Brand

What is Brand?

“Brand” is something that is so fundamental to your marketing and business as a whole, yet it’s actually an area that is surprisingly often overlooked. Amongst most industries, there’s more competition every day and ensuring that your brand really does have a personality is the best way to attract new and retain your current customers. 

Brand is often thought of in terms of logo, fonts and colours, and whilst this is part of what helps identify your company it certainly shouldn’t be what defines you, and won’t be what people remember. Your brand is the heart of your company. It’s what you do, why you do it, and ultimately, it’s about feelings and emotion. The brands we all have the most affinity with evoke these emotions, becoming more than just about the product.

How can I help with your brand?

Fundamentally, being the ‘heart’ of your business, what your brand stands for should come from you, but when you are engrossed in the day to day running and stresses, it’s sometimes difficult to take the step back needed. I find many business owners find it easier to give themselves the space to do this in the format of a meeting, where we can run through topics to help build an overall picture. These include the past, current and future ambition for the business, opportunities & challenges faced, key objectives and who the key target audience is. 

From here, I would compare any data you may have about your current audience (from google analytics, sales figures, enquiries, or even simply qualitative data based on staff member experience). Comparing the data not only helps to identify if you are reaching the intended audience but can also reveal other interested audiences you may not have considered. 

Having researched this, we can go on to look at the emotive, intangible areas of your brand identity, whilst being able to root thinking and ideas back to the data, and ultimately focus on the areas and approaches that will make your business more money. From here, it’s useful to set down a key vision of what the brand is and isn’t. Companies internally brand these ideas as pillars, missions statements and all sorts of other wonderful buzz phrases, but essentially you want something written ‘in stone’ that you can help base decisions around the business on. 

For instance, Amazon.com’s first key value (which they title ‘leadership principles’) is customer obsession. This is evident from everything they do, from renowned excellent customer service to a simple to navigate website & their focus on the long term relationship with customers. During the challenging time of Covid-19, they even optimised their website to lower sales whilst they were experiencing delays and difficulty with deliveries as ultimately they need to perform to customer’s expectations to maintain that long term relationship. 

Once these ‘written in stone’ values are established, areas more associated with ‘brand’ such as fonts, logos and design, as well as marketing strategy  to capitalise on opportunities can really be established, knowing that you’re marketing really says what you want, and need it to, and to the right people.