Branding – What is it?

Why do we choose one brand or service provider over another?

Traditional marketing encourages us to sell benefits, not features. 

Brand marketing goes one level deeper and connects with people’s beliefs.

When you speak to people on the level of their beliefs, you have an opportunity to connect emotionally which can be extremely powerful — to customers, employees, and even investors.

The key question to ask yourself is: what do you believe and how do you attract other people that are aligned to those same beliefs? 

Great brands create a belief system that is both internally and externally aligned. When done correctly it simplifies the challenge of defining your brand.

Branding is a combination of a topic that ‘your’ audience is curious about and creating a brand belief system they can relate to.

To do this you need to identify an important topic or activity that your customers care deeply about and create a belief system around this topic.

Companies must have a strong sense of who you are appealing to if you are to build a sense of personality (brand) that starts customers on the road to buying from you. 

Confused companies, confuse customers, who buy from someone else. 

As with the rest of the world I've been invited onto a series of sector and industry relevant Webinars, Zoom conversations, and WhatsApp sessions. Every one of these sessions are jammed with people looking for help, advice, direction and support to help resolve their particular sector problem, something that's is the same for all of us and that problem is 'growth'.

Growth is a combination of agility, and innovation along with the ability for a company and its leaders to accept and be willing to recognise the external changes in customer behaviours and look to understand how to adjust and implement 'change'.

Just recently I've been asked to run a few online 'brand alignment' workshops to help businesses look to better understand how to ramp up the growth strategy and better understand the key drivers impacting their 'why'.

They're designed as a one day's introduction for alignment and brand context to flesh out the business direction and growth strategy for marketing. 

A vital part of the session is a number of hands on exercises for leaders and companies to help better understand the simple yet complex question of 'why do customers choose one brand or service provider over another'. 

Of course just like you can't get fit by going for a one off session at the gym attending an (online) workshop isn't really going to lead to immediate change. 

But, if done right with the right strategy, support and process it will have a profound and a commercially positive effect on your company and growth potential 

With 3.8bn+ people on one social network or another the more internally aligned you are to the creation of a 'belief system' can only help to supercharge your growth ambitions

If this is something you believe you might benefit from feel free to drop me a note on LinkedIn. original article here