A Fast and Easy Branding Exercise to Find Purpose and Focus

A novice-friendly exercise to discover your essence in under an hour.

Branding is everything when it comes to success.

We commonly think of branding as the most superficial parts of your business — the design of your logo, the colours and typefaces of your “house style”, maybe you come up with a snappy tagline.

But successful branding cuts deeper than that. Branding should emanate from the very core of what you do, no matter what you do. It’s what distinguishes your business and communicates value to your customers.

Good branding can align every aspect of your business with your ethos and values, bringing with it focus and energy. It smooths operations, motivates employees, and turns customers into vocal fans at no additional cost. It’s pure alchemy.

The following exercise is the fastest branding exercise I can think of. It’ll very quickly help you understand your enterprise — the good, the bad and the ugly — to improve every aspect of your business or non-profit and discover your brand.

It’s built to easily scale — suitable for corporations, charities, small businesses or freelancers. In fact, you can even use it as a personal branding exercise — it’s a great place to start when you re-enter the job market or pivot to a new industry.

To get started, all you’ll need is a board and some post-it notes.

Draw a vertical line on a board and at the top write “most distinctive” and at the bottom write “least distinctive”. Now think about the main aspects of your business — what are the most and least distinctive in relation to the competitive field?

Using the post-it notes, write down all the aspects of your business on a scale from most distinctive at the top, to least distinctive at the bottom.

Let’s explore some examples as we do this. Take Ikea — I would say that what makes this company most distinctive is its value for money. Ikea is well-known for its obsession in giving customers value, it is simply cheaper than any other mainstream homewares store.

It’s also Swedish, and wears its Swedishness on its sleeve (we'll get to that), which makes it somewhat distinctive. It operates through huge warehouse stores, and it’s principally a home furnishings retailer. The latter fact is the least distinctive thing about Ikea beyond the fact that it’s a retail company.

So using four simple aspects of Ikea’s business, the board should look like this:

Let’s use another example — an equally famous and simple one. For Apple, I would say that beautiful design is the most distinctive thing about the company. No other tech manufacturer comes close to the beauty of Apple products.

Then I’d say simplicity comes next — Apple prides itself on the idea that its products “just work”, and they do.

That Apple offers services such as Apple Music and Apple TV is somewhat less distinctive—an Apple laptop is very distinct from other laptops, but how distinct are Apple TV and Apple Music from the likes of Netflix and Spotify? Not much. And, least of all distinctive from its rivals is of course that it makes electronics and software.

Value

Now bisect your vertical line with a horizontal line, leaving an equal amount of cards above and below the line. Write “more valued” on the far left, and “less valued” on the far right. How are each of the aspects of the company valued by customers?

At this point, you can survey your customers*, but you can also take an educated guess if you like.

Your post-it notes should be placed along the vertical line from most to least distinctive, so now move them either to the left or to the right depending on how valued they are to the customer.

As an example I’ll use Ikea again — customers appreciate the low cost of its goods most of all. That card is near the top, so it’ll move into the top left quadrant of the board. Less valued is its "Swedishness" — nobody shops at Ikea simply because it’s Swedish, it’s not a compelling reason.

That it has big stores is less attractive to people — we don’t like driving out of town and wandering around huge stores. That it is a home furnishing company is more valued — we need furnishings, and we tend to enjoy shopping for them.

There are more facets of the company you can consider, your board could have dozens of post-its if necessary. But for the sake of simplicity, I’m using one for each quadrant.

So Ikea’s board now looks something like this.

Now you’ll notice that each quadrant has a label. Let’s explore each one.

The “Essence” of the Company

The top left quadrant — both distinctive and valued, is the “Essence” of your brand. What is meant by “essence”? The essence is an invisible aspect of something that makes it what it is. If you took away the essence, a thing would no longer be what it is.

The essence is really the purpose of the company. It is the fundamental reason for the company’s existence. Without it, the company would be like any other company. You don’t want your company to be confused with other companies in the mind of the customer, you want to be utterly distinct.

From its early history, Ikea’s ethos has been to drive down the cost of home furnishings. No aspect of the business is untouched by this drive — from the layout and scale of stores, to innovative flatpack designs and supply chain efficiencies, Ikea strives to cut costs for the customer. This “essence” is what has made Ikea a world-champion brand.

Your essence should drive your marketing and PR. Your essence is what is distinct from the competition and valued to your customers, and so must be front and centre of any publicity campaigns, adverts, website and so on.

The “Soul” of the Company

The top right quadrant — distinctive from competitors but less valued by your customers, is the Soul. The soul is the way the company behaves, it's the “look and feel”.

This is an important part of the way the company operates — even if the customer does not value it as much as the essence, it is still a distinctive aspect of the company that allows it to act differently from other companies.

Everything in your “soul” quadrant should drive the values of the company. The most positive aspects of the Swedish national character are embraced by Ikea, it gives the company a sense of pride and drive.

The “Face” of the Company

The bottom left quadrant — less distinctive but more valued by customers, is the Face of the company. This is the visible appearance of the company to consumers. It’s really the “What” of the company: what you make, or what you do.

The face of the company is intrinsically valued by customers because there is a market for it. If there were no value to consumers in home furnishings or computers, Ikea and Apple wouldn’t exist.

Everything in the “Face” quadrant is what you need to infuse with your “essence” and your “soul”. Your front-line teams should walk-the-walk and talk-the-talk of what’s in those two top quadrants.

Take Apple — it’s a computer company that has stores, packaging and customer service that’s infused with simplicity and beautiful design. Shopping in the Apple Store is a simple and pleasurable experience. Apple’s corporate identity and style is equally clean, elegant and simple.

Then Ikea — it's a company that literally wraps itself in the Swedish national colours, it serves Swedish food at its stores. Value for money is at the heart of the way the stores are laid out and its furniture is designed. The essence shapes the physical footprint of Ikea, which turned its warehouses into stores to maximize efficiency and pass on the saving to customers.

The “Shadow” of the Company

The bottom right quadrant — less distinctive and less valued by customers, is the Shadow of the company. This is the inevitable but unfortunate part of the company that has to compete in some way.

The shadow is the part of the company that the brand must minimize, it is the part that you seek to either shrink or turn into a positive. Everything in the “Shadow” quadrant is your challenge — how do you change it for the better, minimize or dispose of it?

For example, Apple’s shadow in the example above is services. Its Apple TV+ in particular is really just a Netflix clone, a lesser one at that. Apple could have shaken up the market in television sets as it had done with computers, smart phones and personal music players if it had created beautiful and easy-to-use televisions, instead it gave us a mediocre online service and a nondescript plug-in accessory.

Ikea created their famous one-way trails to make the shopping experience easier in large stores — and sell more goods, by putting everything in front of customers. This idea helps align the least distinguished and valued aspect of Ikea with its vision and purpose.

This branding exercise is a quick audit of what is good and not-so-good about your company. Essentially, it's about finding what gives your brand the most distinction and value in the eyes of the customer.

Doing this speedy exercise will also help you cut to the core of your business, it’ll throw more light on some structural advantages or disadvantages you may have underplayed or overlooked. It’s a basis for reconsidering the way your company operates, as well as the way it looks and communicates.

What is least distinct and valued — everything in the company’s “shadow” quadrant — is important to understand. Considerations of changing or minimizing the shadow would be at the heart of any business transformation.

What’s in the “essence” quadrant you need to protect, nurture and grow — it’s the arrow that points to success.

* You can do a much more thorough version of the exercise with customer and employee survey data. In fact, if you include these questions with rating-scale answers in your survey, you can plot out the chart with exactitude - based on coordinates your data gives you.