The Brand Pyramid

I'm just getting ready to run a master class and I wanted to share with you all the core of the master class, what it's about and why it matters to businesses. It's all about pyramids and I don't mean ancient pyramids that one finds in Egypt or South America which are absolutely amazing in their own right. The pyramid I'm talking about is the most important pyramid in business. It is the number one thing that I think differentiates businesses from each other and helps them create space, better positioning and helps them ultimately out position their competition.

The pyramid I'm talking about is a brand pyramid.

If you don't have a strong brand pyramid I think it's going to be really difficult to confidently command the conversation in your market.

As you will have seen from many of my previous videos and blogs it really is all about commanding the conversation. In order to command the conversation you have to out position your competition, and of course out positioning is more desirable than outspending. So in order to out position perfectly, one has to get the brand pyramid right.

There are four primary elements to the brand pyramid;

Brand and Strapline,

USP

WOW

Your Content Core

Let's look at the first piece brand and strapline.

Brand and strapline are obviously the bit that most people see, more than anything else, they see your brand identification, your logo, your avatars on social. They see the strap line either in association with your brand or on the back of a business card or in the hero image of your website. Those two pieces have to work really well together, for me one of them has to be aspirational and the other one has to be logical. One of the pieces of the brand and strapline piece has to be very very black and white and the other one can appeal to an emotional sentiment.

For example TepFu the art of disruptive marketing. TepFu doesn't mean anything to anyone, but the art of disruptive marketing very clearly tells people where we are and what we're about. It's something to do with marketing, it's clearly disruptive, and the interesting bit about my strapline is 'the art of' is there for a very strong reason and that's to signify that marketing is both science and art, and I'm interested in the art.

The second piece of the brand pyramid is the USP.

The USP complements the brand and strapline really well, because whilst one of those is logical and aspirational the USP has to be absolutely scientific.

What I mean by that is it has to really really nail down what's uniquely different about you that no one else can talk about, that genuinely allows you to out position the competition.

For me the USP of TepFu is that we're the only marketing leadership coaching business in the UK. We believe that to be true, we don't know of any other marketing leadership coaches. That again further positions us, not just being focused on the art of disruptive marketing, but focused on leadership, coaching and being quite unique in the UK.

The next piece of the brand pyramid gets really really interesting, it has to be an emotionally charged, emotionally connecting piece and this is what we call:

The WOW phrase.

For TepFu our WOW phrase is;

We’re in it all the way to ensure you create sustainable marketing growth and leadership in the business.

We're in it all the way to ensure that you create sustainable marketing growth in the business, with no half measure. If you're a client of ours and we're allowed to serve you, then that's what we are vested in. We have to get you to growth and we have to get you to sustainable growth. That means that we can step away, as we did for a senior partner at a law firm last year, where we were able to step away having built the perfect marketing structure for them. Perfect for them at the time, hopefully for the next few years they will be in a very sustainable place, and that absolutely fills us with joy and we got a fantastic testimonial from the client confirming that “they were delighted. Sad to see us go and now we can talk about phase 2” but TepFu had done their job.

We're absolutely committed to being there with our clients to ensure that they achieve sustainable marketing growth beyond TepFu. It's not about TepFu being there as an agency.

So what's your WOW?

What's your USP?

What's your Strapline?

What's your Brand?

Last but not least the final piece of the brand pyramid that underpins it all is the content core.

This is typically three things that we want our clients to focus on talking about in relation to their brand. These three things form the basis of the pyramid on top of which the WOW, the USP, the brand and strapline are positioned on top of.

The content core should be the three content buckets that you focus on, without deviation, 99% of the time certainly. That when people see content from you it should be falling in line with one of these three buckets.

The reason why this is really important is because you couldn't build a pyramid on a shifting foundation, and you can't build a brand on a shifting foundation of different content that's constantly changing.

Brand is about familiarity more than anything else.

Whilst they'll get used to your logo and they'll get used to your strapline, it's the content that you're going to engage with them in the most. That content has to develop a consistency, both a voice and of substance. You have to talk to the right audience about the right things, and nothing helps you define that more succinctly than the right content core.

Get it right at the brand pyramid phase and all you've got to do is roll that into strategy, roll that into plan, and roll that into execution.

For us it's that simple.

It isn't rocket science, lots of marketing can come across as rocket science because I don't think people understand really what good and simple looks like. For us it's really simple, have a really strong brand pyramid, let that roll into strategy, let that roll into plan and let that roll into execution. If you get that right 80/20 principle dictates that your marketing will be far better than most of your competition, if not all of your competition.

That's how we out position. Of course we get to talk about all of that at the marketing leadership masterclass we run in June and July and onwards, and in our marketing leadership masterminds that we are running from July onwards, which we're very excited about.

But don't forget, get your brand pyramid right: brand, strapline, USP, Wow, content core.

I'd love to hear about your brand pyramids. Let us know if you have one and if you want to talk about yours please do get in touch.