What Is A Brand?
A brand is the distinct mark of a person, place or thing as in comparison to category peers. The goal of a brand is to become synonymous with its category so that it is the brand referred to most often. However, the benefits of building a brand extend far beyond preferability.
What is branding?
Branding is the process of distilling down the ideals of the brand into specific ideas and concepts and aligning then to the desires of an audience.
When effective, branding takes the ideas of one and duplicates them in the minds of many. This mind to message clarity is incredibly helpful when it comes to leading teams and making decisions.
Why is branding important?
A branding process is essential if you want to produce effective media for marketing. Without it, your message won’t be receptive to your audience because of your cognitive bias. Individuals tend toward a subjective interpretation of reality instead of one that is objectively true. In other words, your instinct on what to share is what you think is important to talk about. That’s great if they’ve already bought into what you sell but if they haven’t your message won’t connect.
Branding helps you stop talking about things that only matter to you and start to see the world from the perspective of your audience. This is the foundation of messaging that connects, campaigns that are successful and teams singing the same song. All of these are mandatory if you want to actually achieve your goals.
However, the branding process is only a small aspect of branding. Brand building is how marketers create demand in what a company is trying to sell.
What are common challenges to building a brand?
When it comes to brand building, one of the biggest hurdles business leaders face is knowing where they are in the story of their brand. That’s because business leaders have two visions.
The promise land - the vision they are working toward.
The present tense - the vision they are living in. This vision is the product of what they had been working toward and have now arrived at.
Without a picture of the promise land it’s hard to motivate yourself.
Without the words to describe the promise land it’s hard to motivate others.
Without a process, it’s can be hard to accept the past, and therefore, agree on the future and ever move on. This can be hard with a process, but imo impossible without one.
Branding helps you clarify where you’re going and we’re you’ve been so that the picture of why others should join you is clear.
How Do I Get Started With Branding?
The only way to get to some place new is to know where you’re starting from. That’s why the first place to start with branding is with a brand audit. A brand audit is a professional analysis of where you are in the development of your brand. It covers:
What is your brand strategy and have you achieved it?
What is your brand positioning and do you need to consider brand repositioning?
Is your brand image in alignment with your brand positioning strategy?
Does your brand communication strategy support your brand strategy?
Are your brand advertising and brand marketing strategies the right fit for your brand and business goals?
The covid19 crisis has made that picture very unclear for most of us today. Because of that, just about everyone is revisiting their brand. If you can use some help auditing your brand, consider a single session with Jenn.