Back to Basics: What is Branding?
“Branding” is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot lately, but what does it really mean? Branding is sort of an umbrella term for a lot of things. It’s everything from your name, to your logo, your mission statement, your business strategy, to who your clients are, but the best and most succinct way to define it is: Your brand is how you are perceived by the rest of the world. But there’s a lot of noise and chatter out there, and humans have gotten really good at shutting out the noise. So when you’re developing your brand, you also have to shut out the noise—you need to simplify your message and make it as clear and direct as possible. When I work with clients, the first thing we do is define their ideal client by designing their ideal client.
Some questions I ask include:
1. Who is your ideal customer? Get specific! Give them a name, a job, hobbies. Where do they live – not just which city, but which neighborhood? Are they married? Do they have kids? Where do they go out to eat on Friday nights? What’s their household income? How often do you work with them – once? Twice a year? Weekly?
2. What problem does this customer have that you can solve? Again, don’t be vague. This is where we get into defining your brand message. For businesses like Walmart that are trying to attract the biggest possible customer base, this message should tap into the customer’s survival instincts. Think of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. A company like Walmart is tapping into our most basic needs: food, shelter, and clothing at prices that most people can afford – they are the base of the pyramid and everyone needs these things. For luxury brands, that survival mechanism is status! Status means powerful allies, a sense of abundance, and access to resources—the top of the food chain, if you want to really boil it down to something primitive. People instinctively want that, so don’t shy away from selling status in your messaging.
3. Why are YOU the best person to solve your customer’s problem? If your customer is Harry Potter, you are his Dumbledore. You’re the Yoda to their Luke Skywalker. You have the knowledge, experience and access to help your client survive and thrive. But it’s possible that your competitors do too. So why should they choose you? What makes you THE ONE?
If you’ve been writing down the answers to these questions, you may have pages of notes in front of you. Great! Now for the hard part: take all those notes and boil them down to one sentence. Every member on your team should know that sentence by heart and be able to repeat it, because it’s the shared goal of your entire company. It also acts as the foundation for your brand. Once you’re able to define that, you know how you want to be perceived by the rest of the world.
But perception is a funny thing. Because humans don’t just take in information one way. We see things, feel things, hear things, taste things. All of these are different ways of perceiving, so when a company is developing their brand, they need to take all of the ways they can be perceived into consideration. Branding is not just your logo, and it’s not just your company name or your Instagram account. It’s your visual identity, your voice, and how you make people feel.
Everything that starts within your business and goes out into the world should be a reflection of who you are, what you’re about, and the level of quality that you offer to your clients. And most importantly, it should be a clear and consistent message every time.
This post originally appeared on The Scout Guide - Little Rock blog.
