Building Your Brand

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Howard Lim, http://www.howstudios.com

Branding has become such a buzzword lately that it's beginning to take on almost mystical overtones. Utter the word, and you'll turn heads. Listen for it, and it will likely be spoken in hushed, almost reverential tones. Books on branding become best sellers, and branding seminars draw large crowds. But for all this emphasis on branding, how many of us really know what the term means?

Brand = Personality

Properly managed, the brand does eight things:
1. The brand stands for the organization (it has a purpose)
2. The brand embodies ethics, attitudes, and affiliations (it has a character)
3. The brand expressions create an image of the company (it has a face)
4. The brand image acquires meaning in people's minds (appearance matters)
5. The brand is as the brand does (it's an active agent)
6. The brand develops and changes over time (it's alive)
7. The brand is more emotive than logical (it's human)
8. The brand lives at the point of contact (it's the front man)

It's the face, the spirit, and the spokesman that carries the character of the organization to the world. It's a personality. If your brand was a person, who would it be?

At HOW Studios, branding means spending the time to learn how your company does business, and where, and with whom. It means learning about your products and markets—who buys what? Why? Where do they buy it? Along the way, it means developing a distinctive look for you, and a singular voice, through a service we call Authentic Branding™.

With it, you can more precisely influence the factors that have the greatest influence on your business...
- Clients/Customers: Identify, influence and modify behavior
- Talent Pool: Attract a superior work force.
- Market Share: Expand your recognition and influence.
- Media: Know it and use it better.
- Stakeholders: Enhance your position with investors, employees and customers

Since 1989, HOW Studios has been developing effective brand strategies and multidisciplinary design solutions for a roster of companies, all diverse in their lines of business, yet each sharing an upward growth path built on a singular brand image. A key component to this success has been a collaborative philosophy, and the co-creation of campaigns that are more innovative, stable and enduring than those of their competitors. HOW Studios invites you to learn more about it.

5 Key Branding Terms to Keep in Mind
- Touchpoint - any place where a business comes into contact with its customers or prospects.
- Targeting - where different products, pricing, distribution methods and promotions are developed to meet consumers varying needs and preferences.
- Segmentation - The process of dividing a market into groups of customers that have common needs and will respond similarly to a marketing action.
- Positioning statement - a sentence, or series of sentences, that define what the brand is, what makes it unique and why it is relevant to the audience.
- Value Proposition - a brand's promise to deliver an expected experience to a buyer; an answer to why a customer should buy a company's product or service.

Successful Branding: Five Key Elements and One Mantra
Successful branding begins with a well-defined brand that is RELEVANT to your market. You might think that since you have a logo, tagline, and business card, you've completed your branding. But, unless you've carefully considered and defined ALL five of the key brand elements—position, promise, personality traits, story, and association—you still have work to do. And, until you've infiltrated your brand into every level of your organization and built the discipline of CONSISTENCY into every behavior, action, or communication—both internally and externally—you are not yet on the path to a successful brand.

5 Key Brand Elements:

Brand Position
The Brand Position is the part of the brand that describes what your organization does and for whom, what your unique value is and how a customer benefits from working with you or your product/service, and what key differentiation you have from your competition. Once you've defined your brand position, make it available in 25, 50, and 100 word versions.

Brand Promise
The Brand Promise is the single most important thing that the organization promises to deliver to its customers—EVERY time. To come up with your brand promise, consider what customers, employees, and partners should expect from every interaction with you. Every business decision should be weighed against this promise to be sure that a) it fully reflects the promise, or b) at the very least it does not contradict the promise.

Brand Personality
Brand Traits illustrate what the organization wants its brand to be known for. Think about specific personality traits you want prospects, clients, employees, and partners to use to describe your organization. You should have 4-6 traits (5 is ideal), each being a single term (usually an adjective).

Brand Story
The Brand Story illustrates the organization's history, along with how the history adds value and credibility to the brand. It also usually includes a summary of your products or services.

Brand Associations
Brand Associations are the specific physical artifacts that make up the brand. This is your name, logo, colors, taglines, fonts, imagery, etc. Your brand associations must reflect your brand promise, ALL of your brand traits, and support your brand positioning statement.

One Mantra:
Once you've developed and defined a relevant brand, you must begin building the brand with employees, customers, prospects, partners, etc. through CONSISTENT execution. Repetition is key to the success of the branding process.

It's easy to falter "just this one time," because you're busy, or because you think your effort will only be used or viewed internally. Faltering, however, will make the fact that you have a good brand completely irrelevant. No one, including your employees, will ever really know or remember what your brand is, unless it is the same every time they are exposed to it. Without consistency, brand awareness becomes impossible to achieve, no matter how much money you spend on marketing. And your good brand identity—that you spent so much time defining—begins to look more schizophrenic with every falter.

To help ensure you build the habit of consistent brand execution company-wide, we recommend you document your Brand Elements in a Brand Book and provide this guideline to every employee for their own use in their daily activity. Then become your company's brand ambassador and begin the diplomatic process of self-enforcing its use!

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