A well thought out brand can add significant value to your product and business as a whole by attracting customers and retaining them. The purpose of a brand is to create recognition, desire, and trust, and there are two key factors to doing this well: authenticity and consistency.
In general, branding is thought of as your business name, tagline, logo, and visual identity. Your visual identity includes all the elements that help customers recognise your brand: colours, typography, product photography, and packaging. Visual consistency is really important here.
But your brand is actually more than that. It’s the entire experience you offer your customer, including your product, service, response time, the language you use, how you tell your story, and the way you present yourself. It is the personality of your business – its voice, values, and vision. That’s where the authenticity of your brand comes through – as well as being visually consistent, you need each part of that experience to strike a consistent note and ring true for your customer.
So, if we think of your brand as a tree, your logo and visual identity are the parts above ground: the shape of the tree, its branches and leaves, flowers, and fruit.
For those parts on the surface to perform, you need good healthy roots and nourishment below the surface supporting them.
Out of sight are the less tangible aspects of your brand – the vision, values, and purpose that not only help to define your brand, but provide a useful framework for making any decision about your business. These are the reasons that you do what you do, the way that you do it. It’s totally possible to run a business without consciously defining these things, but defining and understanding them can be hugely beneficial and rewarding. The richer the nourishment, the stronger the roots, the healthier the tree.
In large companies, defining the vision, purpose, mission, and values is a useful way to keep everyone on the same page, but they’re equally important for small businesses and sole operators to find meaning, direction, and focus.
Each of these could be a single, succinct sentence, and in the case of your values, it might even be just three simple words.
Vision
What you ultimately want to achieve with your business – your long-term goal (5–10 years from now), your destination, what success looks like to you. Your vision can change over time. It’s not the ‘how’ or the ‘why’, but the ‘what’.
Purpose
This is your reason for doing what you do, the thing that motivates and inspires you. It’s the reason your business exists, beyond making money. This is your ‘why’.
Mission
This is how you’re going to achieve your vision. It’s the road map. It’s what you’re going to do to get to where you want to be. It’s your ‘how’.
Values
These are your guiding principles and the beliefs that underpin and define how you approach all of the above. Your values determine what you stand for and how you behave.
Exercise Identify your values, and assess how well your brand aligns with them and whether there are areas that you need to align more closely. Download the PDF »
Drawing on this nutritious mix are the roots that connect your underlying purpose and values to what the customer sees above ground. These are methods you can use to ensure that there’s consistency between what you are offering and what you’re portraying with your visual identity and language.
Positioning
Positioning is defining where your brand and product fall in the market, informing your decisions about how to portray your business. It’s an exercise in assessing your offering against the other options your customer has to fulfill the same need, and understanding how they might perceive your brand in comparison to others.
You can highlight different aspects of your brand and product to position it in relation to your competition, such as price, quality, functionality, availability, or presentation.
Your brand should align with wherever your product fits in the market. For example, if your product and prices are premium, but the rest of your brand looks cheap, your sales will suffer. Conversely, if you have a super expensive looking brand for a lower quality product or commodity item, you will have perpetually disappointed customers.
Exercise Assess where your brand lies in the market, and how your customers might perceive it in comparison to their other options. Download the PDF »
Personality, voice, and tone
Your brand personality is a set of human characteristics that can help you differentiate your brand and build a connection with your customer. Consistent personality traits and behaviour are reassuring – when we know what to expect and those expectations are consistently met, we feel comfortable and confident.
Defining your brand personality and ensuring that everything you do aligns with that, from your visual identity to your customer service, is how you build trust and reputation.
Exercise What personality should you portray to best promote your products? How well does your brand convey that personality? Download the PDF »
Whether you develop a visual identity yourself or work with a graphic designer, completing these exercises gives you a great foundation for developing a brand that communicates and accentuates the qualities of your business. The steps are simple, but deep, and this work can be the difference between a superficial brand and one that really resonates with your customer.
It can be useful to go through these steps both on your own, and also run through them with a friend or mentor, to get some external perspective.
In all of these areas, honesty and authenticity is key. By having these parts defined and compatible with each other, you create consistency and substance within your brand which in turn conveys your authenticity. And that’s the secret to creating trust and connection with your customers.
