What's Your Brand? Does It Have a Plan?

Part 1 of 3

By Allison Ries

Branding is bigger than a logo alone. Your brand is your company's promise. It touches on what makes your company unique and delivers the overall character behind your company. It’s easier to picture what a company brand truly encompasses when you compare it to how you might think about your own personal brand. What makes up the uniqueness of you?  It’s not just about your clothes (your logo or graphics), which will probably change over the years. Your "look" and other branding elements are important in showing your brand to everyone, but they are not the brand alone. What others come to know and remember are your personality traits (your brand traits) and who you are (your brand promise). Understanding this concept before jumping into the exciting process of creating or elevating your brand, and moving to spend precious dollars on further marketing activities, is imperative to your success.

BRAND POSITION AND PROMISE. The brand position describes what your company does and for whom, your unique value and key differentiators, and how clients benefit from working with you. Once you've defined this positioning, it can be developed further within quick hit messaging (we will revisit this in our May Hop To It). Then you can move to develop your brand promise. This is the single most important thing that your company promises to deliver — without fail, every time. Think about what clients can, and should come to, expect from your company. Everything your company does should be weighed against this, and better aligned when necessary, to be sure that it fully reflects the promise and at the very least isn't at odds with it.

BRAND PLAN.  So where do you start? A strong brand starts with a strong strategy — one that defines your company identity and provides ways to enhance and measure the impact of that identity on your market, clients, partners and employees. Your strategy should help you move forward to:

• Define and document the brand position and promise
• Outline brand traits and values
• Build key messages
• Create your brand story
• Design your brand elements (logo, Web site, brochures, business cards and other corporate identity materials)
• Develop your brand plan, summarizing how all of the defined elements will be used and strengthened through consistent use and interactions with clients and employees

Once you have a strong strategy ready to go, introduce it to your organization with a confident roll out and tribute to the new brand itself.  This is your chance to launch all of the hard work and careful thought that went into building your brand! Provide your brand with the stage it deserves and continue to live it vertically and horizontally throughout the company. There must be strong adherence to the strategy you've developed or all of your work to develop the brand may very well have been for nothing. This is an important step to fasten your branding efforts to successful growth.

Stay tuned for next month’s Part Two in this Hop To It series! Because branding success is so important and affects Return On Investment for so many of us, we are offering further insights to you in this special Hop To It series dedicated to brand strategy, brand ambassadors and messaging to tell the story of your company. As always, LeapFrog Solutions is here to help at any point in your branding process and overall marketing efforts, remaining dedicated to Make Your Message Matter^®.

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