In case you would rather read than watch…
Hello there, my friends. I wanted to take a few minutes just to send you a quick message about branding today.
I know you probably feel like you hear about branding all of the time. But I have a bone to pick with branding and marketing and that is that branding is a terrible word for what it is that we mean when we are actually talking about branding. When you think about a brand, it’s the thing that you sear into a cow’s behind in order to say, “Yes, this is mine!”.
Is that really what we want to have happen with our businesses? I’m thinking not!
If branding isn’t about what you’re stamped with, or wrapped with, what is it?
Let’s think just a little bit about branding because if you’re in a place where you’re trying to really accelerate your business growth (and a lot of us are), one of the first things that I like to do with people is to have them kind of take a fresh look at their company and how they’re appearing, wherever they’re appearing — that might be online or it might be in person, it might even be in the experiences that they create with their customers. Branding is the whole enchilada.
How do you know if your brand is on track?
And so, when you know that your branding is right, it’s that when you look at how you show up (you particularly, as the owner; your staff’s opinion matters too, but you as the owner is most important)… if you look at how you show up, your branding should really make you feel like you are lit up inside, like one of those days when you had all wins. And you just know that you’re glowing and you are excited.
That’s how you want your branding to look.
And while you may have branding that looks beautiful, it won’t have quite the same resonance with you if it’s not also really truthful to what you stand for and how you operate.
And those energizing, vibrant emotions are the pieces that I feel are sometimes missing when branding is created to make it suit your industry and look professional or some certain way.
Branding has to evolve out of you; it can’t be something that is stamped on you.
So one of the things that I want to challenge you to do today is to start with the feelings that you have about your business and about your customers and — to the extent that you can (because I know some of you may have a little challenge with naming your emotions or naming your feelings) — try to identify the kinds of emotions and responses that you want to have yourself and you want your customers to have at each of the phases of your business – when you’re in the interaction, just getting up and started, during the course of delivering your service, and then afterward.
What’s the impact that you really want to have?
If you write down those feelings, that’s going to be step one in identifying what it is that your brand communicates, in order to be true to you and really light up you and the people that you’re going to engage.
Because the more true that you are in this brand, the more likely it is that the people, who you really want to serve, are going to be connected to you.
So that’s your task for today, list your emotions around delivering your service, list the qualities and the feelings that you really want to have — and that you want your customers to have at each of those core phases.
If you have questions, feel free to shoot me a message, or add comments onto this video.
We’d really like to have a conversation with you about it and if it’s something that you don’t want to put out there, feel free to send me a DM. Thanks again.
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