Many consumers today are expecting more out of companies than just providing good value in products and services. A study shows that a business’ “brand” – how it is identified and perceived by the public – is defined significantly by showing social responsibility and having a higher sense of purpose than making a profit.
Building a company that connects with people on a personal and emotional level requires “conscious branding,” which begins with a business being aware of its identity (who we are, what we stand for, and what future we would like to co-design), the ecosystem it lives in and how it can add value to the world and its people, says Julius Geis (www.juliusgeis.com), a branding expert who has created strategies for over 40 companies and is the creator of Identity Built Branding™ (IBB).
“The way we relate to brands is radically different now, and the upheaval of 2020 magnified this,” Geis says. “People want brands to be a navigator for change. They expect responsible branding and for companies to be proactive and transparent.
“Brands that only see dollar signs need to shed their rigid conceptions of business. The brands of today must be living organisms that are relationship-centric inside and outside the company. When a brand is anchored in an organic identity and moving from a place of purpose, consumers are drawn to its authenticity. It’s time to move away from brand-fakes that manipulate people. Let’s embrace branding designed to strengthen our collective connections.”
Geis offers three tips for businesses to build their brand inside and outside the company in ways that connect people and a higher purpose:
Engage in organizational self-searching. Geis says companies can determine their purpose by asking questions such as: What is the core reason we are in business? What are our non-negotiable, guiding beliefs? Where do we come from, and what are our backgrounds of experience? What do we wish for the world to become? “The understanding of a company’s collective self,” Geis says, “or its founding spirit, is the focal point for strategic development and decision-making.”
Investigate disruptive relationships. A deep analysis of relationships within the company and with the outside world, Geis says, is a fundamental part of removing the obstacles on the road to company self-identity, unity, and greater purpose. “It starts with your culture and extends to everyone your company has contact with,” Geis says. “Probe relationships, from internal employee-manager connections to the relationships between the brand and its suppliers, consumers, and communities. The problems lie where these relationships are disrupted. That points to the underlying cause and leads to ways to strengthen these relationships in a sustainable manner. But without solidifying the work culture first, connecting in a stronger, sustainable fashion with consumers can’t happen.”
Embrace truth and change. “Change happens when a company finds its true sense of self and strengthens its culture accordingly, rather than continuing randomly or aimlessly and manufacturing a false identity that will inevitably crumble under the pressure of reality,” Geis says. “When you’re operating from a place of truth, your relationships are grounded in trust and a like-mindedness that allows them to move and react to the flow of business and culture. Rigid relationships built on false premises or forced connections will always struggle to evolve.”
“Many brands have lost public trust,” Geis says. “They’ve lost their power and their way. But finding or rediscovering their purpose can connect them inside the business, which must happen in order to connect with today’s consumers that demand a world awareness. As we move towards a better understanding of our interconnected culture and economy, branding in its traditional structure and motives will disappear.”
Tim Maleeny, head of planning at Ogilvy North America, speaks at the BRITE ’11 conference about how Ogilvy has designed a template (The Big Ideal) to help build brand platforms from a combination of a company’s purpose and the relevant cultural tensions it’s suited to address. The BRITE ’11 conference on brands, innovation, and technology was hosted by the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia Business School. Learn more at http://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/globalbr…
Branding is one of the most vital parts of growing a business. It’s how you differentiate yourself from your competitors. It’s how you stand out from the crowd, and it’s what your customers feel when they think of you. It’s the promise you make to your customers, and your business’s success depends on how well you fulfill that promise.
Your brand is the exact blueprint of how you will represent yourself to your customers. It’s the manual that tells you and anyone in your company who and what your company is not only from a design standpoint but also, who your customers are, what their wants and needs are, what the voice and tone of your marketing efforts and communication will look like.
Branding is the upstream driver of everything that comes underneath a business’s marketing campaign. It drives culture, tells customers what to expect, and ultimately drives a business to succeed or fail.
We’ve all seen brands change and grow throughout the years. Logo changes, changes in marketing messages, new angles and approaches to delivering a product or service — a brand’s changes evolve and mold to fit different changes in the market. Most brands who’ve stood the test of time use these three ways to differentiate themselves and stand above their competitors.
1. Sell emotions
If you look at great brands, you’ll see trends emerge. A mentor I once sought for advice used to say, “success leaves clues,” and while there is a lot left unseen when you look at large corporations… There are many traceable and tangible variables that can be monitored and valuable information to be gleaned from them. First and foremost is that most brands sell emotions.
Coca-Cola sells happiness. So does McDonald’s. Visa sells the feeling of freedom. Toyota sells freedom, reliability, adventure. Many large brands sell you a feeling and deliver it through service or product. They deliver it through an experience.
Understand what emotions your customers are craving, and you will win your branding efforts. Oftentimes, a business’s marketing campaigns focus too much on delivery mechanisms and not the state the customer will be in once they receive the product or service.
Most customers don’t actually want the specific item, service, or product they purchase. They actually want more safety, security, happiness… or less pain, less stress, less time or effort output, and more results. Most customers’ wants and needs are simple. While attempting to stand out, entrepreneurs tend to overcomplicate things and think that because their mechanisms of delivery for their products are so different from their competitors that their customers care as much about it as they do.
This isn’t true… Ask yourself questions like;
What emotions are evoked when my customers receive my product or service?
What are the pain points that my customers are trying to solve?
What is the end-state of receiving my product or service for an extended period of time?
What are the results my product or service delivers?
Use the answers to these questions to understand what your brand or business delivers. Create a roadmap of the emotional journey your customer goes through. Then speak to each part of the journey in your marketing messages.
When people are first learning about your product or service, what are the emotions they are feeling? As they move from a cold/unaware person to a warmer and more educated lead, what emotions and thoughts do they have about your product and service?
Map the customer journey using emotions as the basis for transformation and let your marketing then speak to each segment as they move through the conditional logic that is your marketing funnel.
Consistency is the key to any branding campaign. Since branding is a promise, you make to your customers. This promise MUST be made consistently throughout your front and back-end marketing campaigns to maintain integrity.
One of the hardest things about our current entrepreneurial world is how many shiny objects fly around our purview and get us distracted. I have often found myself exploring new and deeper territories of marketing, new ways of advertising, or new ways of delivering our product or service.
It’s so easy to see a gap in the market and innately rush to try to fill it. As entrepreneurs, we capitalize on the opportunities we see in front of us. That’s the job of an entrepreneur… It’s to see room for improvement in society and then create that improvement.
When you define your brand, you create a container for your business. You figure out what fits into “the box” that defines who and what your business is and who it serves. You understand what it is that you do you and what you don’t do. When you’ve created this roadmap, it allows you the ability to say no to opportunities that will create inconsistencies in your business.
Define your brand, create a consistent message that speaks to your audience’s emotions, and make sure you continually measure any and all new possible products, services, or marketing channels against who and what your brand is. If it fits, run it. If it doesn’t, you’ll know, and saying no will be so much easier.
Branding isn’t just about messaging anymore. It’s not just about consistency either. It’s also about creating community. The best brands created communities accidentally. For instance, Costco didn’t intend to create a community with their memberships, but you know if you’re a Costco member and you’ve had a discussion with another member that you’ve likely talked about some product or service they have. Maybe you like their gas or their return policies… Maybe it’s the deals on dried mangos (that’s me). I often find myself sharing tips, tricks, or items I have found valuable there… but it’s only relevant to those that have a membership.
You’ll find that communities are created inadvertently by large brands. If you own a Toyota 4Runner, you’re a part of a club that only 4Runner owners can be in. That community of enthusiasts then created more containers for the community online through forums, Facebook groups, and other places to gather and exchange knowledge.
eBay is another great place to look at community building done through forums. If you google nearly anything about eBay, you’ll find that their forums generally dominate the SERP. In those forums, you’ll find sellers and customers collaborating to find answers to their questions.
Large brands create community by their prominence in society. Just by buying a product or service, you signal to others in the world that you are a person who “does things like that,” as Seth Godin would say.
If you buy a Tesla, you signal to the world that you’re forward-thinking. Maybe you like technology, renewable energy, or you just like fast cars? No matter what emotional reason you bought the car, fun, safety, prestige, status… or any other reason, you still signal to the world that you’re the type of person that would buy a Tesla, and you join a silent club of Tesla owners.
Great brands don’t just silently induct you into communities… Great brands create communities and places for their customers and clients to congregate, communicate and create new relationships. Look at Peloton and the gamification and ability to ride in classes with others or look to Literati, the online book club curated by celebrities and thought leaders that allows you to not only get access to the knowledge that has shaped Stephen Curry, Malala Yousafzai, and Richard Branson’s life’s, but you actually get access to a community where you can speak to other book club members and the curators themselves.
In the age of information… finding the information we actually need is sometimes like finding a needle in a haystack. We often find ourselves with answers, but because the internet is open source, it’s hard to trust that the information we get is true or exactly what we need…
When you create a community and involve celebrities and thought leaders, you do two powerful things for your customers. You allow them to relax and trust the information’s validity (compared to a forum or googling.) You’ve earned social authority with them by leveraging someone they know, like, and trust…
At the end of the day, branding is much more than marketing or a logo… Branding is exactly how your customer feels about you and your products/services and every touchpoint they’ve ever experienced from your business. It’s about providing your customers with solutions to their problems that create a change in their lives and, most importantly, in their emotional state and quality. It’s about creating a consistent place of business where they can reliably come to get their needs met. And most importantly, it’s about creating a community where they know their answers will be met with the best and most reliable information they possibly can get.
As information and technology become even more widely democratized, your business and brand will win or lose based on these three foundational factors. Can you define who you are, who you serve, and then consistently provide solutions and community? Answer yes to these three questions and your brand will inevitably grow, win more market share and become a staple in your customers’ lives.
Find clients for your service-based business! In this series, we’re covering how to launch, grow and scale your online service business. 💸💸 ***Join The Early Bird List For The Savvy Online Selling Course DROP for FREE 👉 https://kimberlyannjimenez.com/earlyb… **Catch the entire series business series: http://bit.ly/2KwtZiE 💻Get My Best Work In One Place (And 30+ Business & Marketing Courses) Inside The Business Lounge: http://jointheblounge.com Get in-depth, practical examples of today’s episode over on the blog: https://kimberlyannjimenez.com/2019/0… 📺 WATCH MORE ONLINE BUSINESS TRAINING VIDEOS: http://bit.ly/2KwtZiE ▼ GRAB THESE FREEBIES Learn How To Sell More On Your Blog Via My Brand New, Free Masterclass:
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One evening when my daughter was 12 I asked her to grab my car keys from my desk. She came back with the keys. We got in the car to drive to her piano lesson. “Mom,” she said, “I saw a resume on your desk.” “Was there something about the resume that struck you?” I asked her. “Yes!” she said. “This man says on his resume that he’s the best technical salesperson in Chicago. How could that be true? They don’t have a ranking for something like that, do they?”
“No,” I said. “That’s just how he describes himself. It’s his own designation.” “It’s so sad!” said my daughter. “Anybody could call themselves the best technical salesperson in Chicago. It seems so — childish, like a kid in my grade telling the other kids they’re the best singer or the best volleyball player in the class.”
“It is kind of sad,” I said. “The problem is that people don’t know how to brand themselves. It’s not something they teach in school.”
“So that’s why the man who sent you his resume made up a fake title for himself — the best technical salesperson in Chicago?”
“Yes,” I said. “When someone is looking for a job, they want to stand out. They aren’t sure how to do that, so they say things like ‘I’m the Best Technical Salesperson in Chicago!'”
Calling yourself the best salesperson around, the top attorney in your field, the leading digital marketer in your city or the greatest cost accountant ever to live is a very poor branding choice.
That’s why it’s included on our list of the six worst ways to brand yourself, below!
The problem with “I’m the best!”-type personal branding is that it marks you as someone who lacks the confidence to simply say “I’m a Cost Accountant, and here’s what I’ve done so far in my career.”
Praising yourself is beneath you. Let other people praise you. That’s not your job!
Here are all six of the worst possible personal-branding choices.
• Calling yourself a guru, mogul, maven or expert
• Zombie branding
• Trophies
• The best/the one/the only
• My Tasks, My Skills
• Disruptor, catalyst, change agent
Let’s break down these six regrettable branding choices.
Calling yourself a guru, mogul, maven or expert or using “praising adjectives” like Savvy, Strategic or Visionary to describe yourself is a fear-based move that will not impress anyone.
It is much stronger, more compelling and more human to simply tell your story in your LinkedIn profile and your Human-Voiced Resume.
Zombie branding uses the dull, dusty corporate-and-institutional language most of us have learned at work (whether we wanted to or not).
Here’s an example of zombie branding: “Bottom-line-focused Business Professional skilled at leading cross-functional teams, developing end-to-end solutions and adding value through game-changing strategic initiatives.”
There are lots of good reasons to avoid zombie branding. It’s impersonal and makes you sound like a zombie or a robot, not a living person. It’s generic and trite. Anyone can dish out this awful jargon.
It doesn’t tell your story at all. You are much more powerful than zombie branding makes you sound!
Some people brand themselves based on their trophies, like this:
“Ivy League grad and alum of Apple, Google and Snap.”
Now you’ve made it clear that you were able to get into an Ivy League school and that you subsequently worked for Apple, Google and Snap.
All that tells us is that these three organizations (four if we count the Ivy League college) found you acceptable for their needs.
Is that all you want us to know? Are your trophies really the most significant thing about you? I hope not!
We want to know what you came, saw and conquered at each stage of your professional life. We want to know about you, the person — not the impressive trophies in your trophy case!
Calling yourself the best, the top or the only something-or-other is an amateurish personal branding move that will not grow your flame.
A very common and unfortunate branding choice is to list all the things you can do, thereby branding yourself based on the tasks you can perform.
This is a very sad and hopeless way to describe yourself, because what’s significant about you is certainly not the list of things you’re capable of doing.
Still, we see LinkedIn profiles with branding like this every day:
Public relations, marketing, customer service, IT and office administration professional seeking new challenge.
Few organizations have a pressing need for a person to do PR, marketing, IT, customer service and office management all at the same time.
The person who brands themselves this way is telling the world “Heck, I don’t know what I want to do next! I’m throwing all my skills out there so that somebody will find at least one skill they need and hire me!”
However, that’s not how people get hired.
Your job as a job-seeker is to decide in advance what kind of Business Pain you want to solve, and to brand yourself for the specific jobs you want, not any job you could possibly perform.
The last deadly branding mistake on our list is to call yourself a Disruptor, a Change Agent or a Catalyst.
These terms are cliches and they don’t tell us anything useful about you. Rather than calling yourself a Disruptor, tell a story in your LinkedIn Summary or the Summary at the top of your Human-Voiced Resume, like this:
I’m a Product Manager whose passion is to shepherd good ideas through the development process to get products out the door on time and on budget. I led the product development team at Acme Explosives and launched six profitable new products between 2014 and 2016.
Now you have a voice, a story and a mission. You’ve shared a concrete example of what you can do, right in the Summary of your resume or LinkedIn profile.
You’re using the word “I” the way humans beings do when they talk about themselves — and haven’t been brainwashed to think that the use of the word “I” in their branding is forbidden!
You aren’t bragging or giving yourself a made-up title like Best Technical Salesperson in Chicago.
You aren’t listing the tasks you know how to perform.
You’re just telling a bit of your human story so we can understand who you are and what you do professionally.
It isn’t hard to brand yourself like the powerful human you are.
It only takes a shift in your mindset. You can start cultivating that right now!
I was a Fortune 500 HR SVP for 10 million years, but I was an opera singer before I ever heard the term HR. The higher I got in the corporate world, the more operatic the action became. I started writing about the workplace for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1997. Now I write for LinkedIn and Forbes.com and lead the worldwide Human Workplace movement to reinvent work for people. My book Reinvention Roadmap: Break the Rules to Get the Job You Want and Career You Deserve is here: amzn.to/2gK7BR7
