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Minding Your Business's Brand - Part 2
By John Bidwell
(This is the second of three articles. The third will show how to keep your brand thriving.)
I'm not naturally a process-oriented guy. As my wife said, I would prefer to blaze my own trail, even next to a highway. It took years of questionable food concoctions and unstable furniture before finally following recipes and reading Ikea directions. In the process, or processes so to speak, I discovered liberation. I was freed from reinventing the wheel. I learned from others. Now, I am a process-oriented guy, and I want to share our branding process, learned from both the trails we have blazed and the highways experts have built.
There are five stages to building a successful brand:
1) research, 2) planning, 3) creation, 4) toolbox, and
5) evaluation. This article will deal with the first three that center on the development of the brand. The last two are more concerned with brand maintenance, and so will be explained in the next (and last) article in this series.
Brand Research
Doesn't research just tell you what you already know? Yes, it can, but it can also tell you what you don't know. It might even dispel what you think you know. My favorite reason for research is that it provides objective information that battles subjective roadblocks. Our experience is that companies end up taking their brand development more seriously than they expected. The brand is an extension of who they are and what they do, and not everybody in a company agrees on that. A branding process can become bogged down in personal opinion unless you have a way to move beyond it. Research lends credence to branding decisions, facilitates support, and keeps things moving.
Branding research relies on traditional marketing research coupled with analysis of other brands, and often a communications audit. Marketing research is used to assess perceptions and misperceptions of your brand. Its findings pinpoint the essential attributes, personality, core messaging, and positioning opportunities for your brand. Specific brand research looks at similarities and differences of other brands in your market. The audit is taking the pulse of your past and current branding, determining what has worked and what has not.
Brand Planning
Like the proverbial maple sugar shack, you want to boil down all the research findings until they are condensed and appealing. This distillation should include how to leverage your brand opportunities and core market differentiators. It should prioritize your brand attributes, your audiences, your communications venues, and your segmented messaging. It should provide a timetable for your brand launch, and address brand hierarchy, such as how sub-brands and services fit into the parent brand.
Up to this point, the ink has hit the paper, but now it is time for the rubber to hit the road. You have a plan built on the foundation of research, and it is time to turn that plan into your brand. In general, the biggest branding challenge comes from tension between what we want customers to know about us, and what they actually absorb. Understanding how the brain works can help, and we refer to that in the creation of brand components such as naming, logo, and messaging.
Brand Creation: Naming
Most companies try to make each branding component capture everything about their brand. That is why so many companies start with long, descriptive names. People, though, are natural economizers and use the shortest name possible. So long names become initialisms (IBM, RCA), which unfortunately don't say anything about a company and can easily be confused for dozens of other companies with the same initials.
You can't coerce people to use names that are not economized. Mount Holyoke College tried to have "College" be part of its name. It didn't work because it is not needed: "Mount Holyoke" is enough. Another company, Page Product Design, experimented with the forgettable PPD, before settling on "Page." Good naming practices include names that are short, easy to spell, easy to say, easy to remember, unique to your market, and are not too trendy. Page fulfills these requirements. In addition, it is important to research any coincidental positive or negative associations, cadence (how the name sounds), and foreign name considerations (PVTA, an initialism for Pioneer Valley Transit Authority, had a logo where the V looked like a U, which got lots of laughs from Spanish and Portuguese speakers).
What about name equity? Research usually shows that weak names rarely have the equity we think they do. A few years ago we worked with a Boston-based marketing network (Mavens & Moguls) to rebrand The Greater Lynn Mental Health and Retardation Association (GLMHRA), an organization that had successfully grown to over a thousand employees in forty years. They supposedly had name equity in spades; research showed otherwise. We renamed them Bridgewell, which gained almost instant recognition, and fostered pride. For the first time, employees could easily promote and speak of their organization.
Brand Creation: Logo
If your name is the primary verbal representation of your company, the logo is the primary visual representation. Like your name, the logo can't be everything, but it must capture the essence of your company or product as uniquely as possible. This doesn't rule out ubiquitous icons such as hands, globes, and heart so it just means that you need to use them in a new and memorable way.
There are four basic categories of logos: word marks (a unique rendition of a name like Coca-Cola), letterforms (an initial such as the H for Hilton), pictorial (an obvious image like the Mobil Pegasus), and abstract (the Nike swoosh). Like naming, it pays to follow good practices. These include: keeping it simple, making sure it is legible at a small size (for the web), and can work in one color (faxes and some print).
Again, it also pays to understand how the brain works. The brain perceives the shape of a logo first, followed by the color, and finally the content such as something pictorial or your name. For this reason it is helpful to mind your competition, and choose shapes and colors that differ from them (providing they are not too bizarre for your market). It is all too common for brands to mimic one another, especially in color.
Brand Creation: Messaging
Your messaging includes your tagline, descriptor, key themes, voice, and elevator pitch. Taglines are supposed to be exciting and emotional. The best way to make them memorable, without wasting time and money, is to think of them as disposable. Unlike a name with a very long shelf life, or a logo with a moderately long one, plan on a tagline to last no more than two years (though it is fine if it lives longer than that). A descriptor works like a tagline as a follow up to your logo, but in contrast a descriptor is a nuts and bolts description of what you do. What it lacks in excitement, it compensates for with clarity.
Your key themes are the three to five attributes you want everybody to know first and foremost about you or your product. For each, write one to two paragraphs that provide details. These are your messaging touchstones that you refer back to even as you tailor your advertising and communications to specific audiences. Be sensitive to voice, meaning not just what you are saying, but how you say it. Is your voice maternal or commanding, friendly or professional? Whatever it is, make sure it is true to your brand and used consistently, whether spoken or written.
An elevator pitch is a condensed version of your key themes. It is two to three sentences that an employee can deliver when asked where they work. Here, a casual voice is best and should not sound scripted. It is your most important tool in making sure employees are all talking about their work in the same-and proper-way.
The ultimate goal is to capture and express your core brand in as unique a way as possible, and in a way that sells. Foster a brand that is authentic to your company and to your customers' experiences. Done right, your audiences will see you as the only one that provides the solution to their needs.
References: Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands, by Alina Wheeler. Positioning: How to be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace, by Al Reis and Jack Trout.
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