Synkd Blog
The Brand Entrepreneur

Brand: Image is nothing. Perception is everything.

When it comes to your brand, many people suggest a brand formula of three distinct elements for success: identify your vision (purpose), establish your voice (tone, language and personality) and create your visuals (identity, brand touch-points or design).

I’m not convinced that’s enough these days to truly resonate with and attract your ideal customers in this saturated, noisy market place.

As we all know, brands have transformed into something far deeper than superficial sales stimulants or clever customer communications. For me, brand is indeed focused on realising your higher business vision but it’s underpinned by two hugely important strategic pillars:

1. your core values (that what you truly believe and defines you – key insight: people buy what you believe, not what you do – refer to Simon Sinek) and

2. your brand perception – i.e. how your core values, beliefs and visual assets or ‘expressions’ are collectively received via people’s primary sensory information. Translation: how it makes potential customers or prospects feel. Crucially, any know facts about your business or brand are incomplete – hence a perception of what is actually real.

Shaping or crafting your brand perception (its difficult to completely control how someone perceives your brand – in fact you should aim to be divisive with your brand for more pay off – pleasing everyone gets you no-where) influences how you would like people to see or perceive you i.e. what they think of you when you’re not in the room (see Jeff Bezos).

Perception, however, is the key driver in this brand equation when attracting and connecting to prospective customers. ‘What’ we really are as people and what epitomises us as a business (closely linked to your business culture) and ‘how’ we are perceived can be a world of difference, however crafting and shaping how we are perceived in the market is critical to attracting your ideal customers – those who we want to help or serve.

If you don’t have a framework in place in the form of consistent brand touchpoints to influence your brand perception, your audience will create associations for you – often negatively too if the brand is mismanaged, at odds with your brand values or your original business vision (sometimes it easy to lose focus in business).

In many cases this is true today – customers create your brand for you by what they say or experience online, in-store or in-person (correlated to customer service), however, don’t forget that as businesses, entrepreneurs or business owners you have the power to shape that perception, to grow and nurture it as your brand and business evolves over time. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

So to recap, brand perception is key to attracting and creating your ideal customer. Perception is also linked to your core brand values, which is tied inextricably to your business vision. Build this ‘brand architecture’ into your business the right way and on strong foundations and not only will you be ahead of the competition, but you’ll be in a far stronger strategic position to weather unforeseen economic challenges and/or obstacles (remain brand relevant – see previous post) plus you’ll also be adding huge value for your customer and to your business. That’s a powerful recipe when building value into your business asset.

Remember, Agassi and Canon in the 80’s were wrong – ‘image’ is not everything. Image will only get you so far. Society has moved on. Today, look around – perception is everything.

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I hope you gained some benefit or learned something new, insightful or useful from this blog.

As The Brand Entrepreneur, I believe in helping busy business owners and savvy entrepreneurs to be bold when building brands and ‘market smarter’. I do this by deeply defining my client’s ‘ideal’ customer with The ‘My Avatar’ Workshop. Successful brands in the future care about customers, not branding. I believe that future is now. I’m focused on creating brand stories & design assets that help brands get ‘in sync’ and connected to customers they ‘care’ about.

Jamie Thomas – The Brand Entrepreneur

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