Seven Secrets of Remarkable Brands: They Begin Inside
How Brand Clarity Will Change Everything for Your Business
I love a new year, don’t you? It’s a blank page to approach with optimism, joy and a determination to make it the best year yet!
As we begin this new year, you will be seeing all kinds of support from me—blog posts, courses, informational products, trend reports and the latest in market research—that will help you make 2020 your best year ever.
How can this opportunity for a fresh approach help you and your brand?
Well, here’s the thing: Once you get to a certain level in your company, a plateau is inevitable. It’s normal to feel like your growth has stalled or your market position has slipped. When this happens, the best thing you can do is NOT PANIC and then look inside your company for the solution to kickstart it again.
Revisiting your company’s culture, values, mission and overall brand identity is a surefire way to create a breakthrough in your business.
Who are you as a brand?
The stepping stone for all of this lies in one concept: brand clarity.
Defining your brand—who are we? What do we stand for? What do we want our customer experience to be?—is absolutely essential not only to building a brand that will stand out in a noisy marketplace but also to creating a brand that will keep your target audience coming back again and again.
All of this starts with YOU. After all, if you don’t know who you are and what you stand for as a company, how will your audience?
This powerful brand strategy has two components to it:
First, you have to know what you stand for as a brand. This includes thinking through and clearly defining your brand’s mission, vision, values, tone, brand story and identity. When a customer interacts with your brand, what is the thing that is going to effectively engage them and make them loyal to the products and services you provide?
Being clear about this requires defining, articulating and declaring your brand and then translating that into places, both online and off, where your audience engages with your business.
All the fancy marketing strategies in the world can’t work if you aren’t super clear about what you are as a brand. If you can’t clearly define it for yourself, your audience never will.
Second, you have to communicate your brand clearly, consistently and cohesively. Everything from your press releases, social media interactions, blogs and all other forms of content marketing and business development activities—both online and off—must clearly be articulated to your audience.
Building your brand’s platform and creating credibility in the eyes of your audience is an ongoing process, not a quick sprint to the finish line. However, if your brand messaging is clear every time, you absolutely will increase the number of people you funnel into your potential client network.
Converting the people you have attracted into loyal clients, fans or connections may take weeks, months or years. However, the payoff is huge. This new mindset of knowing your brand’s identity in and out will lead you to strategies that will keep your client pipeline full.
In short, you need to start and maintain a lot of small fires to keep your brand burning hot.
The Boost Your Brand Needs
A brand platform also can help your company create new opportunities to reinterpret its brand to fit a new future.
For example, a beauty brand found itself in a plateau a few years ago and enlisted me to help recraft its brand platform. Together, we looked at and clarified its mission, value proposition, reasons to believe in the brand, and new personas that would help them grow rapidly. Those refined brand elements now live in a manifesto that clients see when they first walk into its salons, and it’s found in all sales programs and all of the brand marketing developed from that point on.
The result? Well, this brand just celebrated its 100th location. In the photos of this major milestone celebration, you can see the manifesto we developed together in the background, a visual reminder of what a strong brand strategy like looking within for clarity can do for your business.
Brand clarity can help with things that used to be trouble spots without it. This could include product design, service line selection, retail layout, customer service policies, promotions and everything else that a company does.
After all, a successful brand isn’t just what you say it is—it’s what you do.
The Power Within
Glinda the Good Witch of the North once told her pal Dorothy that the power was always within her to get where she wanted to go. To get your brand where you want it to be, to maintain or improve your brand positioning, you also have the power within—and it begins with clarifying what your brand is and what your brand does.
Sometimes finding that power could use some outside help, a look inside your company from an outside perspective. That’s where I come in.
It is my passion to help small businesses reassess and clarify their brand to find the joy that entrepreneurship can bring to life. From helping build a comprehensive brand strategy to just tweaking and refining what you already have in place, I can help you get out of that plateau and start looking inward.
