After many years of consulting I’ve come to realize a simple truth…the most fruitful starting point for planning your marketing is to first define your brand strategy. Getting clear on your brand strategy will minimize the emotional roller coaster ride that usually comes along with planning and paying for your marketing.
Think about it, the secrets to really successful brands are really very simple:
a) The product, service, cause they represent is sound, good, relevant, in other words NOT fatally flawed and
b) The brand is defined and executed to a very high level of specificity.
Michael Eisner, former CEO for Disney, said it best, “A brand is a living entity— and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.”
When you think about your brand as a living entity, let’s say like a person, your brand really needs:
1. Core values to guide it and live by,
2. A personality to create rapport and endear itself,
3. A promise (purpose) to deliver on,
4. A core message to convey what it can do,
5. Target audiences to engage with,
6. Market positioning to show how it’s different and
7. A role within its brand “family” (ex. parent, child, sibling, cousin)
If you’ve not defined the above, it’s time. I see it with clients all the time, the longer they “hang out” in limbo on these decisions, the more frustrated and confused they become. Gaining clarity will free you from reinventing the wheel about how you talk about your business, where you market it and how you design your touch points.
I have two workshops coming up that deal with these topics in great specificity:
• September 9, 2010, we’re hosting “How to Build a Brand that Sells”
• October 16, 2010, we’re hosting “Brandtopia: The Secrets to aligning Your Personal and Business Brands” (note: this one is exclusively for women business owners).
Until we meet, all the best to you in life and in brand building!
About Pecanne Eby, MBA
Pecanne is speaker and an independent Marketing Consultant in Denver, CO. With 20 years of marketing practitioner experience (many of those years in the fast-paced advertising agency world), she helps clients clarify, simplify and unify their brand strategy so that their marketing “sticks” in their audiences’ long term memory banks. Pecanne regularly speaks and facilitates a variety of marketing workshops including: Brands that Sell and Brandtopia.
