Brand: it’s all about the belief.
Forget highly creative visual assets, ‘bells and whistles’ website design, FB marketing, PPC, lead generation tools, email marketing, integrated campaigns, an obsession with ‘traffic’, SEO marketing, video marketing or the latest app… the real insight to effectively grow your business is… getting 100% laser-focused on your core philosophies and messaging – your brand DNA. Stop for a minute and ask yourselves, whether you’re a start up, large or medium-sized business, when it comes to your brand ‘what do you believe?’ and more importantly will those values resonate with your ideal customers?
Most businesses and business owners struggle when making a connection between their brand and their beliefs or values. The confusion lies ironically in the ‘belief’ that a brand is just a logotype, a visually abstract mark or an aesthetic ‘look or feel’ to their overall business. Ironically again, that’s too superficial. Brand goes far deeper than that.
Pressed further about their business beliefs and values only results in vague mumblings of a vision, flutterings of paper to the mission statement on page 2 of an internal report that never sees the light of day, or a hesitant attempt at a positioning statement that lacks energy and fails to inspire.
I get it. I can understand why.
We’re all too busy consumed in ‘the work’ these days to think ‘value’s, ‘beliefs’, ‘vision’ and ‘mission’. This only confirms why its all the more important to make the time to define what you stand for and what you stand against or risk losing identity with, inspiration of and insight into your brand and customers.
On the other hand, if we do have the values and the vision aligned then the danger is we forget it when things ‘get busy’ and ‘stressful’ and we fail to truly live those values through an established and unique brand culture.
Either way the reality is we’ve taken our eyes off the ‘brand’ and ‘belief’ ball.
The relevance of brand values to our every working day reality is unclear to most of us, or if it is acknowledged, its relegated to some abstract concept within the scaled down HR department. ‘Business’ for most is about juggling ‘time’ and ‘work’ for an end result: revenue and ultimately profit. Not much purpose there is there?
Yet if you want to achieve serious growth in business, belief and values are every bit as relevant as profit and loss sheets, tax forms, capability statements and product life cycles.
Why you believe what you believe will determine your brand and business success.
This is not coaching, this is brand. This is not philosophy, this is business.
This is not psychology, fluff or the ‘Woo’; this is the business of brand.
Your business growth (whatever that means to you – $$$ are just a by-product of your creative efforts) stems from a clear understanding of identity, a clear purpose, a shared vision and a defined mission that prospects and employees can relate to and resonate with. It’s also where brand leadership starts in communicating those cores belief to others in order to ‘energetically’ resonate with prospects and leads.
Simon Sinek was spot on – people don’t buy what you do, they buy your ‘Why’.
Ideal customers and ‘raving fans’ buy what you believe; they buy what they and you value; a shared belief and identity; that’s brand. They also ‘buy into’ how you express those values to the market; that’s marketing.
So find your Why before you invest in any other marketing tactics and ensure the strategies you select reinforce the ‘Why’ in your customers’ hearts and minds.
Its one thing to attract and engage customers with an effective brand; it’s entirely another to convert them. Investing in your brand provides a solid base to determine intrinsic beliefs and values that will weather even the most severe economic storm (barring severe endemic financial mismanagement – in which case the values and vision were never truly there).
That belief in and expression of your brand values makes it that much easier to ‘energetically’ resonate and attract your prospective customers. Most people will easily connect and resonate with a belief, charity or a cause. Just look around at all the charities and see how well they’re doing in difficult times. Why is this do you feel? Again, because people buy your Why, not your What.
Let me be clear. There is still a need and a place for marketing. ‘Pushing’ your message out to the market through marketing is key to balancing or ‘syncing’ with the ‘pull’ factor of ‘brand’; i.e. the values, identity and perception.
The secret to serious business and brand growth is to use your head and your heart. With a clearly defined brand, a shared vision and brand values underpinning the vision, you simply don’t need to spend so ‘hard’ on your marketing dollars to experience those returns – for any business, large or small, clarifying your beliefs and values and communicating them to the ‘right’ customers is the smarter way to market your business for serious growth.
——————————————————————————————————————————————
I hope you learned something new, insightful or useful from this blog.
As The Brand Entrepreneur, I believe in helping businesses and savvy entrepreneurs ‘market smarter’ for serious brand growth. I do this by deeply defining your ‘ideal’ customer with The ‘My Avatar’ and ‘Ideal Customer Personality’ Workshops and then creating design assets that convey your ‘Why?’. Successful brands in the future care about customers, not branding. I believe that future is now. I’m passionate about creating brand stories & design assets that help brands get ‘in sync’ and connected to customers they ‘care’ about.
BE on the look out for Brand New ‘Brand Entrepreneur’ Brand Workshops for 2018!
Jamie Thomas – The Brand Entrepreneur