The BENEFITS
A company’s Brand has to be one of the most misinterpreted things in the business community. It’s often confused with having a logo, name or mark to represent your company. Branding is not your business cards or brochures. But, branding is used to determine how to phrase the message to the client and what tone to write your content. All of these things should reflect your brand, but they are not your branding. Defining the brand of a company can be one of the most helpful tools for growing your business.
Your brand is what people think about your business when they come in contact with it.
One of my favorite brands is Chic-Fil-A. Their brands screams a place that feels honored to provide healthier, great tasting food, fast and friendly. It’s like they understand the value of their customers.
Another is Zappos. They value their clients so much that they only hire people who will love working there. And if they don’t love it, they’ll pay them to quit.
Discovering your brand can help you really focus in on:
- who you want to work with (your clients)
- who you want to hire
- how you want to hire
- how you great your staff
- how your staff greets your customers
- the colors you choose for your business
- and so much more
Discovering your brand can unearth some great nuggets about your business and a wealth of opportunities. Branding may often tell you something about your business that you’ve never heard before, or that is so unique and sets you apart from your competitors. It can also show you areas that you need to improve on that you may not have known otherwise.
You can consider your brand to be the personality of your business as a whole. And just like a personality, it can’t be something it’s not. What I mean is you can’t say you are friendly if your staff is rude or doesn’t greet customers when they walk in. The customer will walk out thinking that you weren’t friendly if they didn’t already think it when they walked in.
So, if you can’t say what your brand is, how do you get people to know what it is? You define your brand then you work really hard to live it in front of your audience everywhere that you can.
If you want to work with people you enjoy working with, hire people that will like where they work, attract customers who will love you, and gain more repeat customers.
This is why Chic-Fil-A can close on Sundays and still be one of the busiest franchises in America. They always have a line around the building for lunch and dinner.
A FEW WAYS TO START
There are two questions I typically ask a client when we are discussing their brand. What is your brand? This is where they typically start telling me how innovative, fun and friendly they are. How they are so unique; trailblazers even. Or whatever other adjectives they use to describe how awesome they are.
Just as I see their eyes begin to glimmer I follow up with this reality checking question. Is that how your client's described you? You can tell if I've killed their dream by the moment of silence that typically follows. Some folks try to resuscitate it through justification or all the things they do, but if you can't answer my second question with a solid yes, then you don't know what your brand is.
In reality, your brand is not what you say it is. It's what your customers say or even believe it is.
So how do we discover what our brand is? There are several ways, but simply put, through analysis. Social media monitoring, online reviews, polls, and surveys.
Discovering your brand through analysis takes more than just looking at data, it takes a bit more work and strategy. I've not found a tool that great for automating this task just yet. This takes real human eyes.
Social Media
If you monitor twitter for each time your company is mentioned, what words are used around your company name? How often are these words used. Are they words that describe what you do or are they words that describe what they think about your company.
For example; if we were talking about a person like Steph Curry, saying he's a basketball player is talking about what he does; if I described him as a nice or arrogant person, or the best 3 point shooter in the NBA, then I'm talking more about his brand. Doing this take patience, time and organization.
Surveys
Another way to determine your company's character is to do a survey with a scale of 1 to 10. Make a list of all the words you would use to describe your organization. Take each word and fit it into a question like; "On a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being least likely and 10 being most likely) is "Your Company" "Selected Word".
Of course, you send this survey out to your existing clients or even your entire mailing list. Any word that averages under a 7 is not a word that describes your brand, anything that's a 7-10 is a good word to describe your brand, but may need some work if it's below a 9.
Polls
If you don't want to ask for too much at a time or you want to focus on improving a specific idea about your brand Polls are a great way to get a quick idea with a yes or no answer. A simple example of this is a Pole that asks something like "Is Eternal Works Friendly". It's very easy to see how much work you need to do to improve in this are based on a percentage score. If your no is higher than 50% then you know this is not a good thing. if You score above 70% you may want to focus in another area.
Reviews
This is one of the easiest ways to find out what people think of your brand. Typically they will flat out tell the whole world. Be sure to monitor your reviews often so that you can maintain higher scores and capitalize on opportunities to maintain your brand. One unanswered review could leave a bad taste for everyone who reads it.
IN CLOSING
It’s good to know what you want your brand to be. Many companies suffer from DIBD, or Dissociative brand Identity Disorder once called Multiple Brand Personality Disorder. It’s also good to know what customers think your brand is. This allows you to see how much of a gap you have to bridge.
So before you start a logo redesign or create your collateral, if you need help discovering your brand, give us a call. We have a very fun process that will help you define and analyze your brand. Then we can work together to identify ways to increase your brand recognition through strategy, design and marketing.
We can help you
- Define your brand
- Visualize your brand
- Write a brand statement
- Do a brand Analysis
- Create a brand strategy
We want your customers to walk in and out having the great experience that they expected and that was designed for them. They should have good memories of their experience with you. We design memories. Let’s makes some great memories together.
