Your brand is not your logo. It’s not your color palette and it’s not your fonts. Those are visual identities. They are part of your brand. These visual identities help communicate your brand and help distinguish your brand among all of the other logos and visual identities, but they’re not your brand. Obviously, you need to do the basic blocking and tackling of making sure your visual identity and name are consistent throughout your business and that people know who you are and what you do. However, there’s much more to it.
Your brand is your promise to your customers and your employees, and although your visual identity contributes to the recognition of that promise, it goes much deeper than that. I’m guessing that you already know this, but this post is dedicated to the things that make up your brand, the people.
You’re Not Completely in Control
Yep, unfortunately, this is a sad reality. When you are in business, you’re not totally in control of your brand. You can take steps to manage the direction and perception of your brand, but you are not completely in control because your brand is only as strong as how your customers and potential customers perceive your brand. You can obviously cover some of the basics, like making sure your products don’t break and your service doesn’t suck, but depending on the size of your company and the steps you need to take to evolve a negative brand perception, this could be easier said than done. So, what can you do? Although you probably dread the subject, the next part of this post is partially about the good old mission, vision, and values. Okay, I know I probably made you groan and maybe I totally lost you, but don’t stop now, you already sunk a few minutes to get to this point. I hope to bring a real-world approach on how to integrate these items to help drive your brand and not just be something that gets created behind closed doors and hangs on the wall somewhere in the office.
Your Internal Customers
Your brand begins and ends with your employees (more on this later). They are the number one asset to your organization. A great organization has Rockstar employees that feel empowered. They feel proud to be part of a company that is treating them right and letting them make decisions. When reviewing your brand, make sure that your employees understand your company mission, vision, and values. Also, it is critical that your employees share your corporate values. If not, your employees are not aligned with your company’s foundation.
Developing Your Values
Whether you are a startup or a well-established company, developing or refreshing your company values is essential to maintaining your current employees and making the right hires. Values are an excellent way to communicate the fundamental ideas to empower your employees to make decisions. Without an empowered workforce, there are always people that serve as bottlenecks to making decisions. This typically leads to overall employee frustration, lost opportunity cost, and a decrease in productivity. Instead, an empowered workforce that is encouraged to make decisions based on your corporate values can exponentially increase your productivity and innovation.
For instance, if your values include a relentless pursuit of the best customer service, given the right structure and autonomy, an empowered employee can take several steps to handle customer issues when they arise before taking the issue to the manager. A value like this can also help define the direction of your company by placing a higher emphasis on employee training for items like how to deal with difficult customers, how to manage tough situations, and how to create customer-centric solutions.
What’s Your Vision?
Do you really know where you want your company to go? Who you want to be? What you strive to achieve in the future? If not, your brand value can and will continue to erode. In business, you evolve or die, and having a well-defined vision is critical to driving your company forward. Do you strive to be innovative? Want to diversify? Deep down, do you really want to completely change the way that your company operates? Having a vision for your brand is kind of like setting a stretch goal for your business. The same thought process that applies to personal goal setting applies to your business. However, think of this as a stretch goal.
While a normal goal will be slightly unattainable and may only require you to stretch yourself only a little, a stretch goal makes you push for amazing things. Oftentimes, stretch goals will require you to completely reimagine what you are doing. If running a 5K is a goal, running a marathon is a stretch goal. If taking an online course is a goal, getting an MBA is a stretch goal. So how could you apply it to your business?
Let’s say for instance your goal is to launch a new product in the next year. Your stretch goal could be to become the leading product in the category. These are two completely different goals. One requires you to check all of your normal boxes for a product launch. The other requires you to completely take over the category. You’ve got to lead in features, pricing, packaging, promotion, industry relationships, advertising, well…everything. A stretch goal can make you a little crazy, but it typically takes this type of thinking to do anything amazing.
From an overall business standpoint, where does this put your vision? Well, does it make you a little uncomfortable? Is it something that everyone can believe in? Is it measurable? If so, you’re on the path to setting a stretch goal.
Mission Statement
Aah yes, the dreaded mission statement. You’ve probably agonized over this in school. Maybe you’ve messed with it in a meeting. Maybe you’ve never been part of this conversation and you’ve just been told what it is or sat in a meeting where it was explained. Maybe you don’t know it at all. Regardless, your mission should actually mean something and not be something that you dread. Think of your own personal mission in life. What do you want to do in this life? Is it to leave the world a better place? Is it to teach your children your values? Is it to be a Rockstar? Maybe to be a doctor? Regardless, you should have something inside of you that drives you to achieve these goals; something that pushes you to be better every day. This is what your mission statement should convey.
Customer Service
For nearly a decade, I’ve been an advocate for the idea that your customer service personnel should be run by your sales and marketing departments. Regardless of what your business does, there will likely be a person, departments of people, or entire buildings full of people whose job is to attend to customer issues. This is the perfect time to perfect your brand.
Without fail, high-effort consumer behavior follows a five-step process. If you haven’t read anything I’ve written on high-effort consumer behavior, the way consumers process high-effort behavior is through what’s called central-route processing. This is just a fancy way of saying that you have to really think deeply about a decision. This is opposed to low-effort consumer behavior, which uses peripheral route processing; this basically means a consumer doesn’t think much about their purchase. The five steps involved in high-effort consumer behavior are:
- Problem recognition
- Information search
- Consideration set
- Purchase
- Post-purchase
This last and final step of post-purchase is where so many organizations don’t focus enough energy on improving their brand. This is not just an opportunity to make customers happy, but it’s an opportunity to make longer-term incremental sales. For high-effort behavior, many companies have the opportunity to solidify their brand when there is something wrong. As a company, you are always going to have things go wrong. Something is going to break. As humans, we get it, not all products are perfect. However, with high-effort behavior, each step is as important as every other step. If a company exceeds expectations after a product is purchased, it is likely going to lead to more purchases in the future. This can also lead to the most powerful marketing available, positive word-of-mouth marketing, or personal recommendations.
However, forget the furthering the brand conversation for a minute, this is also an opportunity to sell. You have customers calling you, and regardless of if they are having a good experience or a bad experience, they are calling you and no outreach is really necessary. Are you using this opportunity to let them know about something new that you are launching? Obviously, you have to be tactful about this and train your customer service people on how to read the room. You can’t have somebody try to sell anything to someone that is pissed off about something that impacts your brand. However, if you solved their problem, what better way to make a sale than to simply mention something that could turn into another sale? Credit card companies have this figured out. If you ever have an issue where you need to talk to someone, they will almost always try to sell you on their rewards card. However, you don’t have to take it to that annoying level. You could simply just ask for permission to email them some information on a new product that you are launching.
Let’s take this customer service reps as salespeople thing to a whole new level. How about keeping logs in your CRM for customers that you’ve helped? You can use this CRM to track outbound communication from the customer service team to proactively pitch new products. You could simply filter your customers by satisfied or unsatisfied. For the satisfied customers, your customer service team could send an email saying something like Hey (customer’s name), my name is (customer service rep name) and I helped you with (insert issue-from a category list) back in (insert month). We’re launching a new product that solves (insert problem here) and we have special introductory pricing through the end of the month. Would you like to find out more? With variable data and smart content, you could easily do this pretty much exactly like I just listed. Smart content would fill everything you had from a spreadsheet and voila, you’ve got a marketing and sales email sent directly from the customer service team.
However, in many companies, it doesn’t work this way. This primarily happens because most companies operate in silos. The marketing group is focused on data and advertising. The sales group is focused on net new conversions or increasing market share. The customer service team is focused on retention. The operations staff is focused on efficiencies. Instead, by removing the silos and thinking through the entire high-effort consumer behavior process, you can create a better and more efficient way of making sure you’ve covered every part of the process.
Your Brand is Your Attitude
Let’s put your company aside and talk about your personal brand. You will, more than likely, have a career and a personal brand that lasts much longer than your relationship with your current company. Your personal brand is made up of mostly your attitude. Sure, it’s other things like your talent, your education, and how your brain works. However, all of these things can come crumbling down if you are steered by the wrong attitude. Your attitude is what drives your success. If you are always looking for ways that something is going to fail or isn’t possible, you are going to stifle yourself and your career. You’re going to be a person that is miserable to be around, and this is going to likely translate to your personal life. Having an attitude that holds other people back is also holding you back. It’s making you depressed and it doesn’t have to be this way.
However, if you have a welcoming attitude that is open to new ideas, inclusion, and always striving to be the best, you will achieve greater success and probably have some fun along the way. People don’t just want to work with smart people. People want to work with and work for, others that are fun to be around. We want to work with people that can cheer us up when we are having a bad day. We want to work with someone who loves jumping in and solving problems. We want to align ourselves with someone that presents ideas that are just crazy enough to work.
In some cases, you likely spend more time with some of the people that you work with than you do with your family. I agree, this seems a little crazy, but it’s just kind of how the world works. Just like a spouse would rather be around someone that has a good attitude, so do your coworkers and you should want this out of the people that you work with too. You are a team and the team is greater than the individual team members. Every day, you have the opportunity to choose your attitude, and every day, you are building your personal brand with your colleagues, customers, and vendors.
How Your Personal Brand Coincides with Your Company’s Brand
So what is your company’s brand? Well…it’s you. It’s your friend that works in sales. It’s your neighbor that works in the shipping department. It’s your cousin’s wife that works in the accounting department. It’s people. Your company’s brand is the collection of all of these people choosing their attitude and representing the company. Your company relies on you and every one of the people that it employs to represent them in a certain way. This is where brand and culture training is critical. You should know your company values. As stated earlier, these are the basic fundamental building blocks of how your company expects you to represent them. If you are working for the right company, your values should be aligned. If not, well…you should probably be working somewhere else.
If your values are in alignment, any growth to your personal brand will likely benefit your company as well. Whether it be getting an education, volunteering, or posting educational articles on LinkedIn called “Your Brand is Not Your Logo” to try and help other people, the growth of your personal brand will have incremental growth on your company’s brand. Just imagine if everyone in the company had the drive to grow their personal brand. What if everyone in the company tried to better themselves? What if everyone tried to have fun? What if everyone had a positive attitude? Well…then you’d have one amazing brand.
Wrapping Up
So your brand is not your logo. It’s not any component of what makes your company’s visual identity. It’s something that you can’t completely control. Your brand is your product or service, but it’s not your product or service. It is your product or service because the thing you have to sell is a major customer touchpoint. However, it isn’t your product or service because, in some respects, those are just representations of what your company represents. They’re just a part of what your brand was, is, and will be.
What’s behind all of this and what makes your brand possible is the people. Your brand is the people that work for the company, regardless if it involves tens of thousands of people or a sole proprietor. These companies aren’t run by robots (yet), they’re run by people. These people have hopes and dreams. They have families. They have hobbies. They’re just like you. Some employees might not have the education that someone else does. They might not have the technical knowledge that others have. They might not have the title or salary that someone else has. What everyone does have, however, is the ability to be kind. We have the ability to tell a dad joke. We have the ability to help someone that is in need. If your brand is your people, make sure that you are attracting, retaining, and cultivating a workplace that is inclusive, open to new ideas, and just fun to be around. If you can do this, you’ve figured out the secret to how to create a strong brand.