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Successful branding begins with a well-defined brand that is RELEVANT to your market. You might think that since you have a logo, tagline, and business card, you've completed your branding. But, unless you've carefully considered and defined ALL five of the key brand elements—position, promise, personality traits, story, and associations—you still have work to do.
And, until you've infiltrated your brand into every level of your organization and built the discipline of CONSISTENCY into every behavior, action, or communication—both internally and externally—you are not yet on the path to a successful brand strategy.
Five Key Brand Elements:
- Brand Position
The Brand Position is the part of the brand that describes what your organization
does and for whom, what your unique value is and how a customer benefits from working with you or your product/service, and what key differentiation you have from your competition. Once you've defined your brand position, make it available in 25, 50, and 100 word versions.
- Brand Promise
The Brand Promise is the single most important thing that the organization promises to deliver to its customers—EVERY time. To come up with your brand promise, consider what customers, employees, and partners should expect from every interaction with you. Every business decision should be weighed against this promise to be sure that a) it fully reflects the promise, or b) at the very least it does not contradict the promise.
- Brand Personality
Brand Traits illustrate what the organization wants its brand to be known for. Think about specific personality traits you want prospects, clients, employees, and partners to use to describe your organization. You should have 4-6 traits (5 is ideal), each being a single term (usually an adjective).
- Brand Story
The Brand Story illustrates the organization's history, along with how the history adds value and credibility to the brand. It also usually includes a summary of your products or services.
- Brand Associations
Brand Associations are the specific physical artifacts that make up the brand. This is your name, logo, colors, taglines, fonts, imagery, etc. Your brand associations must reflect your brand promise, ALL of your brand traits, and support your brand positioning statement.
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The Sales and Marketing Toolkits BUNDLED contains:
- Over 60 sales and marketing templates (DOC, XLS, PPT, and PDFs)
- Loads of "how-to" articles and examples
- 8 Training sessions (MP3 audio files) for your computer or iPod
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