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W hile the online space and social media have ushered in access to knowledge
previously locked away in library stacks, continuing education classes, and on
microfiche, they’ve also opened the door to scam artists and faux marketers who hock
five-figure online courses and master classes riddled with inaccuracies.
Business coaches peddle their wares while they have zero experience beyond building an
Instagram presence. I’m not knocking anyone’s hustle, but I’m questioning how factors of
luck and opportunity (in addition to hard work, of course) can translate to the
complexities of small businesses and corporations. What may have worked at a
particular point in time may not work for others without understanding the discipline of
marketing.
Then there’s the issue of access. I’m tired of seeing boldface names brag about seven-
figure sales (which isn’t net income), yet their programs are available only to a specific
segment of people who have financial resources and time. What about the people who
can’t fork over $1,500 for an email-marketing course but desperately want upward
mobility?
I have a certain level of disdain for people who have the means to give back but don’t,
especially when they dangle the content carrot that is the webinar. Rarely is real,
actionable knowledge conveyed through a free webinar. Instead, it devolves into a long,
painful advertisement for a course, e-book, master class, etc., that the guru of the
moment is selling for the low, low price of $997.
I’ve complained about this online before, but a wise friend told me that complaining
doesn’t achieve anything—action does. Hate what’s out there? Forget about the scam
artists and put out a counterpoint. Publish the knowledge and information I want people
to access.
Learning how to build a brand can easily be a quarter-long MBA course, but I’m going to
distill the essentials into a eight-part series, complete with real-life examples and tactical
exercises to get started.
I’ve spent over 20 years in marketing on both the brand and agency side. I’ve worked in
digital since 2001 and in social since 2006. My work spans industry sectors from retail
and consumer packaged goods to book publishing and health care, but my sweet spots
are beauty, publishing, media, food, finance, and luxury. Some of the brands I’ve been
privileged to work with include HarperCollins Publishers, Time Warner Cable, Mattel,
Verizon, Estée Lauder, Calvin Klein, Banana Republic, The National Board of Medical
Examiners, IHOP, DeLonghi, David Yurman, and Novartis. Over the past year, I’ve
focused on small businesses and startups principally owned and/or operated by women
and underrepresented communities. I’ve taught marketing and brand-building to artists
at USC , and I’ve been sharing content on this platform since 2014.
In short, the tools and knowledge you’ll get from this series have been implemented
successfully in big brands and scrappy startups.
. . .
L et’s start with the basics: What’s a brand? A brand is a perception or set of
associations consumers have of a business. Those perceptions originate from the
story you tell about your business, the vision, the values you hold, the products and
services you offer, and how your customers are transformed as a result of using those
products or services.
Developing a brand requires defining, articulating, and asserting your messaging and
then translating that message into channels where consumers can interact with your
business. Creating a brand requires research, brainstorming, data, insights, and a clear
vision for your business. The brand guides and drives every decision in your
organization.
What I’m saying may all sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how often people dodge
this first, critical step in favor of sexy tactics like social media, video, influencer
marketing, etc. They consider brand development an expense, a fluffy PowerPoint
presentation, when in fact it is the foundation of their marketing and messaging. It’s like
building a house with a straw roof and no floors and then wondering why it falls apart
when it storms. You have to take the time to build the roof and floors instead of going
straight for the chaise lounge, gossamer curtains, and fancy candles.
What you do
Why you do it
There’s a lot to unpack from each of these seemingly simple questions, and that
exploration is the driving force behind the visual and strategic representation of your
brand.
You can’t effectively create a visual identity system (the visual tools that an organization
uses to communicate a brand, including logo, logo use and application, typography,
color palette, imagery, design, and layout principles) without first defining the key
elemental components of your brand. I use an eight-step process to develop a brand,
which I’ll get into in a hot minute.
Not many brands publish their full brand platform online, but here’s an example to give
you a sense of the components: NC State’s brand platform.
For visual identity examples, note that some terms are interchangeable and pretty much
mean the same thing:
AT&T’s brand identity system (preview 10 pages for free before log-in)
3. Brand Expansion
Expansion grabs a megaphone and shouts your message and assets to the masses in the
form of marketing, advertising, and public relations (PR). Consider this the distribution
phase of your brand process. In the brand expression phase, you created the collateral;
in this phase, you’re distributing it in service of your business, brand goals, and
objectives.
4. Brand Authority
This is the phase where you showcase your dominance, provenance, and authority in
your particular industry. Brand authority can be an assertion of your market dominance
or disruptive difference or the critical accolades or success you’ve gained as a result of
your business’s work in your particular sector. Lawyers showcase how many cases and
settlements they’ve won on their websites. Industry leaders speak at conferences or
publish books on thought leadership to educate or elucidate other professionals in the
sector. In short, brand authority is about establishing that you know what you’re talking
about from a place of experience and success.
Brand strategy is a plan that businesses create to embed themselves in the minds of
prospects and customers. It uses the above four elements to build recognition,
sentiment, and preference. When a company is successful at brand strategy, consumers
know who they are and what they do as well as the brand’s look and feel, and they’ve
also now formed an opinion about the brand.
For the purposes of this entire tutorial, we’ll focus on brand platform development.
First, get to know your customer, because you’ll need to understand their wants, needs,
and preferences so your brand and messaging resonate and make an impact. Get to know
your market because you can define where you fit and how you stand apart. And then
ask the hard questions about your business: What you do, who you do it for, why you’re
doing it, how you’re doing it, and is it working? If you have an existing business, this is
about evaluating the efficacy of your brand and messaging to determine where you’ve
veered off the road, and for new companies, this is about being clear about what you’re
trying to build.
Your brand is not in service of you. If that’s the case, what you have is a hobby. Your
customer should be at the core of your brand because they’re ultimately going to
determine the success of your business. Without customers, there is no business because
they are your business. Your customer wants to know who you are, what you stand for,
and how you’re going to make their lives better or easier or just plain fun.
Your customer or “target audience” is a group of people whose attention you want to
attract, the group you want to cultivate a long-term relationship with. The goal is to find
them; get inside their head to understand their wants, needs, preferences, and lifestyle;
and ensure that your product or service (and how you talk about it) is relevant.
Remember, your customer isn’t the entire world. You’re going after groups, or
“segments,” of people. Otherwise, your marketing will be diluted, generic, and dull. For
example, let’s say you have a business that sells bespoke high-end suits for men online.
You wouldn’t say, “I want to target every man in the world!” Instead, you might say, I’m
interested in style-conscious affluent millennial men who work in industries that still
require suits.
You’ll attract customers on the periphery, but if you only wanted to target men, you
couldn’t create a brand or distinctive messaging that spoke to your target’s wants, needs,
and lifestyle.
Behavior: Who are they? What do they want and how do they act? What are their
habits? Are they formal in communication or do they use emojis? Are they online? If so,
what sites—social media, blogs, forums, etc.—do they visit? Go deep. Learn everything
about your customers from the magazines and TV shows they consume to when and how
often they use their smartphone.
Motivation: What prompts them to act? Why would they come to you? What
experiences have they had with products/services in your sphere? How have your
competitors served them? Consider the six C’s of consumer motivation: content, cost
reduction, choice, convenience, customization, and community.
Influences: Who do they trust? What resources do they use to search for and vet
information? What sites do they visit and rely on for objective opinions? For example,
travelers look to TripAdvisor as an authority they can trust because the site is composed
of third-party reviews from people who’ve put down money on the places they’ve visited.
And the data backs this up. According to TripAdvisor, 79 percent of users will read six-12
reviews before selecting a hotel, and 83 percent will “usually” or “always” reference
TripAdvisor reviews before booking.
Pain points: What keeps them up at night? What do they need to make their life easier
or better? When they complain, what do they complain about? Identify your customer’s
core challenges and struggles—when, how, and why they experience them.
Journey: Get a notebook and write down their complete experience before, during, and
after engaging with your product as a diary entry. Research and talking to your customer
will help with this. This also leads to a smart exercise that allows you to take baby steps
to visualize their journey: the empathy map.
Image: Felicia C. Sullivan
The empathy map is a great tool that gets you in the head of your customer, and it’s also
a preliminary step in crafting their journey. It helps you understand the following:
What do your customers know about the business you’re in and the products you
sell? Are they shopping the competition?
Okay, at this point you’re probably overwhelmed and wondering how you’ll access all
this information about your customer.
You can conduct primary research (focus groups, interviews, and observations) and/or
secondary research (industry news, third-party studies and analysis, websites and social
networks, and internal resources). Google can deliver a gold mine of secondary research
resources, and I wrote a great quick and dirty how-to on using Amazon and YouTube to
learn more about your customer.
You can also do some quick customer research on SurveyMonkey or Google Forms.
(We’ll get into segmentation in another tutorial. I’ll show you quick and dirty ways to do
it and how to get fancy if you have the resources.)
The more you know about your customer, the more effective you will be at creating a
narrative that resonates. Customers care about personalization, relevance, and context.
If you’re not speaking to them about your business in a way that relates directly to them,
they won’t care or listen.
And it doesn’t hurt to do some sleuthing on how your competitors are talking to their
customers. How, where, and how often does your competitor speak about their
business? Are they successful? Are there any gaps? Is your customer talking back, and if
so, what are they saying? What insights from this can you employ for your business?
Once you’ve done all your research, you need to talk to your customers like they’re real
people instead of segments or random data points plotted on a whiteboard. Consumers
have expectations of you, and your job is to understand what they want and how to
make that the center of their experience.
Know Your Competition
Context is crucial, and you can’t define your place and point of difference in your
industry if you’re not aware of the overall size, health, players, and trends in the
marketplace. No brand is created in a vacuum. Before you started your business, you
probably did a lot of research on the market including:
Market size and CAGR (compound annual growth rate): How big is the market, is it
growing, and at what pace?
Competitors: Who are the major and minor league players? What are their strengths
and weaknesses? How do they differ from you? What works/doesn’t work about
their products and messaging? How are they talking to their customers? Are they
doing an excellent job of it? Mainly, you want to analyze your direct competition
while also keeping an eye on adjacent competitors—those companies that hover
around your industry but don’t directly compete in it. They’re speaking to a similar
customer and they have the potential to enter your market. For example, let’s say
you’re a bank that offers lending products to its customers. An adjacent company
could be a fintech (financial technology) startup like SoFi that offers similar online
and mobile financial products and has the potential of getting into direct lending.
Product life cycle: Introduction, growth, maturity, and decline compose a brand’s
product life cycle. Where is the market right now and where do you fit? Are you
introducing a new product in a mature market? Do you dominate a niche of the
market? Are you a specialist or a generalist? The Ansoff Matrix helps you define
where you sit in the market structure and your potential for growth, which would
impact how your brand is positioned and messaged. The matrix is a strategic
planning tool that helps businesses map their growth strategy through four possible
market combinations.
Are you a market veteran? Do you have years of trust, reliability, and expertise? Are
you a new player? Are you looking to redefine the industry? Or, as the tech kids say,
“disrupt” it?
Key customer segments: This is a slight variation on the customer analysis you
performed because you’re looking at the industry writ large and understanding the
larger pool of customers instead of the segment you directly want to appeal to. Think
about Forever 21, Eileen Fisher, and Versace; they’re all apparel, but they’re
capturing different audiences based on demographics, psychographics, and affinity.
Once you determine where you fit, you’ll have a more refined understanding of your
base.
Innovation and market trends: Who’s driving change in your sector? Is your industry
prone to innovation or is it stagnant? Where do you fit in the trend spectrum? Are
you forward thinking? Are you a first-to-market or a cautious conservative? It’s
essential to keep pace with customer and industry innovation and evaluate where
your business falls on that spectrum and when/how you should adapt.
Barriers to entry, ease of exit: How easy is it to enter and leave your market? Are you
the Hotel California of brands? If your business is harder to get into, you can use that
to your advantage, like how blue ocean brands are giving their business some
breathing room.
All of this research and analysis is also important when it comes time to develop your
positioning and purpose. It forces you to consider where you sit on the industry curve
and which factors define you and make you stand out.
Remember that time when you sat in your manager’s office and they proceeded to
review your annual highlight reel—the good, the bad, and the areas that could use a
little improvement? You learned about the tools you needed in your professional toolkit
to be competitive and grow. An annual performance review gives a clear sense of how
you’re viewed and valued in your organization.
When you’re building a brand, no one is peering over your shoulder and evaluating you.
No one is objective about your unique selling points and product benefits—except your
customers. Most CEOs view success through the lens of profit, and anything that doesn’t
contribute to that profit picture is an expense. And we all know how businesses see
expenses.
Many people mistakenly view the brand-building process as a nonessential cost. You
can’t get a direct ROI (return on investment) or ROA (return on assets) from positioning
and messaging, but you also can’t make real decisions about your business if you’re on
shaky brand ground. How do you sell more products if you don’t even know how to talk
to your customer, what words to say and when and how to say them? How do you stand
out if you don’t know what makes you unique? Why should prospective customers
believe your claims and promises if you’re unclear on why they should believe? No
business can be successful without the brand fundamentals crystalized. Period.
Often, we’re caught up working in our business instead of on our business. The part of
the brand development process that forces you to be objective and honest about your
products, purpose, positioning, promise, message, and customer is critical for long-term
growth. Introspection, honesty, and self-discovery are essential, whether you’re a startup
or an established brand.
Take a deep breath and get surgical about your brand with the following three exercises.
They are an orderly way for you to evaluate your business, customer, products,
competitors, and market position—all of which are powerful when building brand
fundamentals.
I. The Essentials
Give short answers to these questions.
Goals and objectives: What is success to you? Please describe your short- and long-
term. Goals should be SMART goals and straddle qualitative and quantitative:
What metrics have you used to benchmark and measure brand health and growth?
What metrics do you feel are important for the long-term health and viability of your
business?
Revenue, number of sales, average order value, site traffic, conversion rates, social
media engagement, press/influencer coverage
Mission: Describes the purpose of your organization and how you’ll achieve that
purpose. For example, Patagonia’s mission statement is “Build the best product, cause no
unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental
crisis.”
Vision: An aspirational statement that outlines your long-term objectives and goals over
time. For example, Patagonia’s vision statement is “We’re in business to save our home
planet.”
Values and belief system: Your values and beliefs are the guiding principles—that
which matters most to you—that drive every aspect of your business. It’s your moral
compass and core and gives you and your employees a sense of purpose and direction.
For example, Patagonia’s stated values are the following: 1) Build the best product. 2)
Cause no unnecessary harm. 3) Use business to protect nature. 4) Not be bound by
convention.
What are the rational and emotional benefits of your product or service?
Do you have any existing research about your customers?
Who is your current customer? Do you have any demographic information? (For
example: age, gender, geography, education, HH1, marital status, home ownership,
device ownership/usage, etc.)
What about buyer behavior? Where, how, and when are they buying your products?
III. Product/Services
Outline your products/services: What do they do? What are their functional and
emotional benefits?
What are your primary sales channels? Do you have channel partners? Or do you sell
directly to the consumer? Direct to businesses?
How is your product different from, or better than, the competition? Do you have a
competitive edge (i.e., patents, research, distribution, supplier advantage, IP, resources,
experience, product innovation, etc.)?
What results are you promising? What outcomes will your customers experience if they
use your product or service?
Why you? What makes you an authority on the products/services you sell? Why should
consumers trust you versus the guy down the street?
What are you most passionate about when it comes to your brand and business? What
change do you want to evoke or create in the industry you’re in?
What are you good at? What’s your brand’s core genius?
What makes you different from the pack? Do you have any advantages that make you
stand out? Specific areas of expertise? Specific methodologies, i.e., ways of doing things
that differ from your competition?
What are you offering in your business? What are your services? Be as detailed as
possible. Write this as if a client has contacted you and asked what you offer.
Why did you start your business? What was missing in your industry? What gap are you
trying to fill?
What problems are you trying to solve for in your business? What solutions do you hope
to provide?
What’s your client’s biggest problem? What do they need you for?
Framing your elevator statement is easy when you use the be/do/have technique:
Being: This is your “why.” What characteristics do you bring to your business?
Having: This is the outcome your client will experience as a result of working with
you.
For example, a millennial legacy planning and coaching company created this elevator:
Do: At Company A, we arm the next generation of ambitious and intentional female
wealth owners with the tools, resources, and frameworks they need to transform
their family’s financial success to personal and societal significance.
You meet someone at a party. You hate parties because people and apparent feelings of
awkwardness and psychological despair. (Oh. Is that just me? Okay.) You make small
talk and then you exchange the superficial, “So, what do you do?”
You wouldn’t blurt out a manual or copy from a sales funnel page, right? No, you’d tell
them about the business you created and why you did it. Maybe you’d talk about your
vision and mission. Not everyone’s in it for the money, and perhaps you want to leave
your mark on the world in a particular way. What bolts you out of bed and keeps you up
at night? What struggles are you discovering along the way?
You tell this story in your own words and voice; it’s unique because it’s from you. You
might speak super fast and become animated when you get excited, or maybe you’re
thoughtful, measured, and speak from a place of experience and perspective. But there’s
a story you want to tell, and it comes from inside you.
We understand others not by thinking, but by feeling. We feel first, think second.
Scientifically, we home in on “mirror neurons”—creating words that simulate your
customers’ actions and the thoughts and feelings behind their actions. They feel like
you’re talking to them, about them.
Cortex activity: When processing facts, two areas of the brain are activated (Broca’s
and Wernicke’s area). A powerful story can engage other areas, including the motor
cortex, sensory and frontal cortex.
Neural coupling: A story taps into parts of the brain that allow listeners to transform
the story they hear into their own experience.
Mirror neurons: Listeners will experience activities similar not only to each other but
also to the speaker/storyteller.
A good story is made from a few key ingredients. First, authenticity is important. A real
story is more powerful than you think. We forge connections with people who proudly
wear their vulnerability. Real stories attract the people you want to serve and empower
you to communicate with them. Serendipity is how your business launched as a result of
a coincidence, an accident, or simply the lucky stars. Specificity adds value. Use specific
images, words, and cultural signifiers that your customer relates to and understands.
The signature story and elevator statement drive your brand story in the way you
combine the emotional with the practical. Your story highlights your values and belief
system as well as what you do, why you do it, why clients should trust you, and how they
ultimately benefit. All of this is key to forming your positioning statement as it zeros in
on what makes you a special snowflake. And it’s so important to center your customer
because you’re creating a brand in hopes that it will attract the people you want to serve.
The point of the signature story is to make your story their story. The signature story is
about you understanding their challenges and coming up with a solution. Most brands
fail because they only talk about themselves. Customers are selfish—they want to know
why they should care and why you matter to them. It’s a nuance in messaging, but an
important one. Browse website homepages. Within 15 seconds (or less!), can you gauge
how you directly benefit from a product or service, or have you just read a paragraph
about the company? It’s the difference between these two statements:
The second story is a bio that centers the person behind the business instead of the
customer. You can (and absolutely should) have this kind of bio, but it should be the
antecedent to the customer. You (the business owner) serve as the back-up dancer for
your customer, Beyoncé.
To make story magic happen, you need to inspire your customers’ imagination. Identify
their problems and solve them. Make them sit up and pay attention. Give them
something they didn’t expect — especially since everyone else’s offering is mass-market.
Associate your brand with your fresh take. Project that freshness, imagination, and
intrigue onto you.
Humans aren’t necessarily attracted to the allure of the new, as much as we like to see things
we’re already familiar with in a new way.
You create positioning through the target, category, benefit, and evidence:
To (target): Start by addressing the audience you’re serving directly. Specificity is
key. For example, you wouldn’t refer to all millennials in your positioning, but might
be focused on African-American millennial women.
Your brand is the (category): In which industry do you operate? Your category or
market gives you a point of reference that helps define the space in the marketplace
where you compete.
That is the (benefit): Define the promise you’re making to your audience. What are
the main benefits you’re delivering?
That’s because (evidence): Why should your customers believe you? What support
points, evidence, and claims can you use to back up the benefits?
Your positioning is driven by your market, customer, and brand insights, and it speaks
directly to your customer with clarity and confidence. Consider the following questions
when crafting your positioning:
Does it set your brand apart in a way that puts people on pause?
Can you own it? Is this statement exclusive to you or could it be reflective of every
shop on the block?
Example: Amazon used this positioning statement back when it almost exclusively sold
books: “For World Wide Web users who enjoy books, Amazon.com is a retail bookseller
that provides instant access to over 1.1 million books. Unlike traditional book retailers,
Amazon.com provides a combination of extraordinary convenience, low prices, and
comprehensive selection.”
Brand Purpose
The purpose is the business’s reason for being, not selling. It’s human and puts the
consumer at the center of the brand. The most successful brands build their positioning
into their purpose—shifting from, Where do I stand? to What do I believe? What are my
values? What are my vision and mission? Why did I start this business? What keeps me
going? What sustains it?
So you’ve finished the industry and customer research part of your work. Now, it’s
showtime. Sometimes even big brands aren’t able to succinctly or articulate what makes
them distinct. The next few exercises will help you when establishing your positioning
and purpose.
Example: Target does an excellent job at articulating its brand purpose, as does
Patagonia.
1. _______________
2. _______________
3. _______________
Rational benefits relate to the specific performance of the product or service, i.e., what
the product does and how it performs to expectations. For example, a Dyson upright
vacuum purports to offer superior suction compared to other vacuums on the market,
with the lowest maintenance (i.e., no bags, no filters to clean).
Emotional benefits relate to how your product or service makes customers feel. What
results or outcomes do they experience as a result of using your product? Let’s stick with
the Dyson vacuum. Superior suction and low maintenance mean you save time and feel
content that you have a tidier home.
The reason to believe (RTB) is, simply put, why your customer should believe you. What
makes your claims and promises credible and trustworthy? Your RTB could be anything
from your experience in the field, proven results and testimonials, products backed by
extension research or science, etc. Your customer is skeptical because they’ve heard the
promises before. Their clarion call is: Prove it to me.
Claim your words, vibe, visual aesthetic, lingua franca—this is your first mighty step in
your content and channel strategy. How do you want your customers to perceive you?
What adjectives would they use to describe you?
Brand Personality
Personality in this case refers to the human characteristics, emotions, and attributes
embodied by a brand. It’s a brand made human by the Dr. Frankenstein of marketing
departments, although far less nefarious. Your personality is how you show up and act in
front of your customers. Your personality is composed of your tone of voice—all the
elements that make an individual unique and establish their identity.
For example, do you speak fast or with a drawl? Are you loud and bombastic or quiet and
reserved? Do you speak in long, ornate sentences or are you punchy and to-the-point?
Do you use emojis? Do you use industry jargon or plain English? Are you cashing in on
all your 50-cent words or are you keeping it simple?
Examples of your voice in practice: Give examples of what would be “on brand” and
“off brand.”
Dos/Don’ts.
Brand as individual; create a mood board of your brand as if it were a real person.
Strengths: What are you good at? What unique skill sets do you have that put you at an
advantage? What do others (e.g., customers, partners, vendors, competition, etc.) think
you’re good at?
Weaknesses: What are your weaknesses? How do your competitors have an edge? What
do others perceive as your vulnerabilities?
Each step builds and expands upon itself. You started at a simple place of talking about
your product and evolved into a sophisticated matrix that predicates what you say,
where, how, and when you say it. Your message becomes expansive and specific,
knowing that the messages you use in product copy will be different from an Instagram
Story.
. . .
B uilding a brand takes work. It’s a marriage between your passion and experience
and a world of data available for the taking. At the end of the day, You’re creating
your own personal Frankenstein—something that is so close to being a person in the
flesh. And if making a brand was as easy as buying fancy fonts and getting someone on
Upwork to create your logo, we wouldn’t see so much convoluted mess in the
marketplace.
Getting your business off the ground requires you to be scrappy, agile, and surgical about
your costs, but this is the one investment in your business that will save you in the long
run. Don’t sidestep the brand development process in favor of other investments
because, without this process, when it comes time to go to market, you may not be clear
on what it is your selling, why your customers need it, and why you should be their first
choice.
. . .