Dummies Guide to Startups: 5 Steps of Brand Building

There are 5 key steps to understanding and building your brand

1. Situational Report: A situational analysis is designed to take a snapshot of where things stand at the time you're developing your brand. An easy way to outline and create this is through what's called a "4C Analysis" - Company, Customer, Competitor and Channel.
2. Positioning Statement: A Positioning Statement is a one to two sentence statement that conveys what you do for whom, and why. It is useful as it requires you to identify, and then briefly articulate your distinct value to your customer in relation to your competitors.
3. Growth Vector Analysis: This describes product alternatives in relation to market options and is one of several means to classify strategic alternatives. Basically a growth vector matrix contains three market options and three product alternatives so that there are nine different combinations or vectors in all.
4. Growth Driver Analysis: Checks whether assumed growth in your market is a reality or just an illusion. It should also help identify if and how you can influence growth in your market.
5. Action Plan: This is your short and long term plan for developing your brand, based on outputs from the various analyses you've completed.

The vector and driver analyses are a bit more complicated than the others, so my advice is give them a thought but focus on getting the situational analysis, positioning statements and action plans right. Searching on Google will provide you with lots more detail on all these, but I'll put up some more bullets on each as we go along.