Think of all the things the brand Apple represents… they’re all about lifestyle, imagination, liberty, innovation. They’re about hopes and dreams and power-to-the-people through technology. They are revolutionary.

Now imagine if Apple founded an airline. 

I bet you could picture exactly what it would look like, the simplicity of the experience. Maybe you could start to imagine some of the innovative approaches they’d use that we don’t even know we need in air travel until they’re there. I bet everyone reading this can form a picture in their minds about what an Apple airline could look like.

Now, picture in your mind what it would look like if Delta Airlines created a phone. 

Huh? We’d have no idea what that would look like. 

That’s because Apple has a brand. Delta, American Airlines, and United Airlines don’t. If you swapped logos in the airports and on the sides of those planes, would you even know which brand you were flying? Probably not.

The differentiator here is the care Apple takes with not only their products, but their experiences too. They know exactly who their customer is and designs their products, experiences and messaging to resonate on an emotional level with these core audiences. 

Walking into an Apple store is entirely different than walking into a Best Buy. In fact, all the rest of the computer companies with retail stores have now copied Apple’s setup. Still, you know Apple when you see it

The question for marketers out there becomes… how do you recreate Apple’s process? How do you build a brand that’s so singular and yet consistent? 

Spoiler alert: it’s not about you. It’s about your customers.

Apple was built by creating a brand that understood the emotional needs and psychographic personas of its customers. They didn’t implement everything customers said they wanted—they focused on the problems and pain points and created what customers genuinely needed. 

Not only that, Apple has done this over and over and over again to the point where no matter what product they are selling, you can picture in your head how it will feel. 

What’s funny is that every product they come out with gets mocked. Remember how when the AirPods came out, there were all sorts of memes about electric toothbrushes striking out of people’s ears? Or how ridiculously big people thought the new phones were? Now everybody is in and we don’t think that way.

It takes someone making tough calls to say “No, this is not our brand. We’re doing it this way instead,” even when nobody is doing it that way. It takes strength to say “I don’t care about the public’s reaction at first. This is our customer, and we know them better than they know themselves. We’ve done our research, and we’re confident in our choices. We stand by them.”

The process of creating a revolutionary brand is not difficult to explain in theory. What’s difficult is the amount of focus and dedication and (most of all) discipline you need to create a revolutionary brand. There are three key steps to follow when creating brand messaging: 

1. Conduct research to understand who the market segments are and create personas

The first step is to get to know your key audiences. You can’t create a successful brand without first knowing who the humans are that you are building products and services for. 

This might require bringing together a mix of qualitative and quantitative research—in-depth interviews, video diary studies, surveys, usability testing, and other techniques—so you can be totally confident when you’re making decisions about who your customers are and who they aren’t. 

After you have done your research, synthesize your data to create psychographic personas for each of your types of customers to create a picture for yourself of who exactly your customer is—not in terms of demographic similarities, but in terms of how they think and behave. 

Personas help you and your team to remember the research, without having to look it up, they help to convey how audience segments interact with your brand differently and they help you step into each customer's experience to understand how they would interact with a new product.

2. Map buyer journeys to discover pain points and moments of truth

Second, hone in on where your customers' pain points are so you can start to brainstorm ways to fix them. This can be done through a process called journey mapping.

A journey map is a compact visual of your customer’s end-to-end journey—before, during and after interfacing with your brand. It’s a way for your business to make value-driven decisions at specific points in your customer’s experience.  

Start by plotting each buyer's touchpoints and channels. Think of touchpoints as WHAT the customer is doing, and channels as HOW they’re doing it.  

By plotting these activities in a chronological path, you’ll see a high-level view of how touchpoints and channels interact, so you can intentionally orchestrate a seamless, cross-channel experience for your customer.  

Next, document the emotional reactions and pain levels at each point in the journey. 

By learning all we can about the moments when customers feel frustrated, anxious, or upset, we have an opportunity to take a negative point in the customer’s journey, turn it around, and truly delight that customer, often resulting in a boost to brand loyalty.  

Where there is big emotion, there is big opportunity. 

There could be many points of anxiety in a journey. It will be your job to hone in on which ones matter more than others—which are the “moments of truth” that will make-or-break an experience. 

3. Craft messaging guidelines, key points, and a signature set of stories for each

Lastly, create a story that resonates with your customers. This is not about you, but about your customers. 

Take the personas you have created and the pain points from your journey mapping and combine them into a story that your customers will connect to.

The best stories beat out facts every time. If you create a compelling story, your customers will remember it! Just make sure that your signature story is persuasive and exciting enough for people to want to share it with everyone. 

The goal is to have a story that people want to retell over and over again. It helps if they learn something from it, if it touches them emotionally, if it’s unbelievable, or if it conveys some sort of insider information.  

The hardest part is this though: the realization that to become a brand that everyone can recognize and become a part of, you have to take the focus away from you and put it on the customer. Make yourself an essential part of THEIR story.  Instead of playing hero, the role you should be playing is the guide.

In theory, the process is simple: learn all you can about who your customers are and what pain points they have, divide them into segments, and create an unforgettable story that resonates with each group, drawing them in. Make your customers the hero of the story and your product or service the helping hand in getting them to their end goal. If you can map it, you have a road to follow, a path to take. And the more you get back on that road and point toward that sunset, the better and better your experience will become. Your brand, your messaging, and everything else will follow.

Written by Sarah Weise, Market Researcher and Bestselling Author of InstaBrain 
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Sarah Weise is one of the world’s leading authorities on customer-focused business strategy. An American author, businesswoman, and professional speaker, Sarah is the CEO of award-winning market research agency Bixa and the bestselling author of InstaBrain: The New Rules for Marketing to Generation Z.