Want a
powerful
brand?
Open your test booklets. Answer the following
8 questions. Your answers will determine how
powerful your brand will be.
Who are we?
Why are we here?
What's our point of view?
How are we different?
Who do we want to connect with?
What kind of relationship do we
want to have
with them?
What territory do we want to own?
What business are we really in?
These are the questions that most companies skip right over because they are in a hurry to get to the "important stuff." Guess what? This is the important stuff.
Branding is a competitive sport. It's your first shot at being different. Don't build a brand that makes you one of the trees in the forest and then spend the rest of your marketing budget trying to stand out.
Asking the right questions is always
in style, says
Danny Altman,
CEO & Founder.
A brand is a living breathing thing. If you really want to connect with people, your brand has to come from some place real and important. Forget about the business for a minute. It's got to make sense in human terms.
One of life's lessons is that what you say is usuallly less important than how you say it. Companies are often so focused on driving home their messages that they don't step back and see how empty and clueless it looks from the other side.
The best way to build a brand is to build it from the inside out, from a place of total belief. So much branding out there is just for show. If you want to build a brand that turns people on, then it had better turn you on, too. And the people who work for you.
A lot of people in business think branding is the soft stuff. If you're a gutsy leader, and you're not afraid of your own shadow, this is the highest leverage stuff you can tackle. Because once you figure out who you are and where you're headed, everything else will fall into place.
We believe the best way to think about your brand is to use what you already know about people. Think of your brand as a person and think about how human relationships succeed or fail. Brands succeed or fail for these same reasons.
Corporate branding is tough enough without the gimmicks, buzz words, and shake 'n' bake formulas. We go a long way on common sense, asking tough questions, and doing a lot of digging.
If you've got this stuff all figured out, take yourself out for a beer and congratulate yourself for all the money you're saving by not hiring us. But if you know what a powerful brand is and you know you could use some help, maybe you need to buy us a beer.
We think that planting ideas in people's heads is a very delicate process. If we're good at it, it's probably because we see ourselves as human beings first and marketing people second.