By Today, the word brand is waved around like a coloured flag on steroids. It’s used by designers to broaden the value of their visual identity design offer (logos). Marketing people use it to add a sexy element to their strategy work. Communications professionals squeeze some more juice into the importance of tone of voice, by impressing upon brand.
Are they right? Yes, to a degree they are all right. However because brand itself is such an all-encompassing concept – its important to take a step back to review your vision and direction.
Brand Strategy, for me, houses all the critical brand-led decisions, choices and principles which define how you (and your business) will approach the outside world.
With a coherent brand strategy in place, you are better placed to:
- recruit specialist resources,
- make better strategic decisions and
- take advantage of opportunities faster.
Brand is a 4D Experience
Ultimately your brand it is the sum of all the external and internal expressions of your business. How your employees, customers and the public at large perceive and experience you/your brand.
The 4D experience, as I like to describe it, is: how you are fully heard, seen and experienced by your customers/clients. The 4D-IMAX of you (if you like).
Let’s dig into the facts of what it means to truly create, build and grow a brand…
FACT 1: Clarity of Purpose and Offer
Brands who are successful and remain front of mind for their customers, are the ones who clearly distill why they exist, what they do and why people should choose them.
My advice: keep it simple, keep it clear.
This means working hard on your Brand Purpose and Brand Positioning:
A good Brand Purpose exercise will help to extract your core values (as a business owner), the values you build into your brand, what your vision is for the brand and how to tell and express your origin story. (Learn more here.)
Working on your Brand Positioning is key. This will help to give you a bigger context to who you are in the market place; how you (really) compare to the competition; and force you to articulate (very clearly) what your value proposition is. I highly suggest incorporating drafting an entrepreneur’s propositioning statement, as well as individual ones for your different categories of products. (Learn more here.)
It’s important to nail down your purpose and positioning, so that your dream customers can:
- identify you in a noisy marketplace,
- know instantly if you are the brand for them, and
- easily understand what your offer is.
FACT 2: Express your brand consistently to the outside world
Oh my gosh, this is where I think many brands let themselves down. They completely forget to exercise what they say they are…out to the real world.
They mistakenly use branding as an internal design exercise and neglect all the other moving parts to the brand experience.
How your customers/clients experience you is really the true telling picture of what your brand is. By this I mean – if you are crappy at responding to customer queries/complaints/requests – then you are not an “excellent provider of X, that supports and cares for their customers/clients.” (No matter what you think).
How do you ensure that you are walking the walk?
You identify your Brand Personality. This is a fantastic way to give you a framework to how you behave and generally communicate and serve your dream clients/customers. It defines your tone of voice and also shows you want you need to AVOID. (Learn more here.)
Put Brand Standards in place. OMG. If you do not do this, you are just mad. This saves so much time in working with outsourced providers, and ensures the much needed consistency you need across multiple mediums and channels. It stipulates how you want your brand to be used, communicated and styled.
FACT 3: Build your Brand Experience, like its the last supper
The only way you can truly be the brand you say you are – is by doing the work. I work with my brand strategy clients on what I call their Brand Experience Matrix (step aside Keanu Reeves, Shelley is here).
You basically start with the experience traits that you wholeheartedly want EVERY customer/client to feel when they work with you. Choose at max 4 to 5. Then you map these to your customer journey touch points. (When you do want them to feel/experience Trait X?)
TIP – make sure you have a balance of activities throughout the journey and not just in the ‘romancing’ phase while you are courting them to work with you.
Then, you design those activities and build them into your business system: on-boarding, support routines, delivery, retention actions, etc. Once you’re done – train your team to make it part of their lifeblood of working with you.
Only then – will your dream clients actually FEEL and EXPERIENCE what you hope they will. A wing and a prayer won’t do it – you need to do this work.
Feel like you need to work on your brand strategy? Have a look at our Brand Strategy session and if it looks like its what you need, book a Discovery Call and let’s get yours crafted now.
