3 Principles of Killer Branding by Richard Bailey

3 Principles

of Killer Branding High-performance marketing method, training & tools.

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The Bottom Line: Your branding strategy should focus on what you want people to think, feel, and remember when they look at your product or service. Branding is about presenting your organization and its offering consistently – and getting people excited about it – internally as well as externally. Take into account who else is messaging to your market, and how your target customers think, then translate that understanding into your design. When an entrepreneurial team designs a new logo, or sees their new brochure or website for the first time, it’s incredibly exciting. It creates tremendous energy as they face the market, because they feel like they can walk through walls with the power of that brand.

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As powerful as that excitement is, it’s only a small part of the purpose of branding. Internally, branding is meant to make sure that everyone in your organization represents, articulates, discusses, and presents your product in a consistent way. If it’s exciting for your internal team, that motivation is an added bonus!

although it uses look and feel, and it’s not just words, although it uses words. It is actually something more along the lines of an emergent property of the collective whole. It’s hard to put your finger on it, but it’s when people refer to things as “That’s cool!” or “That really makes me feel like this is worth a lot of money.”

The more obvious and more important part of branding, of course, is the external purpose –

It’s highly unlikely that many of the purses being sold today for $5,000 or $10,000 are actually worth that, if you broke it down on a bill-of-materials basis. In fact, they may be worth far less – orders of magnitude less. Yet, those high-end brands are able to garner those kinds of returns, because they create an overall sense of luxury for their buyers.

presenting a cohesive and consistent message to the right prospects about what your product or service stands for, and what it promises to do. Branding is not just a look and feel,

Branding

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In a sense, consumers of these luxury products actually want to be sold the idea behind that luxury product, not just the utility of the product itself. After all, a basic recycled shopping bag could serve the function of a $10,000 purse for about $9,990 less! Your branding strategy has to take into account a couple of key elements. One is what is it you want people to think about, to feel, or to remember when

they look at your product or service as it’s represented. (Notice, this does apply to services. Accenture, PWC, Bain, and other major consulting firms that are pure service players, absolutely pay attention to branding – while of course, physical products such as Nike and Coca-Cola clearly have written the book on branding.)

So, branding strategy has to be focused on objectives first What makes it a strategy is thinking about how you are going to go about making that feeling or thought happen in the mind of your target market.

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The 3 Principles of Branding Strategy are: PRINCIPLE 1: POSITION TO WIN For that, you need to know

how your goal or desired position fits within the competitive space that you exist in. It would be very hard to compete with Nike in sneakers with an alternative to “Just Do It,” something along the lines of “Make it Happen.” It would be seen as a pretty shameless copycat, and have no power at all, even though in and of itself, it might be just as valid as “Just Do It” – but it does not exist in a vacuum, and consumers, especially, would note the attempt to rip off Nike.

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PRINCIPLE 2: KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE You must also understand

how your target audience thinks If you’re selling to conservative financial services organizations, and you decide to use psychedelic colors and a mascot that looks like Shaggy from Scooby Doo, that may be very creative – it may even win awards – but it will likely not be effective, as it becomes too much of an “other” to your target audience. Although it is distinct, it’s distinctly strange to them. In other words, branding strategy takes into account who else is messaging to your market. It also looks at who your market is - and especially how they process information and offers especially things of the nature of what you are offering them.

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PRINCIPLE 3: DESIGN MATTERS Finally, we enter the world of design. If you’ve been working your offering concept statement and your value proposition, and you understand why it’s I3

(Innovative, Indispensable, and Inspirational), then turning this into a brand becomes a lot easier, because you’ve made declarations and strategic decisions about what your offering is, who it’s for, and why it should matter to them. Now, applying design acumen and copy writing can become very effective tools to translate the message you’ve already established into powerful and consistent branding.

design matters

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