Your brand is the most powerful part of your marketing. In previous posts I have talked about what a brand is and that we always have a brand, whether we mean to or not. I have also talked about how you need to find out what your brand is before you can start to shape it into what you want it to be. The question then is, what do you want your brand to be?
Everywhere we go these days people are talking about thinking outside of the box. I could not agree more. The world is full with people in boxes and it doesn’t do us any good. However, when it comes to branding, you do need to think about being in a box. A sort of brand box. The first step in building your brand is to find it’s core, the essence of it, the heart of it if you will. You could say that we need to decide what box in people’s minds we want our brand to fit in.
We all know that it is a really complicated world we live in. We get bombarded with thousands of messages every day, advertising, different products, different services, companies etc. etc. Everybody is trying to get our attention. In order to make sense of all this and not get totally confused, we try to make sense of it all by organising in our minds somehow. You could say that we walk around with a filing cabinet in our heads, and each time we come across something we think is worth storing and remembering, we put it in the appropriate drawer in that filing cabinet.
We as marketers need to try to cut through that all that messaging noise to get people’s attention, interest and get them to remember us. We want them to put us in a drawer in that mental filing cabinet of theirs, and we want to be at the top of the pile in that drawer so that we are the first thing they come across when they delve back into that drawer to get what they need.
But because so many things are trying to get into that filing system of ours, [Read more…]