Your Brand Is Who You Are

I find that a lot of business owners confuse marketing with branding. They might say things like “I want our brand to be synonymous with quality!” or “Our reputation is that we have great customer service.”

On the surface, these all seem like reasonable things to say. After all, who wouldn’t want their brand to be associated with quality and great customer service?

And therein lies the problem, because nobody wouldn’t want that. At least nobody who wants to have a thriving, successful business.

Things like quality products, great services, or outstanding customer care should be considered the cost of admission to being in business. Everybody who is a viable competitor can and does claim the same thing.

In the quest to make yourself stand out, you really end up doing everything humanly possible to blend in and become invisible.

What’s in a name?

Let’s start with naming your business. As a designer, I dream of clients coming my way with unique business names - names that stand out from the crowd and make people ask “Where did you get that name?”

The name of your business tells people right from the start how unique they can expect you to be in your industry.

That’s why my personal brands all have names like Fuelblue, Planet Bonehead, and Be a Rock Star - not Quality Graphic Design, Awesome Kids Cartoons, and Bobby’s Web TV Show.

The name of your business is an opportunity to grab attention, remain memorable, and elevate yourself above the crowd. But all too many businesses simply paste meaningless words like “Superior” or “Best”, or the owner’s name in front of what they do or make - as in “Superior Business Thingie” or “Best Widgets” or “Smith Business Service”.

In my opinion, you may as well name your company “Acme Generic Stuff”, because they’re all just as meaningless, and forgettable.

Your brand is who you are!

I often speak about how a brand is nothing more than a mental image that people have of you. What people think about you is your brand.

We all have the power to shape that image through our branding efforts.

Quality products and services, outstanding customer care, and attention to detail should be at the core of any business. But these things are not your brand - nor anyone else’s. They’re simply the bare minimum that people expect from any business they deal with.

And I don’t think you set out to say “Our brand is that we provide the absolute bare minimum that people might expect of us.”

Your best asset is yourself.

It may be true that you and all your competitors are trying to establish yourselves as the best at this or that. But you have one thing that they will never have: you.

As CEO, you set the tone of the business. You get to decide what doing business with you is like. And you get to determine how to project that.

You might inject some unexpected qualities like humor, cleverness, or sarcasm into your marketing materials. Contrary to popular belief, you’re allowed to show off the fact that you’re a human being with a personality. Businesses do not need to be stoic, sterile institutions, devoid of any passion or character.

In fact, if you think of some of your own favorite businesses to deal with, it’s usually because of the people, or the person, behind it.

Your customers are human.

They want to deal with other caring humans who love, and feel, and think, and who have passions for the things that make life worth living.

So please, stop speaking at your prospects and customers about how “state-of-the-art” your widgets are, or how your service is “exceedingly superior” to everyone else’s.

Nobody hears that. Nobody connects to it.

Tell them instead about how your love for the opera led you on the path to your current industry; or how your passion for animals inspired you to develop this new gadget; or how your life long fascination with space travel sparked the idea for your latest and greatest service.

They don’t have to love the same things you love. They just have to love you.

=========================================

Read this on my website: https://www.fuelblue.com/incite/your-brand-is-who-you-are

Other articles I write:https://www.fuelblue.com/incite

My video series: https://www.fuelblue.com/fuelbluetv

=========================================