A Unique Brand Is Creative

The world of strategic branding is full of… well… crap is one way of putting it.

I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read that have contradicted common sense let alone best practices.

But that’s that thing. 

Best practices are not what makes you stand out.

If you’re building a brand then simply doing what everyone else is doing isn’t going to work.

Instead, knowing the key elements you need to build provides guidence as well as a creative environment to build a unique brand.

The Video Breakdown

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Brand Strategy Element #1:
Internal Branding

Internal branding is overlooked by 95% of brand builders out there.

The terms

Purpose

Vision

Mission and

Values

have been lumped together as though they’re an inconvenience.

Like a single task of a handful of statements that need to be drawn up to get it over and done with.

Most will go looking for statement templates, pop in their relevant details [Here], [Here], [Here] and [Here] and boom…

Internal brand check…. What’s next??

Your internal brand should be the driver of your entire brand strategy and communication and should dictate how it behaves and where it’s going.

Brand purpose is a fundamental pillar in-and-of-itself.

If something so significant is developed as a handful of template statements, the brand sets out on its journey with no compass.

Your internal brand consists of 4 key elements that each play a significant role:

Your Purpose (The belief of your brand)

Your Vision (The ambition of your brand)

Your Mission (The commitments of your brand)

Your Values (The behaviour of your brand)

When you approach your internal brand, remember its significance and think of your brand as a living entity.

How we’re made up internally shapes everything in our lives.

Your brand is the same so develop your internal brand with that weight of importance.

Brand Strategy Element #2:
Audience Persona

Like your internal brand, there are plenty of templates to help you to find who your audience is.

Like this one from Hubspot.

Most will provide you with a section for demographics and some will provide you a section with psychographics.

Demographics are essentially a categorisation tool that allows you to define the broadest group of who your audience is.

Detail such as:

Age

Gender

Marital Status

Geo Location

Job Title

Income etc

Rather than help you define who your audience is, this helps you to eliminate the large portion of the population you’re not targeting.

Your psychographics goes into a bit more detail.

By drilling down into your broad audience (defined by their demographics) you can uncover the personality traits and behaviours of the group, bringing them into clearer focus.

Here you’ll find behaviours such as

Preferred music

Hobbies

Sports

Magazine

The car they drive

The food they like

How they spend their weekend etc

Both your psychographics and demographics are an important part of defining who your audience is, but you’re still left without a lot of details at this point.

If you were an ice sculptor, you’d be able to make out the shape of what you’re aiming for, but the lack of detail would leave a lot to imagination.

An effective Audience Persona is full of detail.

This doesn’t mean that you need to get granular into every aspect of their lives.

It’s not really important if they prefer their eggs scrambled or sunny side up (unless of course you’re serving eggs).

The detail of an effective audience avatar revolves around the problems they have in their lives.

More specifically, the problems they have that you can help them with.

When you define specifically, these problems and the emotions tied to those problems, you have an effective tool.

This is a tool you can refer to in order to better resonate with your audience at every and any touch point.