How To Find Your Brand Essence

* You can find the full e-book detailing how to find your brand essence here*

A brand according to a graphic designers is your logo, colors, and website. If you ask a PR expert they will say your brand is your reputation. Ask a product manager and you’ll hear that a brand is the value the customers associate with your product. If you think any of the above are true, your definition of a brand is wrong. “A brand is the emotional and mental feeling the public has when they interact with you and your business.” (Marty Neumier).

A brand is about the experience a customer goes through
When you think about it, marketing has always been about the art of transferring emotions. It’s about changing how people feel and, in turn, helping them to fall in love with something, or maybe just a little bit more in love with themselves.  A strong brand is one that creates ideas and experiences that give people reasons to care and to belong, not just reasons to choose.  
What makes a brand unique is the difference it creates—how it affects people’s lives and becomes part of their story. When you are able to create difference, not just to be different, the result is much harder to replicate

Fifty years ago, the focus of business was more. Be the biggest, sell the most and dominate the market. Today the focus shifted from more to matter— to do something that creates difference, that matters to people, something they can relate to because they can experience it.
Starbucks didn’t invent coffee, and Apple didn’t invent the smartphone; these companies simply created new experiences of them, they told a different story that created a whole new set of meanings that we attached to what were once commodities.  
A brilliant example for this type of marketing – one that matters – is the story of 30 seconds to mars. On the surface it’s another rock band, but if you look closer, it’s so much more than that…
People who consider themselves fans are part of a movement, a cult even. To be a fan is to declare what you believe in and take action to follow your dreams.

You can’t begin to tell a story without understanding why that story should matter to the people you want to serve
So how do you start writing your story? The first thing you should do is lay out everything that you consider to be your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). These are the highlights of what you provide and how it’s unique. Even if you haven’t put any thoughts into branding yet, you know your product or service and can describe what you consider to be the differentiating factors.
Once you have your USPs, look at each criteria and ask yourself “so what?” the answers for these questions would be your RTBs – reasons to believe. This is the backbone of the story.
Now it’s time to take the next step and find your one core value. The hedgehog method or the 3 circles is taken from a great book by Jim Collins called “Good to Great” (It’s a bit old but still an awesome book. A must for any marketer). You start by asking yourself three questions:

1. What you can be the best in the world at. This goes beyond core competences.
   Make sure you also define clearly what you don’t do.
2. What drives your economic engine? How to most affectively generate sustained and robust cash flow profitability (a single denominator).
3. What you are deeply passionate about. The idea is not to stimulate passion but to discover what makes you passionate.

“A hedgehog concept is not a goal to be the best, a strategy to be the best, an intention to be the best, a plan to be the best. It is an understanding of what you can be best at” (Jim Collins, Good to Great).

Imagine this, if you were a chef, you wouldn’t try to cook 50 types of cuisines – you’ll master one and do it very well. If you choose sushi, you’ll do it perfectly over and over again until you become a master. It’s like a mantra. Stick to what you understand and let your abilities, not your ego determine what you attempt.

This exercise seems easy, but it’s probably the hardest one to do. My recommendation – get a few people in the company to do it separately and then have a group meeting and share your thoughts. It will take a while to really “nail” it, but after a few iterations you’ll have your core answers.
I also recommend doing this exercise before you research your competitors. Once you know how they differentiate themselves you are biased.

Market Research
The next step in this process is to understand the market. After all, this is your playground.
The best way I know to do this is by doing a SWOT analysis. This is actually one of the only useful models you learn when you do an MBA. Start with a simple brainstorming to find every strength, weakness, opportunity and threat in the market.

Now that you are familiar with the playground, it’s time for some corporate espionage (or market research) – do some basic spying and figure out who are your competitors, how do they differentiate, what is their positioning and how are they perceived. I like to do this using a simple table or excel sheet and I add categories as I go.

If you want to have a more visual tool, I recommend using the Strategy Canvas from the Blue Ocean Strategy book to find where there might be a gap in the market. This tool helps you create a visual comparison between the different players in the market, by rating them on a set of categories.
This is called a “value-curve” and it is usually used to review the state of an industry, but we’ll harness this exercise to study the competition. You can start with the information you have already collected in your previous work and dig deeper to identify emotions and experiences customers go through when they use or buy products from your competitors. Once you have them compared, you can analyze the "white space", the uncharted territory - this is the area where other companies are not competing. Use this space to discover areas for your brand to shine and be unique [Example].

To better articulate it you can use an “only” statement: a competitive advantage only your company can claim. The formula looks like this: (company) is the only (what you are) that (does this specific thing) in (your specific market). For Example, Starbucks is the only coffeehouse that offers a European coffee experience. Use everything you learned by doing the hedgehog exercise to help you write a few “only” statements until you can narrow it down to one.

Last but not least is mapping out your audience:

To be able to understand your customers you need to go beyond looks, you have to understand their personality. It’s not enough to group them into general categories like “students”, you’ll want to have a specific description (persona) – one that is so clear in your mind, that you will be able to use it to make product related decisions by asking “will X like it?”  

I usually start with the obvious and build from there. Imagine your dream customer, your die-hard fan, the one type of person you know will love your product. Start describing this customer as if it was your best friend. Give them a name, describe how they look, how old they are, what they like to do. Are they athletic? Do they read? What are their goals and dreams? Once you have the big picture start narrowing it down into personality traits. You can use this diagram to help you focus.

To help you figure out who is your dream customer do some research: If you characterized your audience as a specific age group (for example millennials) – look for relevant research online. If you know who your main competitor is, research their audience. Find out who likes them.
The best way to know and understand your audience though, is to talk to them. If you are running a startup you already know that, and you probably have a few users or beta testers. Talk to them, ask questions and figure out why your product worked for THEM.

Finding your customers is not enough. There are more than 6.6M new businesses opened every year. How do you differentiate? How do you stay original?

people don’t buy features, they buy promises. They buy the fortune, not the cookie; the experience, not just the raw ingredients.
Example: Airbnb made people long to experience a destination like a local without the $8 price tag for nuts from the mini-bar. They changed how people view the experience of travel. Before it was about how much value you can get while paying less, now it’s about what kind of adventure you are going to have. Air bnb didn’t compete with the existing hospitality market, they created a different category. Same goes for snapchat. At the beginning it seemed weird to have one more messaging app, one more “social platform”, but snapchat is successful because it delivers a completely different experience. It’s exciting, you only have a few seconds to watch a photo or video before they disappear forever. Due to this mechanism people are more daring, spontaneous. You can’t edit the photos to make you look great, you just go with what you have. It’s real, it’s in the moment and feels more intimate. This is a completely different experience than uploading a photo to Instagram.

The secret to successful brands, they all have an “essence”. A brand essence is the distillation of what you stand for and the experience you offer into one or two words. Your story needs to revolve around that essence and how it will make your customers feel.

Before you can pin point that essence you should articulate the following based on all the exercises you did so far:

1. Define what it is that you want customers to feel when they meet your product. How does it affect them? How does it help them love with themselves a bit more?
2. Your brand persona – just like you built a persona for your customers, now it’s time to build a persona for your brand and describe who it would be if it were a person. I love to use real examples like characters from a movie or TV show. It helps me visualize and it’s easy for others to relate.
3. Write your mission and your vision – these are critical drivers and they will help you write your story.

At this point you have everything you need to define you essence, the hard part is to crystallize it into one coherent line, but don’t worry, it will happen.

Summary

I’ll be honest, you can’t just create a brand, the same way you can’t just create a winning product. You need to dig deep and find what makes you unique. You have to believe in it and commit to it. Consistency is key here – if you want to have a brand you have to stick to the story and make every decision based on who you are and what you stand for.

You can download the full e-book on how to find your brand essence here.