Building a strong brand is the most effective way to persuade people that your product or service is fantastic and that they would enjoy using it. Great branding has a way of connecting deeply with customers.

The purpose of branding is to give your business a voice and convey your identity to your market. 

But to make the best of your branding efforts and improve your company’s performance, you need to have a solid understanding of how branding works. 

By doing so, you would be able to observe how your brand's positioning affects the attention that your target demographic gives to your products and how this can determine whether or not your firm succeeds.

To help you get a better view of the effects of brand positioning, we polled consumers across diverse age groups to find out how they reacted to businesses with a traditional and classic tone versus those with a more modern and inviting one.

What is the Goal of This Study?

The purpose of this study is to determine the kinds of businesses that different demographics are more likely to frequent and how this differs by age group. 

This will assist you in determining how to come up with a business name and other branding elements that will appeal to your customer’s wants and desires, increasing the likelihood that your firm will succeed. 

To accomplish the study's goal, we asked Americans if they preferred doing business with well-known, established firms or with innovative, up-and-coming ones.

What Makes This Survey Important?

It's crucial to realize that choosing an appealing tone is one of the most crucial decisions you'll make while starting or growing your organization. Knowing your target market and your company's identity is crucial when constructing a brand tone since both will aid in creating a memorable one.

Every firm must choose the right tone since it not only enhances their brand identity but also shapes the public perception of them.

The tone of your company affects both consumer interests and your organization's image. You can't afford to ignore tone when you're just starting your business since it's essential to building your company's identity.

What Our Research Has Taught Us About Positioning

Even if our findings weren't very earth-shattering, the results we discovered were interesting. To gain a clearer perspective, we separated the people we surveyed into several age groups.

Here’s what we discovered from them:

• Customers between the ages of 20 and 30 are far more inclined to choose emerging companies than well-established ones.

• Customers between the ages of 35 and 45 choose up-and-coming brands over household names. This age group, however, was unique, with an almost 50/50 split between the two options.

• The 45 to 54 age group chose more established, well-known companies.

• Those aged 55 to 65 were drawn to reputable and trustworthy businesses.

• Our research indicates that males have no preference for either conventional or new brands.

• Women love established brands over more recent ones.

• 148 of the 301 respondents selected modern and innovative firms, while 153 selected well-established companies.

Our research makes it clear that you are free to portray your brand as either a modern or conventional organization as long as it satisfies the needs of your target customers.

How’s This  Works in Reality

According to the data we obtained, millennials preferred young, modern, innovative, and daring companies, whereas boomers and Gen Xers were more drawn to well-established, reputable organizations.

So, if you want to engage with a younger audience, give your company a vibrant, contemporary, and innovative brand identity, like Discord and MailChimp; but if you want to engage with an older audience, make sure your company has a solid traditional identity like Apple and Uber. 

Grant Polachek is the head of branding for Squadhelp.com, 3X Inc 5000 startup and disruptive naming agency. Squadhelp has reviewed more than 1 million names and curated a collection of the best available names on the web today. We are also the world's leading crowdsource naming platform, supporting clients such as Nestle, Dell, Nuskin, and AutoNation.