. You can also write an email to me at shubham@letmeseethat.com, and I will find a way for us to communicate openly.

If you own a brand website, you can hire me for a site audit, and I will try my best to help you with your website with my personal analysis.

Thanks for reading. I wish your brand great success and hope we talk soon.


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