You’re getting ready to start your own enterprise, but the question arises…
How do I create an original brand?
Well let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way.
To stand out in your chosen market, you’ve got to create something that’s not…
- Obvious
- Cliché
- Expected
The purpose of this article will be to walk you through the 3 initial stages to forge a unique and outstanding brand. Once you have these down, you can focus on the ‘identity’ of your brand!
Strategy
With my experience in the industry, I’d say this is the most misunderstood part of the process. Most people conflate this with business coaching, and its simply not the same.
Before you create this brand, you need to visualise and simply know what success looks like.
What’s the vision of this business? Most would simply say to make money, provide profit…
However, that mindset won’t cut it in today’s world, as the industry is saturated with it.
You need to have a driving theme behind your business.
Although to simply say, I wish to change the market/world/industry in a specific way won’t fit the bill either. You need to commit to this vision by providing realistic steps towards your goal.
Messaging
You’ve figured out why you’re building this business.
Fantastic!
Now you’ll need communication.
How are you going to get your message to the people who care about your product/service?
I like to think of this component as telling your story.
- Your values
- Your key phrases and hooks
- Your vision
- Your impact statements.
All of these and more bring about sufficient communication between you and your audience.
You can’t complete this step unless you truly know your goal, your market, and your competitors.
Behaviours
A plethora of businesses can get strategy but completely miss messaging and behaviours.
They generate a business plan and jump straight to the logo/colours of the enterprise.
Inevitably, questions begin to arise around the growing disconnection between themselves and their audience.
Even if messaging is assured…If you don’t commit to the values and vision set out in that component you won’t connect to your audience.
If you disregard behaviours and in turn the customer’s journey/the application of your brand to that experience, you’ll lose the connection between you and your target audience.
This component is simply walking the talk/practicing what you preach.
Conclusions
If all three of these stages are completed and finished, you’ll have solid grounds on which to build your ‘identity’.
This is where you really craft a brand and image that (due to your previous work) is truly original.
The same process has been used to help revolutionary brands such as Barkdays, Solo60, Lazy Environmentalists, and more!
Each one of these companies have come to us with a problem to solve and we’ve created an original brand from the process mentioned above.
What if you’re already creating or refurbishing your brand, and you find yourself wanting to measure the efficiency/potency?
This is where we come in…
With our brand confidence scorecard, you can benchmark your brand against the four components of brand confidence.
- Strategy
- Messaging
- Behaviours
- Identity
How is this achieved?
We take you through 30 yes/no questions which will take 5 minutes to complete.
At the end of those 5 minutes, we’ll provide you with an accurate, personalised score as to how well your brand functions.
You can check the scorecard here!
