Chapter 3

Gearing Up to Brand or Build a Better Brand

In This Chapter

Determining what you want your brand to accomplish

Evaluating your existing brand identity and assets

Incorporating branding into your business plan

Assembling and leading your branding team

Brands are indelible. When they’re seared into customers’ minds, they’re long lasting and durable. That’s why this chapter is so important. It walks you through the steps of figuring out what you want your branding program to accomplish, what kind of brand identity you’re seeking, and what reaching the branding success you seek will take.

If you don’t have a brand — if you’re starting a business or launching a new product — this chapter can help you plan your brand from scratch so you get your brand identity, image, and strategy spot-on from the get-go.

If you already have a brand — if people already know your name and have impressions about what you stand for — use the information in this chapter as you assess whether your current brand image accurately reflects who you are and adequately appeals to marketplace tastes and trends. If not, you have two choices: You can bring your brand into alignment, following all the advice in Chapter 16. Or, you can take what we call a branding mulligan and work to rebrand your business — making the rare and drastic decision to throw out all the vestiges and value of your current brand and starting from scratch to build a new brand following every step in this book.

You Are Here: Marking Your Brand-Development Starting Point

Whether you’re launching a new brand or refining an existing brand, you have to start by figuring out what people think when they hear your name or think about the industry or business arena you’re entering. When you’re clear about how people currently perceive your identity, you have the information necessary to understand the brand assets you have to build upon, the misperceptions you want to overcome, and the brand identity, in your dreams, you want to achieve.

Getting real about your brand identity

The best starting point for brand development is a true and candid look at what people currently think of your brand and offerings in the marketplace.

If you’re starting a business and don’t yet have a brand to analyze, instead assess the image of the business arena you’re entering. For instance, if you’re starting a children’s museum, think about the mental images people have about museums in general and children’s museums in particular. When you know the preconceived notions you’re dealing with, you’re in a good position to develop a strategy that leads to a brand image that fills a unique position (there’s way more on positioning in Chapter 5) and reflects the distinct attributes and differentiating aspects of the brand you’re establishing.

The point of your brand assessment is to determine answers to the following questions:

• What do people like or dislike about you, your business, or your business arena?
• What do they trust or distrust?
• Who do they think you are and what do they think you do?
• Why do they choose you or your offering?
• How do they think you compare with your competitors?
• How do they think you affect their lives for better or worse? Do they find your offering relevant and a good fit with their lives and needs?

To arrive at your answers, first conduct a self-assessment and then reach out to learn the opinions of others.

Self-assessing your brand image

Don’t rely solely on your own judgments or those of your top management team as you aim to get a clear idea of your brand image. Include the opinions of those who work on the front line of your business and the people who answer incoming calls, take product orders, field complaints, and fix service problems. Ask the following questions:

• How would you quickly describe your brand as the elevator doors are closing? If you have only seconds, what would you say you do, and what makes you different and better?
• What brand promise do you always try to keep?
• What five key messages can you boldly declare about your brand?
• Who are your customers and what do they care about?
• Who are your top competitors and what are their distinct differences from you and your offerings? What one thing makes you better?
• What five words best describe your brand? For example, cool, innovative, irreverent, hip, serious, friendly, elegant, fast, youthful, sophisticated, gourmet; the list goes on and on.
• Which major brands are closest to your brand style? Assemble logos of international, national, regional, and local brands in your category. Let people choose which they think are closest to your brand personality and promise.
• If your brand were a car, what would it be and why?
• If your brand were a celebrity, who would it be and why?
• What phrase tells the people you serve who you are and what you stand for? Chapter 7 includes information on developing taglines, but for now just dive in and quickly take a crack at summarizing the benefits of your brand in a few words.
• If you absolutely had to be the person who comes up with a symbol to represent your brand, what would that symbol look like? Quickly sketch an idea for your logo.

Seeing your brand through the eyes of others

Start by opening a search engine and entering your name and the name of your business. See what others see when they look you up, including whether or not you dominate the first screen of results and whether links lead to information consistent with the image you want to project. The section on ego-surfing in Chapter 10 gives tips to follow.

Then talk with customers or prospective customers. If your customer base is large or geographically far-flung, pose the questions through surveys. Turn to Chapter 5 for advice on how to conduct customer research and when to call in professional assistance.

The following questions help you collect information without making you or those you’re interviewing feel self-conscious about their answers. If you’re developing a personal brand, adjust the questions to address your personal qualities:

• In a sentence, how would you describe our business? What simple idea captures the essence of what we stand for?
• How would you describe our products or services?
• What one reason, above all others, causes you and others to buy from our business?
• When you consider buying from our business, what three other companies or brands do you also consider?
• What one reason, above all others, do you think causes people to buy from one of our competitors?
• Would you say there is high or low awareness of our brand in the marketplace?
• Do you see clear and distinct differences between our offerings and those of our competitors? If so, what are a few of the distinct differences that make our offerings unique or more desirable?
• If you were to compare our brand to a car, what car would it be and why? What car would you associate with each of our three top competitors?
• If you were to compare our brand to a celebrity, who would it be and why? Who would you associate with each of our three top competitors?

Compare how your brand is perceived within and outside your organization. By understanding where there are perception gaps, you’ll have the information you need to develop a branding program that aligns your desired brand image with the image in your marketplace and consumer minds.

Knowing and protecting brand assets

Before planning adjustments to your brand image, get clear about what contributes to the value of the brand you currently own.

For a well-known example, consider the brand assets of Coca-Cola: the red packaging, the Coca-Cola script, the bottle shape, the name, the formula. Coca-Cola can evolve any one of those brand assets to fit emerging cultural attitudes and tastes, and so long as consumers feel that the brand assets they love remain intact, the changes only increase brand value by enhancing relevance to changing marketplace tastes and trends. Witness how the name Coca-Cola became Coke in marketing campaigns.

What brands can’t do, without diminishing value, is to take beloved assets away. Were you around when Coke triggered consumer backlash by daring to fiddle with its formula? Or do you remember when Gap unveiled a “sexy and cool” new logo that was so reviled on social media that the design was pulled within a week of its preview?

Use the worksheet in Figure 3-1 as you assess the strength of each of your brand assets, based on your own opinions and on the opinions you collect from those in your company and customer base. Chapter 16 has advice for turning to professional researchers for help if you’re realigning a widely known brand that will have significant range and value in the future.

After you decide which elements of your brand have significant value, you’ll know which assets that you should protect or evolve and which assets have little recognition or regard and can go by the wayside with little or no loss of brand strength or value.

In your dreams! Defining what you want out of branding

Branding isn’t a game of leapfrog. You can’t ask people to jump past what they currently believe and immediately land on a new perception about what you stand for. You have to nudge their beliefs in a new direction by building on the images they currently hold and helping them to adopt new beliefs about you and your offering.

Use the chart in Figure 3-2 to assess how well your brand currently fares in each major brand capability: Awareness, emotional connection, distinction, credibility and trust, and purchase motivation. Use the right-hand column to rank which capabilities most need strengthening in order to reach your near-term branding goals. For example, if you’re launching a new brand, developing awareness will be a top priority. Your responses will help you determine the priority you should place on revitalizing or enhancing perceptions of each attribute in your branding strategy.

Prioritizing Your Branding Goals

To build a brand or fine-tune the brand you have, you first need to know where you want to arrive. Which of the following brand functions best describe what you aim to achieve through branding?

• Build awareness
• Create an emotional connection
• Convey distinguishing attributes
• Gain credibility and trust
• Achieve buyer preference

Some brand builders, especially those representing big, hugely funded companies or top-tier celebrities, aim above all else to establish and entrench top-of-mind awareness to ensure that the spotlight in their category shines brightly and fully in their brand’s direction. Others want to forge or deepen emotional connections with customers, to differentiate their products from competing offers, or to develop the kind of preference and motivation that prompts purchase decisions and makes cash registers ring. Some brand builders want their brands to do all of the above.

Use the worksheet in Figure 3-2 as you set your branding goals. It lists the five key brand functions, which we describe further in the upcoming sections, and provides space to rate your brand’s strength in each area before prioritizing the functions you want to enhance through your branding strategy.

Build awareness

Brands large and small put awareness building at the top of the branding to-do list for these reasons:

• Awareness leads to marketplace dominance. The most powerful brands owned by the biggest companies and celebrities hold their competitive positions based largely on how widely they’re known and noticed. That’s why marketers with the biggest brand names constantly reinforce their images through advertising, promotions, publicity, and ever-expanding social-media followings. They know that in order to maintain market dominance, they must continuously broaden brand awareness and notice.
• Awareness makes selling easier. Marketers who aren’t branded with names like Nike or Beyoncé still need to build awareness, not to become the best-known brands in their marketing worlds but to build sales, pure and simple. Without brand awareness, you spend the lion’s share of every ad, presentation, or sales call introducing your business and explaining why it’s better than the alternatives. With established brand awareness, you can spend that time advancing information that moves the customer to a purchase decision.

Brand awareness acts like a proxy for your business. When you can’t be somewhere in person, brand awareness stands in your stead, winning attention and conveying your core message and promise on your behalf.

Create an emotional connection

Not all brands rely on emotional connections. Some brands succeed based on their high levels of credibility or on their abilities to distinguish themselves based on unique benefits that customers can’t get from competing companies. They win based on factual comparisons. They appeal to what people think; they involve decisions of the mind. Brands that rely on emotional connections appeal to what people feel; they involve decisions of the heart.

Consider the last time you bought dish soap. You looked at the array of bottles, glanced at the prices, saw that a soap brand you’d heard of was competitively priced, and made your selection. Your decision was a rational one. You weren’t looking for a happy marriage between you and the dish soap — you just wanted to know you were choosing a good product for a decent price. Emotions didn’t come into play. On the other hand, think of what you went through the last time you bought a car; gave to a charity; helped your son or daughter select a university to attend; or decided on a new home, or even expensive sunglasses. Suddenly, your emotions came into play. In addition to function, you weighed whether or not your choice would feel good — whether it would instill confidence, pride, or even a coolness factor. Your emotions steered you toward your choice more than your mind did.

In setting your branding strategy, make emotional connection a top objective if any of the following apply:

• Your product is selected for the sense of satisfaction or security it delivers, the self-image it enhances, or the experience it provides — as much or more than for its factual attributes.
• Your product involves a major financial investment or contributes to the customer’s ego or lifestyle. Not all high-priced items involve emotional connection (root canal, anyone?) but many do, including those that affect how buyers feel about themselves and how they appear to others.
• Customer loyalty is essential to your success. Face it, people stick with brands they love — and love, above all others, is a strong emotion.

Differentiate your product

If you’re not 100 percent sure of how you stand apart from the competitive pack — or if your customers don’t appear to find the distinction clear, meaningful, or motivating — then product differentiation needs to move up on the list of what you want to accomplish through your branding strategy.

Product differentiation is particularly important if you’re facing any of these marketing challenges:

• Customers fail to see your offering as unique and distinctly beneficial.
• Your market environment is crowded with similar offerings.
• To win sales in your competitive environment, you frequently revert to a reliance on low pricing or discounting strategies rather than high value.

Sometimes, simply fine-tuning your brand promise and marketing message is enough to win differentiation in the customer’s mind. (Chapter 6 is full of information on these topics.) More often, though, you need to undertake at least some level of product or service modification to add meaningful and differentiating attributes and benefits. Additionally, you many need to update how your product is packaged and presented to magnify important distinctions that will reel customers in at the point of purchase. (If repackaging is in the cards, turn to Chapter 12 for information.)

Create credibility and trust

Brands essentially result from promises made and consistently kept. If your brand fails to win on these two counts — if it fails to appear credible or trustworthy — it fails altogether.

All brand builders need to develop and maintain credibility and trust, but developing or enhancing trust needs to be a top priority if you’re introducing a new business or product, if you’re selling a service (because services are bought entirely based on trust), if you’re selling online (where familiar and trusted brands win out over all others), or if you’re facing a credibility crisis because you’ve failed to deliver on brand promises or customer expectations.

To rate your brand’s credibility and trust levels, ask yourself these questions:

• Do people believe we’re credible and trustworthy?
• Do we appear credible and trustworthy?
• What promise do we make to customers, and do we keep that promise without fail?
• What guarantee or assurance do we extend?
• What additional promises can we make to build higher levels of trust?

Your answers help you determine the emphasis you need to put on heightening credibility and trust in your branding strategy.

Achieve preference and motivate selection

Brands are like great advance teams that establish interest, appeal, confidence, preference, and purchase motivation in a customer’s mind before you or your product ever enters the arena.

Using a dating analogy (see the sidebar “Would you date your brand?”), think back to the social scene of your high school days. Which would you have preferred: a date with a person whose name you knew and regarded highly, to whom you were attracted, and with whom you felt trust and a sense of pride in the potential association; or a blind date who didn’t even come with an assurance from a good friend? The answer’s a no-brainer.

Faced with a selection, you and nearly everyone else opt for the safe choice. And the safe choice is the one you’ve heard of (awareness), the one that makes you feel good (emotional connection), the one with uniquely positive attributes (distinction), and the one you can rely on (credibility and trust).

Together, the brand functions combine to create preference and to motivate selection and purchase, although all don’t play equally in all branding strategies. If you’re launching a brand, your initial emphasis will probably focus on developing awareness and differentiating your offering. If you’re refining or realigning an existing brand, you probably have established strength in at least some of the branding functions. Therefore your future branding strategy will direct your efforts toward gaining strength in areas of weakness. The worksheet in Figure 3-2 helps you prioritize your efforts.

Crunching Numbers: Budgeting Realities

Ask homebuilders how much it costs to build a home and, no surprise, they’ll tell you the cost depends on the home being built. The same is true when the question is, “How much does it cost to build a brand?” The variables involved in the cost of brand building include

• The amount of your own time and expertise you can commit: Especially if your brand is local or your business is small, you can probably research your current brand image, define your desired brand image, determine the value of your brand assets, set goals, and oversee development for your brand — all without professional help.
• How far your brand will travel: If your brand will represent you in distant markets when you’re personally nowhere to be found, it will almost certainly require you to make a more sizeable investment in branding than that required by a very small business with a small and geographically limited clientele.
• The nature of your competition: If you intend to compete with well-known and superbly developed brands, be prepared to invest in a brand that’s up to the task in terms of how it looks, how well it’s known, and how highly it’s regarded. Making it in the major league requires major-league talent. Unless you’re an accomplished designer, for example, a do-it-yourself logo is out of the question.

As you assemble your budget, flip to Chapter 1 for a look at the range of costs involved in each phase of the brand development process. Then earmark allocations for each of the following brand-development phases:

1. Brand strategy and positioning

   This phase involves market research, brand-identity research, and development of the positioning and branding strategies you’ll follow to reach the branding success you seek. (If you plan to do a good portion of this work yourself, check out Chapters 5 and 6.)

2. Creating brand identity elements

   Professionals are worth their weight in gold when it comes to creating, selecting, and protecting your name; designing your logo; devising your tagline; and developing the core marketing message and materials that will carry your brand into the marketplace.

   If you’re developing a name and logo for a business that faces only moderate competition in a local market area, plan on a moderate investment. On the other hand, if you’re dreaming up a name and logo that will travel online and over state and international borders to a marketplace of hundreds of thousands or even more, invest more heavily in an identity that will deliver rewards for years to come.

3. Implementation of your brand strategy

   When you’ve set your brand strategy and established your brand identity, implementing your branding program becomes part of your existing marketing program — and your existing marketing budget. Branding and marketing aren’t separate in terms of message or money. Your brand strategy becomes the foundation for your marketing strategy, just as it becomes the basis of your business plan (see the next section).

Committing to the Branding Process

Think of entering the branding process as entering a marriage. You have to agree that you’re in it for the long haul. You have to start with a unique and desirable identity, establish connection, develop trust, cultivate positive interaction, and propose an offer worth accepting. Then you have to deepen the mutual commitment, consistently stay true, and forever live up to what you promised — every single day and through every experience and encounter.

No wonder the result of successful branding is called brand love. Google the term and you’ll get hundreds of thousands of results, many featuring this two-word first step: Know yourself.

Brands that inspire love start by knowing their missions and visions, and build their brands and all their brand actions around the core values of their companies.

Aligning your mission, vision, and brand identity

Your brand is a reflection of your own (if you’re building a personal brand) or your company’s mission and vision. So you’d think that identifying your brand and starting the branding process would be piece of cake. But it rarely is. Perhaps you’ve never crafted your mission and vision statements. Oops. Or, if you have, the statements may no longer reflect what you want to achieve and stand for. If either of these scenarios sound sounds familiar, Chapter 6 offers step-by-step guidance for putting your statements into words.

But first, because the terms mission, vision, and brand identity confuse even the pros, here are some definitions:

• Your mission is your broad purpose and the positive effect you or your business will have on others.
• Your vision is your long-term aspiration. It’s what you want to achieve through your success.
• Your brand identity is a tangible expression that reflects and represents both your mission and your vision.

Here’s a quick way to put the three in context: Your mission is the heart of your brand, your vision is the eyes, and your brand identity is the face. Chapter 6 helps you put all three into words.

Including branding in your business plan

Whether you’re planning for job-search success, success of a one-person business, or the launch or growth of a small-to-huge business, your brand plays a starring role. It reflects your mission, vision, and values. It impacts your product development plans. It guides your market segmentation, customer targeting, and competitive-strategy decisions. It determines what you do and say and how you present yourself in the marketplace. It keeps you true to your business promise.

That’s why branding needs to be a key consideration throughout your business plan. (Okay, moment of truth: Do you have a business plan? If not, here’s a lineup of what you need to cover and a recommendation to pick up Business Plans Kit For Dummies, 4th edition [Wiley]).

Include your brand statement and branding strategy in each of the following business plan components:

• Your business overview, which includes your mission, vision, values, key products and services, and major goals
• Your business environment, which includes an overview of your business arena or industry, customer profile, competitive analysis, and current image and awareness levels
• Your business description, which details attributes of the products and services you offer, strengths of your business or personal capabilities, and major changes you aim to achieve
• Your business strategy, which includes your business model (translation: how you’ll make money), goals, marketing plan, and growth strategies

When you build your business, essentially you’re building your brand, and vice versa. The two are interdependent and mutually beneficial.

Who’s on First? Suiting Up Your Branding Team

Unless you’re building a personal brand, to paraphrase an old coaching adage, there’s no “I” in the branding team. Everyone in your organization plays an important role because your brand is reinforced or weakened every single time people come in contact with any facet of your organization.

The following tips help you when putting together a cohesive branding team:

• Start by gaining buy-in from owners and leaders. Without participation and leadership from those in a position to make strategic business decisions, a brand is in danger of a credibility train wreck.
• Involve and enlist the support of top-level executives. A brand needs to be reinforced through every business decision. For that reason, it needs to have the interest and engagement of those who call the shots to keep the company true to its brand premise and promise.
• Gain organization-wide brand awareness and commitment. Every single person who has any form of customer contact — whether before, during, or after the purchase — is in a position to strengthen or weaken brand trust and belief in your brand promise. Gain all-important commitment by educating everyone from the CEO to part-time or freelance contractors about your brand strategy, promise, identity, and presentation guidelines. Turn them into brand champions (use Chapter 13 as your playbook) and ensure that they know the rules for presenting your brand by following the advice for managing your logo in Chapter 8 and staying true to your brand promise in Chapter 14.

As you set out to create or revamp your brand, include representatives from all areas of your organization. Then, at key milestones along the way, involve your entire team in updates and to share the rewards of a brand well built. Commit the time and effort it takes to put everyone on the same branding page — because what they don’t know can hurt you.