TL;DR: I can help give your brand a voice but I can't create your brand rootswriting@gmail.com
It’s difficult to avoid the word ‘brand’ these days…look, I just said it. I get it, you don’t want to start sounding like an awful Apprentice candidate or a corporate drone. BUT the truth is that your brand IS your business and consolidating a healthy brand is essential when you want to reach out to potential customers, be successful and take over the world. If you don’t know what your brand is then you need to do some soul searching and think about the types of values and personality that drive your business. If you don’t want to stare wistfully out onto a tumultuous ocean then just grab a pen and paper and jot down some ideas instead. Essentially, if you don’t know what your brand is then you can guarantee that no-one will have a clue and good luck when you try to communicate it.
Everyone wants to be ‘innovative’, ‘creative’ and ‘forward-thinking’ but the proof is in the pudding, so you better make a tasty, delicious pudding of joy. Building a brand based on gestures and idealistic language is ineffective, especially if you can’t back up your claims. Maximise your features by backing them up with your benefits. Claiming to be innovative without having any evidence of business practises and services that actually demonstrate your innovation means that customers won’t have anything to anchor them to a brand; all they’re hearing is language that’s postulated by every other business…and their dog.
If your features don’t match up with your benefits then you should go back to basics and concentrate on the way your business behaves at the moment and what your services show about you. Repackage your brand in a more genuine way and start to communicate the values it actually offers, instead of what buzzwords you think customers want to hear. A confused brand leads to confused customers and clients and we spend enough time being confused in life, so make this part simple.
A brand voice that doesn’t fit in with the rest of your business isn’t going to make sense to anyone. It’s important that everything matches, like most fabulous outfits; from the tone of copy on your website to the types of adverts that you run, mismatched messages look unprofessional and really bad. People are looking authenticity in a world of companies that are just trying to grab any and all customers, so if the character of yours is attractive and easy to distinguish at every turn then it’ll become easier for people to engage with you.
It’s not just confusing for customers to grasp what your business is all about. If you want to expand and improve your business with the help of agencies and creatives (like ME) and you’re unable to give them a brief that makes sense, then what they create won’t make sense to customers. By being able to summarise your brand to creative agencies, this means that we can help you to communicate your brand effectively to customers. You can’t rely on little old me to build your brand for you.
Asking anyone else to help you decide what your business should be about is a sure sign that you need to revisit the origins of your business and refocus your efforts on highlighting its core principles. By supplying agencies with a solid idea of your brand, we can concentrate on creating campaigns or designing a framework that represents your values and can function across various platforms.
Having a distinctive voice that flows through your business, means that your employees won’t struggle to communicate your brand to customers and clients. Every level of your business should encompass the character of your brand, whether it’s a more professional or laid-back attitude, it should be understood in your output and the experiences your customers have with your business. Basically, brand is best. Working on polishing your brand and putting your core benefits and ethos at the heart of everything you do is paramount to an attractive business that knows who it is and what it does.