Take Your Brand and Stuff It

Some brands are stretched so thin that it’s easy to see where customer perceptions and brand advocacy are going to fail. Here are four ways to fill your brand with the stuff that will get the attention of your target audiences and transform buyers into brand advocates in the New Year.

Branding was one of the most popular business buzzwords of the early 2000’s, coming into its own and hitting its stride about a decade ago. Like many other buzzwords-gone-bad, overuse has all but stripped it of its power as it is used to define everything from a brand’s visual identity to the perceptions that exist in the minds of anyone and everyone who ever heard of the business at all.

For many marketing professionals, branding became a series of technical activities done to assign meaning to a brand. Writing a meaningful mission and vision statement, to filling out the blanks in the business plan where marketing goals, strategies, tactics and measures should go, to designing attention-getting visuals and ads – many business owners assumed that the more of these activities were checked off the to-do list, the stronger their brand would be. And the stronger their brand would become, the easier it would be to attract first-time customers and ultimately turn them into loyal patrons and a defacto word of mouth marketing force.

Only it rarely worked, for two reasons.

One, a tendency of marketing and business owners to build a brand identity they wished they had, without actually and honestly transforming their organization in order to do so.

And two, the assumption that designing (or describing) these various elements of a brand’s identity was the end of the process, rather than the introduction.

Because a brand, like a person, is both affected by and has the power to affect (to one degree or another) the environment in which it exists. It has the power to evolve. In fact, like a person, it has the choice to evolve relative to the people it identifies as being most important to itself, or to stagnate, or to actually change in ways that damages its relationships with the people it says it wants most to please.

This being the case, why not think of your brand not as a visual or philosophical representation of your business, but as though it were a person; and in the New Year, take on the task of helping it to evolve so that it can do what it set out to do and can best serve those it has pledged to serve?

By infusing your brand with the ‘stuff’ it needs to get the attention of your target markets and turn first time customers into repeat buyers, loyal patrons and brand advocates, you will take your brand past its infancy and turn it from what it is today, to what you envision it can become tomorrow.

Take Your Brand and Stuff It: 4 Ways to Build Brand Awareness and Affinity in 2015

Get Honest

When you first realize that your customers – and even members of your staff – don’t agree with the ideals you believe to be true of your brand, it’s going to hurt (at least a little). But if you look at your brand through rose-colored glasses, you aren’t going to be seeing it as it really is.

Get In Touch

If you’re ready for honest feedback, there are probably dozens (if not hundreds) of stakeholders who can help you find out where your brand is falling short and come up with creative suggestions on how to improve among your customers, employees, vendors, suppliers, peers, neighbors, spouses, siblings, children, friends, and others in your professional and personal networks.

Get Specific

Once you know where your brand really is (compared to where – or what – you really want it to be), it’s time to get specific. Identify the strategies and tactics that will take your brand from cliché to contender in your industry or locale.

Get Tough

As your brand evolves toward the ideal you want it to become, there will be instances where tough decisions must be made. You might have to let go of staff members who do not want to accompany you on the journey. You might have to stop trying to accommodate people who aren’t among your ideal buyer types. And the way might not always be clear – but the more specific and clear your vision, and the more determined you are to do what it takes to get there, the more likely it will happen.

You might also like: 3 Ways to Keep Your Brand Alive Forever (365daysofmarketing.wordpress.com)

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My 2015 Small Business Marketing Calendar is available on amazon.com, and it’s packed with marketing inspiration and a working calendar that you can use to attract – engage – retain and motivate your customers in the coming year.