A lot of people seem to believe that a brand is about advertising. That it is merely corporate identity, the name, and the logo, the colours used.
So here is what after 19 years of marketing I uses a definition for my start-up and my marketing students.
- Its starts with the founder(s) vision,
- It shifts according to the team they have built and their values plus behaviour
- Its is limited by the technology used
- Its expressed and reflected in the product built
- And finally it is decided on by users and their experience both with the product and customer/support team
Whilst it starts with the founder(s) it is decided and defined by your users.
I believe good strategy and brand can support each other. It’s not about spending lots of money on an icon, name or colours. It is about the sum expression of what you are already doing.
For me a good strategy and brand go together through having a vision, mission and values. These will evolve but they will help guide your decisions – what space am I in (Vision – some call this Brand promise), How will I change it (mission) and how will I make decisions (Values).
Here is ours http://www.professionalyou.com/vision.html once we had done this, it was easy to develop a corporate identity as our prime value is Growth, hence the tree and colours. This value set has/is helping me make a large number of decisions about what we are and what we are NOT.
Once I wrote the vision, mission and values name came to me i.e. Professional You. Not in a sudden flash admittedly. Personally I prefer names that are concrete and that mean something. If you take no time I believe it shows your users that you do not care, that you are only temporally, why should they invest in you if you can not get the basics right. Sometimes sharing this journey (of choosing your name) can also be powerful when users want to know who you are.
It is both my strategy and brand; my pitches are cleaner for it, my messages cleaner and my decisions easier. People tend to trust clarity, if you are clear people find it an easier journey to trust you, branding can help you with this.
So far I have spent nothing on advertising, on creative agencies and a local (Vancouver) designer helped with the logo for free.
Occasionally I tweak the vision and mission as I form better ways to describe what we are up to.
It will continuing evolve but in the end users decide, so do not forget the importance of your customer/user facing staff if they are happy your customers are more likely to be also 🙂
P.S. Do tell your users who you are and what you are about. It is always disappointing if you go to the About Us on a web page, to see that you don’t care to make an effort or even bother to introduce yourselves and its not polite 😉
Eric Brooke's Blog 