How do you craft a brand vision that inspires and guides your team?

To craft a brand vision that inspires and guides, it's crucial to understand your brand essence. Your brand essence encapsulates the unique qualities and purpose of your brand. It's the heart and soul of your brand, shaping its mission, values, personality, and strengths. To uncover your brand essence, reflect on questions like: What is your brand's mission? What values and beliefs does it uphold? How does your brand's personality and tone resonate with your audience? What sets your brand apart from competitors? By delving into your brand's essence, you can create a vision that aligns with its core identity and resonates with your target audience, guiding your brand towards success.

One thing I found helpful in discovering your brand essence is to conduct a brainstorming session with your team or even your loyal customers. You can ask them to describe your brand in three words and see what patterns emerge. For example, if multiple people say "innovative", "bold", and "cutting-edge", it might suggest that your brand is all about pushing boundaries and breaking conventions. Another fun and engaging way to discover your brand essence is to create a brand mood board. You can gather images, colors, typography, and other visual elements that represent your brand and arrange them in a collage. This can help you visualize your brand essence and inspire your brand vision.

It is always best to do a test run - beta testing. Ask those groups of people what they think of your product. What emotions were came up for them when experiencing or using your goods/ services? What action would they take from that emotion. If you are a startup- getting the founders and having a mind mapping/ brainstorm session on what they think you stand for and their, individual, why. What is their reason for putting their heart and soul into your goods or services; Every employee brings their own unique brand DNA and the most successful startups have an interesting blend of individuals with diverse backgrounds and personalities. Happy selling!

My pro tip here would be that you don't "craft" a brand essence, you discover it. In order for it to work, it has to be authentic. You can often find it in the personality of the founder, the reason the organization was started, the culture that has developed, or a mission that everyone believes in. Whatever nuggets you find, those are where you lean in, refine, polish, build alignment, etc.

Is the purpose of a watch just to tell time? If so, we'd all wear the same functional black and white watch. But people select and pay premiums to wear watches that express their unique values, identity, and aspirations. A Timex or Swatch watch says something completely different than a Rolex or Hermés Apple watch. Defining that indispensable quality between the watchmaker and watch-buyer is an example of brand essence. Humans are the only species that imbue inanimate objects with meanings and qualities beyond the literal and function. A rock can be a rock, or it can be Stonehenge. A tree trunk can be a totem pole, a religious symbol, or a sculpture. Understanding your brand entails locating that meaning beyond the literal and functional.

One thing I've found helpful when it comes to creating a strong brand is defining your brand ambition. It's not just about your brand essence, but also your long-term vision and the impact you want to make on the world. Your brand ambition should motivate and challenge your team, and be the ultimate goal you strive towards. For example, take a look at Nike's brand ambition to "bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world" - it's a powerful statement that has guided the company for decades. So ask yourself, what is your brand's vision, legacy, and role in society? By defining your brand ambition, you'll have a clear direction to guide your content creation and overall brand strategy.

No matter how sophisticated and evolved our society is, people have views and opinions about how the world is out of balance, and they look for entities, such as brands, that can help put the world back in balance. One of the world's most respected brands, Patagonia, aims to correct what it sees wrong with our manufacturing and consumption problems. Some brands, like The Container Store, aren't so large in their scope and just want to help put your closet and drawers back in order. Others, like The Honest Company, believe the chemicals used in household products are dangerous to our families and want to put the way we clean our homes back in order. Great brands have a strong opinion on how the world is out of balance and how to fix it.

When writing a brand vision statement, aim for a concise and clear statement that inspires and motivates. Focus on the future, align with your brand values, and connect with your target audience. Make it authentic, unique, and, if possible, measurable. Involve key stakeholders, revise as needed, and communicate it widely to guide your team and unify their actions toward your brand's long-term goals.

Branding is about change and helping people transform themselves for the better in some way, shape, or form. Therefore, your brand vision should describe how your product, service, and offering transform people. This statement should include your active ingredients and catalytic qualities that spark this change for target audiences. It should have a sticky, memorable, and poetic battle cry that rallies the troops, inspires greatness, and motivates action.

In communicating your brand vision, be highly adaptive to each audience: - To prospective clients, articulate the vision in a way that gets them to see how it will help them overcome their biggest obstacles. - To referrers, articulate the vision such that they understand how it supports their efforts in maintaining positive relationships with their networks. - To your team, articulate the vision in a manner that helps everyone understand the value of their contributions as a group and go beyond that to help each individual understand the value of their contributions specifically, not leaving anyone behind.

Far too many companies allow their brands to operate as an oral history within the organization but haven't made the concerted effort to codify their brand in specific terms. They avoid this brand codification because getting their leaders to agree on a unified definition of their brand is too hard. This lack of codification leads everyone in the organization to have a slightly different view of the brand and float around according to the whims of the market, competitor actions, or quarterly projections. But, like strong countries or religions, organizations must codify their values and beliefs into a shared document that can be communicated to all those entrusted with carrying the brand into the world. These docs can be amended as needed.

Humans aren't static entities content with things as is. Instead, they're constantly moving, evolving, and shifting their hopes, dreams, fears, and aspirations with the times. Successful brands embrace a similar fluidity by being aware of the topics of national discussion and evolving their brands to address the times. This fluidity doesn't mean a brand should change its values or beliefs willy-nilly. However, brands that get themselves in trouble are often rigidly fixed and statically stuck with one generational viewpoint that eventually becomes a stereotype and caricature of its former self. Organizations need Brand Stewardship Committees whose duty it is to monitor the brand's health, vitality, and livelihood as it relates to audiences.

In my experience, the best way to create a vision and mission that will inspire is to involve your team and employees in the process. Employees that feel connected to the vision and mission live the brand and embody the brand in their work. Survey your employees and invite the leadership to join brand sessions.

Your brand vision is the apex of why your brand exists in the first place. It's not your product, service, or team/employees. Your vision will guide and help craft all those things and more - ergo brand symbiosis. We all have heard, "We need to stay on brand before", well all things should ladder back up to your brand vision and mission. Your brand vision should be crafted from what inspired you to develop your business. Who are you (as a business)? What impact/change do you intend to have on the world? This creates an authentic statement that drives a brand vision. Your team should be hired and inspired by their personal alignment and/or connection with that vision. They can also influence/help refine it. Your brand vision is the compass.