Search Results: branding
Three Pillars Of Great Branding
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
There’s nothing extraordinary about the location of the vegetarian Mexican street food restaurant at the corner of a Fitzroy laneway. The tacos are good, not exceptional. The prices fair, not cheap. And yet, even on quiet Tuesday evenings, when other restaurants advertise specials to entice mid-week diners, the taco place has a steady flow of customers who come because of how being there makes them feel. The Mexican is no longer just another eatery, it’s become a beloved brand.
Good branding is a promise. Great branding is a promise that’s fulfilled in a way that creates an emotional connection with the customer. Our promises can be made with a symbol, a taste or a sound. They can be spoken or silently enacted.
Great branding:
1. Creates an expectation.
2. Delivers a meaningful experience that matches the expectation.
3. Builds an emotional connection that compels customers to want to repeat the experience.
Every brand aspires to be more than ‘just another’ in their category. We become one-of-a-kind when we stop acting like ‘just another’ and do things that don’t always scale, with a touch of humanity.
* Registration for The Story Strategy Course is now open.
Image by Sigmund
The Future Of Branding And Marketing
The great brands of the future, will be built by those who have worked hard to gain the insight that enables them to whisper “we see you” to their customers.
Shouting “notice us” just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Image by Palo.
Brand Vs. Branding
Branding is…..
“The process involved in creating a unique name and image for a product in the consumers’ mind, mainly through advertising campaigns with a consistent theme.”
—The Business Directory
Branding in the traditional sense was designed to create recognition and awareness of commodities. It was the way business persuaded customers to decide.
There’s a difference between being branded and becoming a brand. A distinction between recognition and significance.
It’s possible to shift a lot of breakfast cereal through brand recognition. But if your brand isn’t loved then it’s replaceable.
Branding might enable you to be top of mind. Top of mind isn’t the same as close to heart.
Ask Microsoft.
Image by Luke Chan.
The Purpose Of Branding
If a brand is more than just a logo, a tagline and the colour of the packaging, then what is branding?
Branding is simply turning up the volume on your mission
Branding is not something that’s arranged on the surface, like a stiffly coiffed hairstyle on a fashion model. It takes place from the inside out, so successful brands and ideas that fly are founded on a great mission, a story that we want to believe in.
Everything you do to tell that story from your brand name, to your social media interactions must amplify what you stand for, and communicate to the world why they should care that you brought this thing to life in the first place.
Branding is shorthand, not a shortcut.
Image by Stathis Stavrianos.
What Do You Want To Be Known For?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The food cart outside the gallery was in the perfect spot to attract the attention of hungry tourists. Judging by the two choices listed on the menu that’s exactly what the owner was thinking too.
Now serving
Custard Tarts
Kale Soup
Differentiation starts with the choice to do one thing well.
Hedging your bets feels safer than putting a stake in the ground.
But it’s rarely a good branding strategy.
When you stand for something, people know. What do you want to be known for?
Image by Kent Kanouse
The Number One Way To Create Brand Awareness
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
There was something peculiar about the SoHo hotel where I stayed on my recent overseas trip. I didn’t see a single child for the length of my stay. Nowhere in their marketing does the management specify their property is unsuitable for children and yet because they are uncompromising about going all the way to the edges in everything they say and do—the potential customer knows.
The best way to create brand awareness is to make a product or service that’s designed to please a particular audience and to do it without compromising. That’s easy to say and hard to do. When you have two hundred rooms to fill and bills to pay, fear sets in and is closely followed by a compromise. That compromise not only dilutes the potency of your brand, it subconsciously creates a disconnect in the mind and heart of the right customer. You can’t imagine seeing a T-bone steak on the menu at a vegan restaurant. It would never happen under any circumstances. That’s the essence of great branding—to build something that feels like it’s just for a particular kind of person. Someone who wants their choices to reflect their values and to be made to feel like an insider.
Back to the SoHo Hotel. Everything from the size and layout of the guest rooms to beautifully lit communal lounges that doubled as coworking spaces and the items on the menu was intentional. The best way to create brand awareness is to understand who your product is for and to only speak to that person. Awareness isn’t about getting the most people to try your product. It’s about making something the right people fall in love with and can’t help talking about.
What are you doing to make your insiders feel like they belong?
Image by Yann Jouanique.
How To Build A 21st Century Brand
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
Forty years ago a brand was an identifier. Branding was what we did to the outside of a product or service after it was conceived and created. Brands became tales woven to increase visibility and memorability using design, clever copy, print and TV advertising to make sure the product was known by the majority of prospective customers. This is how traditional brands like Cadbury, Coca-Cola, Visa and Hertz became top of mind and won big in the days of traditional advertising.
The following list is what branding was traditionally designed to achieve:
Objectives Of Traditional Branding
- Awareness
- Attention
- Authority
- Majority
- Average
- Profit
- Dominance
- Outside in
- Shareholder value
- Single bottom line
But this isn’t how you build a beloved brand now. Today a brand is a promise that people align with, believe and invest in and branding begins from the inside out. 21st century brands are purpose-driven. They have a reason to exist beyond making a profit, and they no longer aim to appeal to the average or everyone. Here’s what 21st century branding sets out to do:
Objectives Of Branding in the 21st Century
- Affinity
- Alliance
- Trust
- Individuals & Tribes
- Edges
- Purpose
- Relevance
- Inside out
- Customer-centric
- Triple bottom line
If the nature and function of brands have changed, then the process for developing brands and brand stories must evolve too. We’ll be on our way when we begin by prioritising the objectives on the second list. A brand story is no longer like the top coat of gloss paint applied at the last moment to make the surface shinier and more immediately attractive. It’s the undercoat that often nobody sees, but which allows the brand to endure.
Image by NASA HQ.
The 5 Building Blocks Of A Brand
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
A brand used to be an identifier, over the past seventy years it’s become so much more.
Seth’s 2009 definition says it best.
“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”
We can agree then that a brand is the meaning the customer attaches to a product or service from what she perceives. If PRODUCT + MEANING = BRAND, what creates the meaning?
5 Building blocks of a brand
1. What you (the founders and business owners) believe.
Your values, mission and vision.
2. Your voice—what you say and how you say it.
The words and tone you use to communicate your message.
3. What you do.
How you act.
4. How you make people feel.
Sometimes called user experience.
5. What you look like.
Logo, design choices, colours, seating, paper stock and on and on.
Branding is about how you facilitate the creation of meaning for your customers. The people you want to matter to need to be able to do more than recognise your brand, they need to know what it feels like to belong to it.
Image by Nina Jean.
A Brand Is More Than A Label
filed in Brand Naming, Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
We’ve been branding things from cattle, to jewellery and even people for thousands of years. We began by burning our mark into things to signal ownership. When technology and infrastructure gave us access to things beyond our villages branding began to signal a different type of belonging, one that said ‘you can trust this because it has my mark on it’.
When you think about a modern day brand like Dyson what words immediately spring to mind?
Innovative, reliable, trusted, cutting edge, best, leader and on and on.
Even if you don’t own a Dyson product or know the company’s backstory (5,000+ failed prototypes to multi-billion dollar business), you have a sense of the brand. The Dyson brand is more than just a label or an identifier of the products the company makes. It’s an emotional anchor to those products and while a label can be assigned or attached, an emotional anchor is earned.
A great brand is not a mark burned into a product, it’s something we want to belong to.
And so it goes for your brand too.
What words and emotions do you want people to associate with your brand? And what promises will you have to make and keep in order for that to happen?
Image by vanou.
5 Things Your Brand Name Must Do
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Brand naming is tough. There are so many variables to consider and the finality of saying ‘that’s it’, feels like a huge decision. Your name is probably the first encounter a potential customer will have with your business. A brand name has to stand the test of time and wear a lot of hats.
5 Things your brand name must do
1. Make the right people curious to know more about your story.
A great brand name is your opening move, your chance to hold people for a second longer and then to keep the conversation going. Does it speak to the people you hope will become your customers? People have been so curious about how the Warby Parker name came to be that the name itself has become a story. It’s been more than just a label for their products, the company name is an asset to the business.
2. Tell people something about who you are and what you stand for.
People will attach meaning in an instant. Is your company imaginative, ambitious, caring or forward thinking?
What does Apple say that Microsoft doesn’t? Your name needs to connect with people. How does yours signal your intention for your business?
3. Be easy to say, share, spell and pass along.
Err….how do you pronounce that again?
4. Be legal.
You don’t want to build your brand only to find you’ve stepped on the intellectual property toes of another company. Check trademark records, business name registers and if in doubt get the help of a lawyer who will do the checks for you.
5. Have domain name and social media username availability.
The .com debate rages on. Startups find great workarounds with .co, .cc, .io, .is domain extensions and by adding prefixes like the words ‘meet’ and ‘get’. Check social media username availability at NameChk.
This tool saves my life daily when I’m developing brand names for clients.
There is one thing your brand name shouldn’t do and that’s prevent you from starting. I’ve seen it time and time again. People get stuck trying to find the perfect name, so stuck that this holds their project up for months—sometimes forever. An idea that’s out there making an impact in the world is better than perfection.
Image by Deiby.