The current state of ecommerce is forcing brands to think about innovative ways to attract new customers and retain loyal ones—while also driving down ever-increasing advertising costs and focusing on customer relationships.
Ultimately, all of this is done through brand-building best practices. The goal is to be a customer’s first port of call when they need the product you sell—not catching them by chance through a paid advert.
This guide shares how to bolster your ecommerce brand as we head into 2026 and beyond. You’ll learn the changes you need to be aware of and how to prepare for them, and get inspired by examples of brands that have invested heavily in brand marketing—a strategy that’s paid off.
What is brand building?
Brand building is the strategy behind building recognition between your products and your customers. It includes everything from your brand’s visual identity (consistent logo, fonts, typography, and color palettes) to your brand values, mission statement, and target audience.
Strong direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands have become the default merchants for customers who align with their core values when searching for new products. Sustainable sneakers that help the planet? Allbirds ticks the box. Comfortable bras for modern women? Harper Wilde is top of mind.
This brand recognition makes your marketing efforts more effective. It’s easier to influence a purchase—even at higher prices—with someone who knows what your brand stands for. According to a 2025 report by Givsly, 88% of US consumers say they purchase from brands that align with their values, and 64% say they would pay more for those brands.
“If you brand yourself correctly, and your product plus customer service align perfectly with this brand, customers will develop a preference for your company and its products,” says Patrick Crame, CEO of Love Sew. “Moreover, branding helps define what your customers can expect from the company. Meeting these expectations is what leads to the establishment of trust and loyalty between you and your customers.”
Branding best practices
Brand building is set to be more important than ever, especially for DTC ecommerce brands working in a competitive market. It’s one element other merchants struggle to contend with.
Here are 10 branding best practices to follow to connect with consumers in 2026:
- Craft a one-sentence positioning statement
- Translate positioning into brand pillars and proof points
- Create a unique voice and tone
- Design a visual identity
- Build community around shared values
- Deliver delightful customer service experiences
- Create brand transparency
- Embrace storytelling
- Meet the moment
- Govern your brand
1. Craft a one-sentence positioning statement
Your positioning statement is an internal tool that guides everything else—your homepage hero, your product copy, your ad creative, and even your support macros.
Keep it simple with the following template. Fill it in, then test it against your competitors. If they can say the same exact sentence, keep refining it until the answer is no:
For [primary audience] who [core need or problem], [Brand Name] is the [category] that [primary benefit/outcome], because [reason to believe/proof].
For example, here is how a DTC apparel brand might fill this out:
"For everyday athletes frustrated with disposable fast fashion, Ironlane is the performance essentials brand that delivers gym-ready basics built to last 500+ washes, because every piece is lab-tested, repairable, and backed by a lifetime stitch guarantee."
Once you have this clarity, it becomes the filter for your brand and its communications.
“A slogan or a hashtag would be really nice, that embodies your entire brand ethos,” says Liah Yoo, founder of KraveBeauty. “Each business would have some sort of an ethos or a slogan that represents who they are and what kind of lifestyle we want other people also to join.”
2. Translate positioning into brand pillars and proof points
Come up with three to five concise themes or pillars that support your positioning. But remember that these pillars are empty without proof—97% of consumers say authenticity influences whether they support a brand, and 85% have purchased from a brand because it felt authentic.
For example, if one of your pillars is Radical Transparency, you might provide a breakdown of product costs on the PDP and a sourcing page in your navigation. If you want to make Zero-Stress Returns a pillar, you could add a 60-day returns badge in your footer and an automated returns portal link in every confirmation email.
For many founder-led brands, the two strongest pillars are often trust and transparency. One founder explains how to operationalize this by treating your brand story not as content, but as a core business pillar.
"We have two really important pillars when we build community: One is being trusted, saying what we mean, following through,” says Karen Danudjaja, founder of Blume. “And then two is sharing the real story behind a small business, a founder-led brand, and all of the challenges…that come along with it."
3. Create a unique brand voice and tone
Your brand should be recognizable whether a customer is reading a cheeky Instagram caption or a serious shipping delay email. That consistency in recognition is your brand voice, while shifts in how that voice feels are your brand tone. For example, that serious shipping delay email would tone down the cheekiness of social media captions, but still have elements of what makes your brand sound like yourbrand.
Start by defining a three-word profile like “direct, encouraging, and witty.” Determine how your voice’s tone flexes based on context. Your marketing emails might be high energy, but your error messages should be calm and helpful.
A great example of this in action is Starface. They didn't choose a fun tone randomly—it was built to resonate with a Gen Z audience, anchored by a recognizable character that dictates how they speak across every channel.
"At Starface, we pride ourselves on being part of that cultural conversation, especially for our core demographic, the Gen Z audience. What that means for us is we have this marquee character, Big Yellow, who is an approachable character,” explains Kara Brothers, president of Starface. She says their brand character “uses very simple language” while acting as “a very earnest voice” across their social accounts and ad campaigns.
“When we think about collaborations,” adds Kara, “we go back to some of those core values and missions, and one of those is the approachability, the playfulness that comes through Big Yellow."
4. Design a visual identity
You have very little time to make an impression online. Brands have a few seconds to communicate who they are and what they sell before a shopper moves on.
Run through this checklist to ensure your brand image looks professional and trustworthy:
- Logo system: Have a primary logo, a stacked version, and a simple icon/monogram for favicons and social avatars.
- Typography: Limit yourself to two typefaces—one display font for headers (H1, H2) and one highly legible font for body text.
- Color: Use a signature color for key actions like buttons and links.
- Accessibility: Create sufficient contrast between text and backgrounds. Accessible design builds trust and improves usability.
Dani Noguera, founder of Grin27, says to really build out the character of the brand, consider what the visuals will feel like across different touchpoints, from Instagram to packaging.
“What does the packaging feel like in your hands?” Dani asks. “What do the buttons feel like? How does it click, how does it sound? All of those things being really, really clear, I think, are really important up front as opposed to an afterthought."
5. Build community around shared values
Look to any social media platform and you’ll see communities of people with shared interests. Some 5.66 billion people use Facebook Groups every month, for example.
If that wasn’t enough, investing in a brand community gives you leverage. Community members talk about your products, share photos of themselves using it, and recommend it to friends. This builds a brand loyalty flywheel: You serve your community who then produce user-generated content (UGC) for you to use in return.
Thinking of creating your own branded community? Instead of ushering people into a virtual room and letting them do their thing unsupervised, have some structure around the content and people you want in your brand community.
A successful community has three pillars:
- Shared identity: Whether it’s shared interests or beliefs, prioritize these within the content you push to your brand community. Consumers are more willing to be loyal to a brand if it aligns with their personal beliefs.
- Rituals and traditions: Relaying back to the stability consumers are demanding from brands, let community members know what to expect when they join.
- A sense of responsibility to serve one another: Lean on reciprocity and show your brand is pioneering this community spirit. Give members something in exchange for signing up, such as a donation to a shared cause, lead magnet, or non-fungible token (more on NFTs later).
Aavia is one DTC brand using community to build a loyal customer base. Their hero product is a pill case that pings customers when they need to take their birth control pills. But to get people excited about an otherwise dull product, Avvia has a strong brand message: that hormonal health shouldn’t be a taboo topic.
Aavia shows their commitment to this mission by partnering with sororities across the US to host Hormone Health 101 workshops. The brand provides educational value, teaching members how to cycle-sync their nutrition, exercise, and schoolwork to their hormone cycle.
With science-backed resources and partner discounts, Aavia builds a community where their audience already lives and turns them into a supportive partner in their members’ daily health journey.
6. Deliver delightful customer service experiences
The experience a customer has when interacting with your brand makes or breaks the commercial relationship you form with them.
Landing on a website, finding a product that speaks to you, and checking out with two clicks is a much more enjoyable experience than encountering confusion. Do I really support this brand? should be a no-brainer question for your prospective customers to answer.
“Branding relies on communication, and to communicate effectively, you have to intimately understand your target audience,” says Stephen Light, CEO and cofounder of Nolah.
“Understanding their behaviors at every level will make it much easier to craft valuable content, and with the specificity that reaches them best. That classic marketing statement remains important: ‘When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one.’ Effective branding depends on knowing exactly who you’re speaking to.”
An increasing number of successful brands are tuning into this idea. Take inspiration from Joel Jeffery, CEO of pajama retailer Desmond & Dempsey who says, there’s a benefit to being online first, as you get to collect information about who your customer is.
“We look at our product as a very intimate product,” says Joel. “It's something that you wear around the house or you wear it to bed. It tends to be mostly just the people that you’re very close with and love that see you in it. So we approach most of our customer experience with that in mind, and that plays out across all of our channels.”
Once someone purchases, Joel says, Desmond & Dempsey continues the comforting feeling through their unboxing experience. They complete that intimate feeling by including handwritten notes and a physical Sunday paper with each order.
“It’s very tactile, and really that is the key theme across all our customer experiences, “ says Joel. “Both on the website with the unboxing experience and any subsequent emails that you get from us, and then in-store in the popups that we’re doing as well.”
7. Create brand transparency
We’re entering the era of customers taking back control of their online privacy. Between Apple’s privacy updates and shifting browser standards, the old ways of following customers across the web are becoming obsolete.
Yet, the demand for personalized shopping experiences hasn’t disappeared. Brands are building their own ecosystems of zero- and first-party data, tracking interactions via mobile apps, loyalty programs, and onsite behavior. This is placing a premium on honesty.
Today's consumer evaluates a brand’s integrity before clicking accept. They are looking for clarity on how their information is stored and used, and also how the brand manages its operations.
Girlfriend Collective leveraged brand transparency as a pillar back in 2020, long after their inception in 2016. The retailer pledged “to be a better, more equitable organization” via Instagram—a promise they followed through on.
On Girlfriend Collective’s “About” page, you can find every micro-decision that goes into their garments. It includes the breakdown of fabrics and where materials are sourced. You can also find information about their manufacturing partners, highlighting SA8000 certifications that guarantee fair living wages and safe working conditions.
8. Embrace storytelling
People are wired to love stories. Not only do they light up the sensory cortex in the brain, but researchers also found that the brain “does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life.”
Storytelling helps your ideal customer picture what it’d be like to touch and interact with your product. You’re in complete control over that experience. Describe it vividly and customers won’t want it to end, leading them toward a checkout page with a product confirmation email waiting in their inbox seconds later.
So, what kind of stories should your brand tell? The most obvious is your brand’s origin story and why it exists. Why did you see the need for this product? What problem were you trying to solve when the idea came to life? Answers to these questions build a strong brand identity and differentiate your brand from competitors. Customers buy into the story, not necessarily the product for sale.
9. Meet the moment
Time is of the essence when it comes to brand building. Consumer preferences, demands, and expectations are changing by the month. The strategies you used to reach your audience last year are unlikely to carry you through 2026.
Treat this as a time for reflection. How can you show your brand values given the current state of the world? Prove to your customers—both new and existing—that your brand is evolving alongside them.
We are moving from a world where people search for products to one where AI agents search for them. Tools like Shopify Agentic Storefronts now make your products discoverable directly within AI chats like ChatGPT and Claude.
This makes brand consistency even more important. If your brand positioning isn't clear in your data, an AI agent won't know when to recommend you.
Your brand voice has to work for humans, as always, but it should also be structured so that AI agents can accurately convey your value proposition to millions of users shopping in chat interfaces.
10. Govern your brand
In the early days of a business, brand governance happens through osmosis. When the founder is in every meeting, the voice is consistent by default.
But as you scale into enterprise territory, osmosis fails. You can’t whisper brand values down a chain of 500 employees and expect the message to arrive intact at the other end. One way to govern this is through brand guidelines that anyone touching the brand can use to do their job.
"One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced is maintaining brand consistency and a cohesive brand identity across all channels,” says David Louvet, CEO of Innovet Pet. “To address this, I’ve set up clear branding and messaging guidelines and regularly monitor and update our campaigns.”
Your guidelines are actionable and will include:
- Messaging matrix: Maps core benefits to specific customer stages so teams know exactly how to speak.
- Visual guidelines: A centralized asset library to prevent off-brand improvisation.
- UI kits: Prebuilt design components that speed up production.
The goal of these guidelines is to define a persona so distinct that your team can improvise without going off-script. If you define the character of the brand, governance becomes less about rules and more about role play. As Andy Pearson, VP of creative at Liquid Death, explains, "I realized that rather than trying to build this brand, we thought of it more like a character that just gets inserted in these different situations.
“If we were writers on a show we would just write for what that character would do in that scene,” says Andy. “And so you're not trying to figure out, like, what marketing thing we could do. We're just trying to answer the question, 'What would Liquid Death do?' And so that was like a big unlock for me that there's just a right answer."
Brand marketing: A case study
Think you’re competing in a saturated industry? Flow Hydration likely tops it. The DTC brand sells bottled water—something global consumers collectively spend $348 billion on each year.
The bottled water industry has many big players: smartwater, Aquafina, and Evian dominate shelves in convenience stores. Against all odds, Flow Hydration built an incredibly successful business. A strong brand was their secret sauce.
“The category itself is already pretty crowded,” says Krissie Millan, chief marketing officer. “And for all intents and purposes, water is a commodity. So we really needed to understand what our brand attributes are.”
They needed to answer the question: “Why do we have this product?”
Flow Hydration came up with three brand pillars they zoned in on to compete. The first: It’s a natural product. All of the minerals and alkalinity that you see in the product are all naturally occurring,” says Krissie.
“We don’t put anything in the water, and because of the source of our water, it provides its natural taste. We’ve done a lot of consumer testing, and it is the best tasting water in the world. So yay for marketing on that.
“Because of our eco-friendly packaging, sustainability is also a big part of our brand pillar,” Krissie says.
Take a look at Flow’s ecommerce website and you’ll see these elements dotted around the store. The homepage describes their “naturally alkaline” product delivered in “planet positive” packaging:
The same brand pillars flow through to their product pages. Their value propositions appear in the main product description, telling customers why they should choose Flow’s bottled water instead of a competitor’s:
Consistency is crucial to building a strong DTC brand. Flow takes the same three brand pillars—natural products, great taste, and eco-friendly packaging—and displays them across each social media platform their customers use.
This Instagram post, for example, taps into a viral meme format to position Flow as a central part of a self-care routine, sitting naturally alongside other self-care rituals like yoga, reading, and rest.
Posted on October 10, the content aligns with World Mental Health Day, helping customers feel like the brand supports their personal well-being goals rather than just selling a product.
This brand-marketing strategy means Flow “started out within the natural channel and we’re making really good strides within that space,” Krissie says. But to go mainstream, “You really have to understand how you can reach as many consumers as you want and make them aware of your brand and who you are and what you represent.”
Brand building in 2026 and beyond
Skyrocketing advertising costs and cheapest-price comparisons are unsustainable. Ecommerce brands who fail to take branding seriously risk falling behind.
Follow these steps to future-proof your brand as we head into 2026, a year of customer expectations at their highest. Prove your brand is evolving as your customers are. Reinforce your brand values and prioritize connection. That’s the secret to rising acquisition costs and watertight customer retention in 2026 and beyond.
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Branding best practices FAQ
What are branding best practices?
Start by locking down your brand’s personality and values. Know exactly who you are and who you’re talking to before you design anything. From there, build an emotional connection through storytelling because feelings drive loyalty. Keep your look and voice consistent everywhere, whether it’s an email or a package, it should feel like it came from the same place.
How do you write a brand positioning statement?
Do market research on who your customer is and the problem they can’t solve without you. Use the template “For [primary audience] who [core need or problem], [Brand Name] is the [category] that [primary benefit/outcome], because [reason to believe/proof].”
How to measure brand health on Shopify?
You want to track brand sentiment and hard numbers together. Every quarter, try running simple surveys to see if people actually recognize and trust your name.
On the data side, use Shopify Analytics to monitor loyalty metrics like new vs. returning customers and average order count. Finally, review retention KPIs such as customer lifetime value (CLV) and repeat purchase rates weekly to see how brand efforts impact revenue.
