Episode 156: How Much Brand Work Have You Done?
How much brand work have you done? Do you have a business or are you building a brand? In this coaching episode, Fiona puts the focus on branding and why it is more than just having a logo and a style guide.
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Episode transcript:
The first thing to get clear on is do you have a business or are you building a brand? Often, people will say, “Aren't they the same thing?” Quite often, you'll hear people interchangeably use business or brand. There are various definitions of the differences between business and brand. The way that I say it is that your business is the company, it is the thing that produces your products, your services, or both. If you're like me, I have both of those. That is the business side of it. It is the transactional side of it. It’s what it is that we do.
The brand is how you're perceived in the market. It's what your customers think of you, what is the culture like at your workplace if you're lucky enough to have staff. They’re things like your tone of voice, your personality, it is how you're positioned in the mind of the market, in the mind of your customers, past, present, and potential that see you and think, “That something needs to be part of.”
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Welcome to episode 156 of My Daily Business Coach Podcast. I will be talking you through a coaching episode. This is where I dive deep into one element of business and it is a big one. It's one that I work on with many of my clients whether they're big corporate consulting clients or whether they are people starting with an idea for a business. It's something that too often is glossed over by many other business teachers out there and even in general in the whole business category. I feel like not enough time is given to this important factor.
I don’t think that it’s essential before you get started but I do know and I've seen firsthand how many businesses struggle because this was never worked on when they're looking to grow and transition into new territory, transition into even a different marketing channel. This is one to stick around for. Before I get stuck into that, as a reminder, if you're looking for a gift for somebody in your life who runs a business, who maybe has a business idea, there are so many things you can find at the My Daily Business Coach shop and you can find that at MyDailyBusinessCoach.com/shop.
You can also find my award-winning book that won an award in the Australian Business Book Awards, Passion Purpose Profit: Sidestep the #hustle and build a business you love. You can find that book available everywhere online but if you are going to buy it as a gift, I would recommend that you buy it from another small business owner. There are so many beautiful book shops and gift stores that are selling Passion. Purpose. Profit. You can google it and you can find someone there. If you can't find somewhere near you or you need some help or you'd love to know which bookstores or gift shops I would recommend buying from, send me a DM, @MyDailyBusinessCoach, on Instagram.
Before I get stuck into this chunky episode, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on the land on which I record this podcast, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. We all have a long way to go until true equality is achieved in this country and we should do everything that we can to aid in that happening. This is a coaching episode. Let's get on with the show.
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I work with many business owners on all sorts of things but the main areas that I work with them on are brand, setting up a brand, increasing your brand visibility, looking at the brand as a structure in itself, and looking at your brand message. Also, things like your tagline, your mission, your vision, your values, all of those things, and right through to the visual identity of a brand and beyond, looking at your brand loyalty, how do people keep coming back to you, your content strategy, and all of that stuff.
I work with people on brand a lot. I work with people on marketing, which is part of that as well. I also work with people on money, I work with them on mindset. Another big part of what I do is to work with people on their systems and structure. I often say to people that those are my golden areas, as you would say. Of course, mindset comes across all of those.
What I want to talk about is brand. I've been in this space for a long time, even way back in my first proper job as editor of Fashion Journal. I worked with so many brands that were getting started and helped them figure out what's your message, what's your point of difference, where are you going to sit in the market, what's your positioning.
All of that has been useful for what I do but it's also allowed me to see even being a journalist and writing about different brands the brands that have survived since I started my career through to the brands that have failed and fallen by the wayside. Of course, sometimes that is external forces at play. Other times, there hasn't been a core understanding of who we are as a brand. What is our brand strategy? Where are we positioned? How are we different?
I wanted to pose the question, which is, how much brand work have you done? Please excuse me if this doesn't make sense but hopefully, it does. I'm riffing. There are no notes in front of me. It could well not make any sense. The first thing to get clear on is do you have a business or are you building a brand? Often people will say, “Aren't they the same thing?” Quite often, you'll hear people interchangeably use business or brand. There are various definitions of the differences between business and brand. The way that I say it is that your business is the company. It is the thing that produces your products, your services, or both. If you're like me, I have both of those. That is the business side of it. It is the transactional side of it. It is what it is that we do.
The brand is how you're perceived in the market. It's what your customers think of you, what is the culture like at your workplace if you're lucky enough to have staff. They are things like your tone of voice and personality. It is how you're positioned in the mind of the market and the mind of your customers, past, present, and potential to see you and think, “That is something I need to be part of,” even if they're not transacting with you frequently.
I often think about white goods. I used to work in Amazon and looked after home and kitchen. I was in charge of doing a big launch that never launched. Thanks, Bezos. Three months of my life looking at white goods and looking at if we were going to launch that into the market. We worked multi-national on this. I was working with people in France, Germany, and Spain at that time. What was coming out when I was looking and doing chats with different big white goods companies or large appliance companies was the loyalty factor that was responsible for them succeeding or not in the marketplace.
You think about a white good such as a fridge, washing machine, dishwasher, and that sort of stuff, you don't replace it all the time. If you replace it all the time, you'd hate the brand that you've bought it from because you buy it with the expectation that those products will last for a long time. The statistics are there.
Let’s say you buy a Westinghouse, Bosch, or any other one of the big brands. If you have a good experience, chances are that when you need to replace that in ten years, which is a long time for any product these days, maybe even longer than that, you will choose the same brand. There's high brand loyalty in those places and not from my own experience but from the brands that our parents bought or the brands that we saw at workplaces. Brand loyalty is massive in those areas because that is the thing that they rely on for people to come back and buy. It should also be as important in fast-moving consumer goods but it isn't always.
What I wanted to talk about is getting people like you, my lovely reader, to think about how much brand work you have done. I need to preface this next stage by saying I work with graphic designers and with creative agencies. I am married to somebody in that space. My best friend in New Zealand is a graphic designer, art director, and artist. I have lots of friends who are graphic designers. I married one. I love their work. It is important. Bringing things to life visually is essential when you're running a business particularly in today's world with social media, websites, and everything else. Packaging, swing tags, every single part of it needs to be on-brand.
Having said that, I know that there'll be some controversy here. What I have seen countless times over the last couple of years running this business and plenty of time before that is people spending all their money on getting a logo designed and potentially getting a style guide designed but spending huge amounts of money. I'm talking about tens of thousands of dollars if not upwardly the six figures into the visual identity only and what they're not necessarily always working on.
However, I do caveat that a lot of agencies do work on this as well but sometimes what I've seen is that they get this beautiful style guide of great assets, a couple of Instagram tiles, templates, beautiful visuals and yet a whole lot of other work hasn't been done. Often, I'm working with people that have already spent that money. When I say, “Did you go through this? Did you go through that? Did you look at this part?” They may have filled in a questionnaire. In some cases, I have seen these questionnaires and they're detailed. In other cases, there are 5 or 6 questions.
This is not an argument against graphic designers, they're amazing. I get that they are doing the visual elements. Some of them do have a strong understanding of brand strategy and have worked through that with a client as well. What I see is that there's a real mix across the board. As there are business coaches, there are people who have the experience and there are people that don't and there are people that have experiences in different fields and all of that.
What I'd love you to think about is how much of the below-the-surface work has been done? What I mean when I say below-the-surface is I often think of redwood trees. Redwood trees are tall trees. If you've ever been to a redwood forest, you'll know how beautiful and tall they are. They have short roots but their roots can go wide below the surface.
The roots can grow 100 feet from the trunk of the tree. They intertwine with other trees and they intertwine with other roots happening. That's where I visualize your brand foundations. They are the things people do not see. That is all the groundwork that you're doing underneath. The visual, the logo, the beautiful website, the fun Instagram tiles, is the tree. Yes, it could grow great but it has to have a strong foundation underneath and it has to intertwine with all these different elements for it to be strong, grow, prosper and flourish.
I wanted to go through some of those elements if you're like, “I don't even know what you're talking about. I thought I just needed to get a logo and a website and I'm done.” Yes, you can get those things and you can charge ahead. However, what I've seen is that when you try and grow, do something else, or perhaps try to scale or hire somebody else into the brand into the business, you don't have the information that you need at hand to be able to do that. It’s because the foundational work of the brand has not been done.
A big love heart that I'm sending to all graphic designers reading this right now or people that work in the brand visual space. It is 10,000% so important but it’s the thinking before that is also important. A lot of creative agencies will help you do that. This is not a me-versus-them but it is per se to anyone reading that the foundational work is as important as the beautiful logo that you finish with.
If you're thinking about, “I get a bit of what she's saying but what do I need to work on?” There are so many ways to work on your brand. There are million different brand equations that you can look up out there and they're everything from what's our mission, vision, values. You hear that all the time. Plus, our brand personality. What's the promise that we're making? What's our tone of voice? What are our origins or our brand story? What are our key messages?
Other brand equations will be more simple and there'll be your culture, the customer experience, the way you communicate. Within each of those are the sub-elements of the brand or you have longer equations that are the mission, vision, values. Those are key. They're in all of them. There are things like, what's your USP? What's your positioning? What's your visual identity? What's your brand personality or your tone of voice? What's your business function? What do you do? If you take all of those mini elements and you add them together, that is your brand.
Let's imagine you're making a cake and you have these eight ingredients and they're things like your mission, your personality, your brand identity, your business function, and your values. What happens that I see is that so often people are putting one ingredient in there, which is the identity. Usually, it's the visual identity. They're saying, “This is what I look like. This is my color palette. This is my typography. That's the brand.” That is the surface level that the end consumer sees. There is so much work that needs to go on behind the scenes.
The first thing is to think about all of those elements that I mentioned. Are you aware of what your mission is? Do you know what your current state is? I always think of mission as the current state. What do we do? How do we do it? How do we do it well? Who are we doing it for? It’s that sort of thing. Your vision is your future state. Where do we want to be? What is going to make an impact on the world through what we do? How are we going to do that? It's inspirational.
With these things, your mission and your vision shouldn't be pages and pages of stuff. You ideally should get your mission and your vision down to 1 or 2 sentences max. I often think of the quote from Oscar Wilde when he said, “I would have sent you a shorter letter but I didn't have the time.” It can be hard to be succinct. I know. I run this podcast.
My Sunday email for anyone that gets it is usually between 700 and 1,000 words. I know how hard it is to be succinct. When you're looking at your mission and your vision, you might decide to ramble for a while, put everything down, and start cutting until you've got the keywords. How can I pull those keywords together? You always want an emotional element. When you're doing your sales message or your marketing, you want an emotional driver in there.
Think about, “How many of those parts of the brand equation are missing in my business right now? Have I focused for too long on the visuals? Maybe I've focused on the business function and showing what we do? What do we sell? What products do we put out there?” Maybe you have spent some time working with a copywriter or maybe you’ve spent some time on your brand tone of voice. Maybe you don't have a tone of voice. Maybe you're like, “I don't even know what that is. I write my posts myself and I write my newsletters. Do we need a tone of voice?”
I wanted to go through quite a few of the brand elements and give you some hints of how you might work on those if you haven't already. There are various brand equations that you can find out there. If you google, “What's in a brand?” “Elements of a brand.” You'll find so many things. I have a slide that I have to put up when I'm doing a brand strategy workshop and it says, “A strong brand is connected roots.” These are all the roots.
If you go back to that redwood tree analogy that I said, all the roots underneath are things like your positioning. Where are you in the marketplace? Your mission, competitor analysis, your audience, your purpose. What are you trying to achieve? Your vision, your personality, your visual ID, your brand voice, your brand promise, your values, your core message. Even things like legal, the policies that you create, how is that part of a brand?
For the sake of this podcast and time as well, I thought I would go through seven of the elements that are pretty commonly put into a brand equation. Some of them you may have already worked on. To go back to the whole question of this podcast, which is, how much brand work have you done? You may have read this and you're like, “I've done 6 out of the 7.” Maybe you've done 2 out of the 7. Maybe you've never worked on any of them. This is not to put pressure on you and be like, “You have to do them all tomorrow.” It's to get you to start thinking about these things and perhaps which elements of the brand need to be amended or documented or considered as we go into a new year.
I should also mention that a brand is like a person, it is a living thing. It changes and adapts. What you work on one year in your brand strategy may change slightly next year. Maybe the vision that you had for the business before the pandemic is different from how it is now. Maybe your values change. Maybe you had a huge change in your lifestyle.
Maybe you had a huge health challenge. Maybe you became a parent. Maybe something else happened that was life-changing so your values have shifted and adapted around that. Therefore, the values that you bring into your business and that you want your brand to be known for may also have shifted. As you work through this and maybe even you've done some work in previous years, revisit it and think about whether it is still the same because these things can change your brand.
I know that in my own business, My Daily Business Coach, we are looking at this again. I spent a lot of time on this when I first started my business. I've looked at it every year. I do a brand analysis of where I'm at, where I want to go, where we're at with the values and living up to them and those sorts of things.
In 2022, we're doing some different things to My Daily Business Coach. I'm excited about that and I'm also a little nervous about it if I'm being completely honest. That means revisiting this stuff and thinking, “Are we still headed in that direction? Does the business function the same way? What new elements will we be bringing into it?” The visual ID is changing slightly but it's still changing.
The tone of voice is the same, it's always going to be me. We're going to be looking at that with a third party, which is something that I haven't done. I make tone of voice documents for other people and I've always created that for myself. It's good to work with people outside the business as well even if nothing else for validation of your own thoughts and ideas. This is not something that you set and forget so keep that in mind as we go through it.
We know the order, these are all equally as important as another. I am going to start with your core values. This is something I talk about a lot with my clients and a lot on this podcast. If you can get your values and beliefs in a strong aligned position with the way that you run your business and get your money and financials in a strong aligned position, you have a fantastic successful business that you're rolling with. The values are thinking about, “What are the values that underpin this brand?”
We're talking about your brand and thinking about what are the values that I want to be associated with my brand? We’re thinking about this often from the customer's perspective. What values would they say are aligned with your brand? Also, internally, things like your culture, the way that you show up, what does that look like in terms of your value alignment? For me, I often talk about my values and things like freedom, alignment, education, kindness, family. Your values are not in any hierarchy, they should each be as important as one another. It's not like a message in architecture hierarchy. It's things that are equally as important.
For me, things like the value of freedom have to be both internally and externally aligned. Looking at freedom as a value, I have to think about, “Externally, how am I showing up for my clients? How am I helping people create freedom in their own life?” That might be through systems and structures. It could be through better understanding principles of business. It could be delegating some of their tasks, looking at hiring. What does the organizational structure look like? It could be looking at passive income products. It could be a whole host of things. That’s where the external freedom is. Also, looking at causes that I support, things that I want to champion. What does that mean for freedom for all?
Internally, what does freedom look like? My staff doesn't have a strict timeline of things. It's like, “The work needs to get done. You can figure out when you get it done.” We need to check in once a week and have that conversation. We often check in more than that through DMs or Asana. There isn't like, “You need to be here at this time and leave at this time. I'm clock watching the whole time.”
All of the people that work for me run their own businesses and they have other clients as well. That doesn't give them the freedom to figure out, “What do I need to do this week?” My OBM is a mother. She also needs to look at other lifestyle things that she has in her life. Other people travel a lot. I want them to have freedom. I want them to get the job done, work with me, and love what they do. I want them to have freedom and flexibility.
When you're looking at your core values, if you think, “I haven't worked on these recently or I haven't worked on them ever,” you can find so many places on the internet to figure out your brand values. You can also get a freebie from us, you can find that over at MyDailyBusinessCoach.com/freestuff and look for the values checklist. That is also available in my book, Passion. Purpose. Profit.
Your values exercise will get you to look at a series of values like a checklist. There might be 100 or there could be 50. What you want to do is narrow that down, keep counting. I often get people to circle things that feel good for you that you instantly have an affinity with, whereas some values you'll look at and be like, “I don't feel anything.” Don't try and force anything when it comes to values and beliefs. Also, look at your belief system as well. How does that tie into your values?
If I go back to freedom, one of my beliefs is that I genuinely think that being around nature heals and revives people. I grew up camping and going to the Grampians all the time. My parents were avid travelers. They were always traveling as much as they could and as much as they could afford to. We were always doing day trips. Every Sunday, we'd go for a massive walk and bike ride. I grew up around that. I had that in me.
When I lived in London, we used to always live as much as we could close to a big park. We'd go for a walk every day in the big park. That is part of me. If you follow me on Instagram, you know that I often show my walks around Warrandyte in the morning. I try to get out most days. I'm looking out the windows of my office, which is built into our garden out the back in North Warrandyte and I'm looking at beautiful big gum trees. I am often watching nature straight outside my window. I saw a fox with a rabbit in its mouth, which was confronting.
For me, nature is a huge part of freedom. I'm incredibly fortunate to be able to have this type of view, to live where I live. I don't take that lightly. My belief that I have to be around nature for a good quality of life goes into my freedom. I don't want to work in the city. I don't want to have an office. I don't want to work anywhere other than where I work. I love working from home even before the pandemic when everyone started freaking out.
Yes, it's different in the pandemic. I’m not for a minute trying to say, “It's idyllic all the time.” I love working from home. I love being in control of my little office. I love silence. I like having that space and that peace. I'm an introvert at heart so I love it. I gain energy being alone and around nature. That is a long way of talking about your core values. It’s thinking about how they show up internally and externally.
You've got your business function. What does the business do? Do we produce products? If so, how do you buy them? Do we produce services? If so, are they in different packages and different tiers? How does the business function? “We do this and this.” Often, I talk about revenue streams and money mapping and that's one way of figuring out what the business function is.
What do we do? What do we want to be known for? What are we the go-to brand for? That’s the business function and that's often the easiest place to start because you know what you're going to sell. If you're yet to begin and if you are already in business, you know what you sell. You may be having things that are coming up in the future so you may include those things in it as well but what does the business do? That's the business function.
We've gone through the values. We've gone through your business function. We're going to go through the next one, which is your brand personality. This is the feeling that your brand gives off to people like the personality that you encounter when you meet with people whether they're new or whether they’re old existing friends. You have people in your life that have a particular archetype or personality.
When you're working on this, if you're like, “I don't know what my brand personality is,” It might be a bit of fun and also good for you to check out brand archetypes. The brand archetypes are twelve different archetypes that derived from Carl Jung's idea that every person in life or any story or any art can fit into 1 of 12 personas or 12 archetypes. He believed that these transcend time and location and that they're in culture. No matter where you're born in the world, you would understand these twelve archetypes that they're part of our collective unconscious.
It's thought that 90% of our decision-making process happens unconsciously. We use things like emotion, instinct, memory, and intuition to make the most of our decisions. When it comes to brand archetypes, you can look at these and you can identify the archetype and the personality of your brand. There are a lot of brand archetype quizzes out there. You can google, “Brand archetype quiz,” find one, go through it, and see what you think. If you google or Ecosia or any other search engine, the brand archetypes diagram, what you'll see is a circle divided into quadrants. With each of those is the three archetypes that relate to that quadrant’s topic or theme.
Imagine that in the first quadrant, you've got A Yearn for Paradise. The three brand archetypes are The Innocent, The Sage, and The Explorer. The Explorer is about freedom. The Sage is about understanding. The Innocent is about safety. If you think about brands that fall into those, you might think of Patagonia. It’s a big one that often comes in as an explorer brand. That's all about freedom and it also ties back to this core idea of A Yearn for Paradise. Sage, which is understanding, showing the truth, and all of that, you might think of a brand like Everlane. I know they've had some issues but they're transparent on how much everything costs, freight, customs, and where they get things made. With Innocent, you might have things like Dove because of its safety and security. That’s one quadrant.
You've got the next quadrant, which is all about liberation, power, mastery. These are their brands that want to leave their mark on the world. There are brands like Disney as The Magician or Virgin or Nike. You've got connecting with others. There's the Every Man, the Jester, and the Lover. The last quadrant is providing structure to the world, things like Caregiving, Ruler, and Creator. In the Creator innovation space, you'll always see Apple as an example of a Creator archetype.
With the brand personality, you might want to go through a personality test online or a brand archetype quiz and have a look at what is the personality and how does that then comes out across all of my communication as a brand? If I am the Outlaw, which Virgin is often shown as an Outlaw, Harley Davidson, how does that brand archetype or personality feed into everything else that we're doing? Even feeding into the collaborations that we take on the products that we're putting out like our Messaging. Brand archetypes can be a great place to start if you have never worked on a brand personality before.
The next one I'm going to talk about is your mission. I mentioned that it's a core one that comes up all the time in any of this stuff. It's worth thinking about, what is your mission statement? It shouldn't be some lengthy thing. It should be 1 or 2 sentences like your vision. Try and keep it as succinct as possible but it is reflecting your goals. What are the customer goals? What are the owner goals? What are the employer goals? What are we doing right now?
I often think this is your current state. Your mission is usually a simple sentence or two that is like, “We do this. We do it because of this and we do it for these people.” It’s not as boring as that but that's the mission statement. Often, people overthink this and spend hours and hours. Often, you know the answer to this.
In a group coaching session, I got everyone to break into breakout rooms and have a go of sharing a mission statement. Some people had theirs and some people didn't. Your mission statement is, where are we right now? What are we trying to do right now? An example of this is Nike, which you can find on their website. It says, “Our mission is what drives us to do everything possible to expand human potential. We do that by creating groundbreaking sport innovations by making our products more sustainably by building a creative and diverse global team and by making a positive impact in communities where we live and work.”
It's two sentences and it sums up what they do, why they do it, and who they're doing it for. That is your mission statement. There are so many places online to create a mission statement and to find things about it. It's important that these are things that you might want to put on your website and your Instagram bio.
Having one helps you when you're onboarding new staff as well and getting everyone super clear. Even if you're not onboarding staff into your business, maybe you're working with a copywriter, a photographer, anyone else in the business that's going to help you with creating content, or any other part that wants to know what your mission statement is. The clearer you can be and the simpler you can be, the better.
We talked about your values. We talked about your business function. We talked about your personality. We talked about your mission. Now, we're talking about vision. When it comes to your vision, that is the big, inspirational, “Where are we going? Where are we taking this company, this brand? How is it going to impact the world?” You can be as big and bold as you want to be and you should. You should think about what the big vision is. This is where sometimes people will get stuck or they'll think, “I don't have a vision,” or, “I want to make money.” I would urge you to think about it. If you're putting all your time and effort into this and you're trying to build a brand, not a business, what is the bigger vision?
I always find examples useful. To help you, the TED Talks, which has become more of a meme these days like, “Sorry for my TED Talk.” TED’s vision is to spread ideas. They're not saying, “We create talks online that then get viewed and we get the best speakers.” They're saying, “Spread ideas.” It’s simple. It’s super succinct. It’s two words. IKEA, “To create a better everyday life for many people.” Disney, “
To make people happy.” Nike, “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” LinkedIn, “To create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.”
You can see how it gets big, bold, and inspiring. It gets you all pumped up and you're like, “Let's do this.” That should also work for yourself. When you write your vision statement, is it big, fun, bold enough, and audacious to get you so inspired into where you're going and where you're going to build this brand in the future? That’s your vision statement.
We've gone through core values, your business function, your personality, your mission statement, and your vision statement. The next thing we're going to talk about is your positioning. I talk about this quite a bit in my Marketing for Your Small Business Course. I'm excited that we’re bringing out some other courses in 2022. We'll be diving into this in more detail in those.
Your positioning is where you are trying to be positioned in the market? More so, where are you being positioned in the customer or consumer’s mind? How do they connect with your brand? When they think about X, Y, Z, whatever your product or service is, how are they then connecting through your positioning with your specific brand rather than the competitors?
Years ago, around the time that I was born, Al Ries is the Godfather of Positioning. You can check out a whole bunch of books and information from Al Ries. He wrote a book called Positioning the Battle for your Mind: How to be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace. There's a new version of this but I'm pretty certain that this was first written in 1980 when I was born. It’s a long time ago. Al Ries and Jack Trout who wrote the book are the gurus of positioning. A lot of what they talked about in this book in 1980 still rings true. There is a newer version because the one that I have, the cover is not from the 1980s.
When you think about positioning, you are trying to help establish your identity in the mind of your consumer. A good way to think about this is using any of the concepts that come up in the positioning book but also thinking about questions like, how are we different or better than what's already out in the market? It may be that your stuff is made locally and other people's is not. I know that's a big one, especially now but hugely as a result of COVID as well.
Where are things made? People want to know the origin story, “How is our brand different from everything else that's out there?” You may have done some competitor analysis. You may have looked at the marketplace. You may have done some focus groups. It’s thinking about, “How we are different? How are we unique?” There are few things that are unique and truly original. How do we bring a different spin on things? How is our brand going to be different from what's out there?
For example, Go-To Skincare by Zoë Foster Blake and her team is a big one in Australia and it came out in a different way. All the packaging is the same, regardless of what you're getting. It's well known for its peach color and the gray color of the men's range. I know they're adding products every so often but it came out much with like, “We have these products.” There was a small range, maybe 4 or 5 products. It was different from a lot of the other beauty products and skincare products at that price point in the market because they were competing with these huge companies that had 500 SKUs, not 5 or 6.
That was different. The tone of voice was different. Their positioning is that you could buy it online.Even the font and the funny humor that was in it were all different from what was here, at least in the Australian market. That wasn't new. It wasn't like, “We're bringing out a face wash.” There are a million face washes out there and different cleansing tools that you can use for your skin. They were bringing that out in a different way. They were positioning it in a different way in the market from what other beauty brands had been doing. Now, there are a lot of brands that are copying that. That’s an example.
You also want to be thinking about what the customer or the client or the consumer is buying from you. This goes back to emotional and rational drivers. I talk about that a lot in episode four. If you haven't read that, go back after this. It's a quick tip episode. You want to be thinking about when people buy from you, what are they buying? What do they think or perceive that they're buying, that they're getting?
I often talk to my students and clients about their product, their business, or their brand, but the product first is the easiest one. How does that change someone's life? You sometimes get these blank looks like, “I only sell X.” Yes, that may be a bag. You may sell a bag but what does that represent to the consumer or the client or the customer?” An example that I say when I'm talking about drivers is an individual driver. The emotional pool of being an individual as being seen as different and unique is strong. That is why brands like Gorman, which is a fashion brand here in Australia, do so well despite the fact that they've got 40-plus stores and that are owned by a parent company of big quantities of fashion.
The way that it is positioned in the market is that when you wear Gorman, you are an individual. You are standing out, you're bold, you're this, you're that. That positioning has done well for them. Even if you look at the facts, it's not necessarily that you're standing out because it's a chain. It's a big chain and they're sold in every single big shopping center in this country. That’s nothing against Gorman. I love Gorman. I have many of their Gorman products. You want to be thinking about the positioning of your brand. How are you positioned? How are you different? Where do you come into the consumer’s mind? Where do they think of you? Do they think of you as a mass? Do they think of you as individual and unique? When they're buying from you, what are they buying?
I know that an example that is often given when you look at positioning books is McDonald's because everyone looks at it. Likewise, Apple. If you think about McDonald's, people often think, “I'm not buying the type of food like a chicken burger or whatever. I'm buying the confidence that it will be the same regardless of whether I'm picking it up in this suburb or this suburb. Even if I go overseas and have it at an airport in Dubai, it's going to be the same as if I get it in downtown LA or I get it in Melbourne.”
That is what people are buying, they're buying that confidence that they can walk in and they know what it tastes like and it will taste the same no matter where they are in the world. That is what they're buying. It’s not necessarily a burger and diet Coke or whatever they are buying. The positioning is something that you want to spend some time on. I would recommend reading the Al Ries and Jack Trout book, Positioning.
The other thing that you can look at when you're looking at positioning and it's a tool that I often use in my workshops is the Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas. Blue Ocean Strategy is a book that came years ago. They did a ten-year anniversary one. If you look at BlueOceanStrategy.com, they have heaps of resources and one of those is the Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas. That is about looking at how you are positioned in the market compared to your competitors.
When they talk about the whole concept of the Blue Ocean, it's about where you are playing. Every brand, product, or service has businesses and brands that sit in the Red Ocean, which is cutthroat, bloody, it's always people undercutting you. There's always someone coming into the market that's cheaper and faster. The Blue Ocean is where there is no competitor. They can do whatever they want. People love them, there's brand loyalty, and they could completely pivot and do different products, and people will follow them.
As always, no surprise, Apple sits in the Blue Ocean. Apple can pretty much bring out anything and we all flock to it. I have been using Apple products pretty much since I met my husband and he got me on to a white Mac and I have never looked back even when I started at MIMCO in 2013 or 2014. I said to my manager, “I'm sorry, I have not used a PC for seven years so I don't know how to use a PC. It will be much harder for me to use a PC than to give me a Mac and I'll know how it works.”
Even now, if I go to a workshop and someone's like, “We've got you set up on a PC,” I'm like, “I don't know how to use this.” I'm used to using Mac products, even though they are often more expensive, they're not necessarily the best in terms of technology, they always are changing their chargers. Every five seconds, you have to pay more for a different type of charger. It's not necessarily the easiest product to use but it plays in its ocean and that is hugely because of the positioning.
If you're interested in this stuff, you should look up one of the first ads that came out in the ‘80s from Apple Mac. They took out a full-page ad in the New York Times or something and it was all words. It was like, “We're for the thinkers and the doers.” It's a great example of positioning. It's not saying, “We sell computers. This is how you can buy them.” It's like, “What feeling are we putting out there? Where are we positioned? Who are we for?” Check out Blue Ocean Strategy, it's a great book. Check out Positioning by Al Ries, it's a great book. If you want to go and map things out in a Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas and have a look at how you differ from the rest of the market, you can find that at BlueOceanStrategy.com/tools/strategy-canvas.
We've done the positioning. The next thing is identity. In identity, some people will say, “This is your visual identity.” I think of it as your whole communications identity. In that, I would think of not just things like your logo, your letterhead, color palette, your typography. In typography, you can have your headings, your things in emphasis, and your standard body text. You'll have your color palette, your primary color palette, your secondary colors, you'll have your photography mock-up.
Do we have bright, fun photography? Do we have dark and moody photography even if we're using stock images? All these things are part of your visual collateral. That is a huge thing. That is a lot of the time what people will at first glance go by. It’s like when you meet a partner. You're going to go off and people will be like, “I'm not superficial.” We all have to be attracted to who it is that we're going to get it on with if I’m being frank.
It could be visual. You could look at someone and you're like, “They're gorgeous. I need to be near them.” It could be the sense of style they have and the way they carry themselves. If you're visually impaired, maybe it's their laughter and the way they talk. It could be the way they hold you. There are always things that we instantly gravitate towards and that's the same with a brand. As much as we may not want to admit it, the visuals are a huge proponent of that. That is why when I started this whole conversation, many people got that done because that is what we're almost been trained to look at as the brand.
In your identity, you've also got the actual tone of voice, the way that you come across. Often, there'll be a copywriter that will help you pull together your tone of voice, “Are we like this? Are we not like this?” I often work with people on a card sorting exercise to look at what's our message architecture. What's the way that we communicate? You can think of stationery brands and you can think of Smiggle, that's a fun tween stationery brand and accessories brand here in Australia. I don't know if it's global.
You've got Typo, which is Cotton On. You've got Smythson. They've got £700 notebooks. They're beautiful. People can have the same product and a different tone of voice. Even like what I was saying before, Go-To Skincare. Their tone of voice is part of their identity, it's part of the personality coming out.
You've got your identity. If you have never worked with a graphic designer, graphic design agency, or creative agency, check it out. There are so many visual brand identity checklists. There are questionnaires you can fill in online. Most good graphic designers will give you a questionnaire to fill in as well. Sometimes they'll give you a matrix and be like, “Mark where you are between these two opposites, fun and serious.”
When it comes to that, that is often where sometimes people get stuck because they haven't done any of this other work so they're like, “I don't know if I'm bold or serious.” “I don't know if I want to be funny or straight.” All these other things that I've talked about previous to this are where you get all of this understanding, you get, what are we doing? Where are we going? What are our core values? All of that can be helpful then to someone like a graphic designer who's going to take that and create your visual identity. Also, a copywriter who's going to take that and create this amazing tone of voice for you so you can scale the business and it's all consistent. It's a consistent brand message regardless of where you are.
I know that is a lot to take in but I hope that has made sense. If you have any questions about this, please make sure that you reach out to us, @MyDailyBusinessCoach. I went through things like your core values. We've got our Values Checklist and you can find that out MyDailyBusinessCoach.com/freestuff. We went through the business function, what you do, your personality, your mission, your vision, your positioning, and your identity. There are so many other elements of the brand equation, your culture, your communication strategy. You could spend a whole year looking at this stuff.
What I would love you to do is to think about that question that I posed at the beginning, “How much brand work have I done?” Think about which elements of the brand equation, which elements of what I've talked about are important for you to figure out. Maybe there are bottlenecks that keep coming up because we don't understand the core values. Maybe there are issues when you hire people that the tone of voice isn't correct or that you don't feel the brand communications are on point or on brand. That's maybe because you don't have a clear brand DNA. You don't have a style guide, you don't have a tone of voice document so you’re like, “That's what I'm going to work on for next year.”
Do keep in mind that if you're interested in this, please stay in touch with us because we're launching something fun in 2022. It’s something that I've decided to take out from working one-on-one with clients and group coaching and present it to the world so anyone can access it for an affordable rate. That is it for this episode.
We have a bunch of gift ideas over at MyDailyBusinessCoach.com/shop. If you're interested in buying something for this fun, festive season, for anyone in your life or even if you don't need the festive season as an excuse. Maybe there's someone in your life who's been awesome in 2021 and you want to give him a little thank you gift. We have everything over there from gift cards through to affordable eBooks.
Of course, you can find my book, Passion Purpose Profit: Sidestep the #hustle and build a business you love. It’s available anywhere online but also from so many small retailers, gift shops, and bookshops. If you are going to buy it, please try and support another small business owner by doing it. I don't sell the book directly myself. You can find everywhere that it is sold or at the Hardie Grant website or you can send me a DM and I'll send you a bunch of retailers near you that are small businesses that stock it.
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