Discovering Your Perfect Brand

Creating an attractive corporate brand for your business is one of the most important marketing elements to help gain customers. A bland brand means no sales, and the wrong brand can make you lose sales.

With a great brand that fits your business image perfectly, your business can soar.

But what is a good brand? Is it a nice business card? Is it the level of quality you offer? Is it just a catchy name?

It’s all that and more. It’s everything from the logo on your business card (you do have a business card, right?) to the design of your website to the values your business conveys. Brand is the perceived value and quality of your business.

When you’ve branded well, you’ve created a remarkable and distinct business image. It’s memorable. It’s easy to recognize. People know exactly what they get if they buy from you – before they even decide to purchase.

Your brand should capture:

• The emotion people feel when they think of your business
• The feeling they’ll achieve if they buy from you
• The overall impression that your business projects

How to find the right brand for you

Capturing all of these impressions can seem daunting at first, but there are few tricks that make finding your brand a little easier. By answering some questions, you can gain direction towards a perfect fit:

• What feeling do you want people to have when they think of your business? (E.g. Professional, friendly, authoritative, welcoming, committed, reliable, calm, etc)
• Fill in the blank: A consumer thinking of your business should say, “Wow, these guys seem really….”  (E.g. Fast, smart, professional, friendly, fun, different, etc)
• What type of personality do you have? (E.g. Fun, quiet, casual, dedicated, curious, whimsical, scientific, etc)
• What values do you want your business to project? (E.g. Equitable, competitive, socially conscious, eco-friendly, etc)

The more you learn about what impressions you want to convey, what your business represents and who you are, the closer you come to building your brand.

A few examples…

Jessie wants to open a computer repair shop. She wants people to feel comfortable with her, not overwhelmed by technology. She believes in helping other people and keeping prices low for families on budgets. Jessie is a very friendly person, and she likes having fun on the job. Her friends think she has lots of pizzaz too. Jessie wants to convey that high energy and fun-loving attitude to customers.

Jessie’s brand is: Energized, helpful, friendly, and fun.

Here’s another example:

Martha wants to open a small restaurant in a small town. She’s a kind, warm, caring woman, and she’s always mothering people. She wants to provide nutritious meals with a home-cooked taste and a heartwarming comfort-food feeling. She decided to call her restaurant “Gramma’s Goodness,” and she’d love for people to feel right at home.

Martha’s brand is: Warm, comforting, welcoming and caring.

It’s all about emotion

Notice that much of building a brand has everything to do with emotion and very little to do with actual pricing. A good brand makes people feel something. It resonates with consumers on a deeper level beyond what they want to buy and the price they’re going to pay.

Think about some big-name brands, like Apple, Toyota, or Campbell’s. When you think of one of the large brand-name corporations, what kind of feeling do you get? What do you think they stand for? What emotions do they convey? Every brand tries to represent a certain lifestyle or personality to resonate with targeted consumers.

And it works.

Once you’ve figured out your business identity and image, you can start creating marketing materials like a logo, a business card, and a website… All properly branded so you can achieve maximum success.