Branding Your Business for Growth

This preview video clarifies for you exactly what a brand and brand strategy are. And, it introduces you to my brand strategy approach and the benefits it delivers. I call it the Authentic Brand Blueprint, and I’ve developed it over decades as a branding and marketing strategist serving a wide range of clients.

I’ll step you through a summary of the 10 components, including their purpose and value, in the order they are taught in this course and should be developed.

After my brief explanation of how businesses of different sizes should structure a development team to do this work, you’ll learn a little more about me, my company, and my background.

In this lesson, I clearly define vision and mission and explain why they are the critical foundation of your brand and culture. You’ll learn what they are, the differences between them, how they work together, and how they empower your business.

I’ll help you deepen your understanding of vision and mission by sharing my insights on 5 very good but different examples. First, I’ll remind you of the 3 litmus test questions you should ask yourself as you assess each one. Then, I’ll step you through the vision and missions of 3 big consumer brands most everyone knows along with 2 small B2B firms.

Before beginning work on your vision and mission, you and your team members will individually complete the Internal Input Survey, which is a downloadable document with this course. Once you’ve consolidated all the answers, you’ll have the first of several data discovery documents in this course that will inform the development of your Authentic Brand Blueprint components. Answers to several of those questions will help inspire rich discussion on vision and mission in a collaborative team session. I’ll guide you on how to facilitate that survey, organize the findings, design the team session to ensure great idea generation, and co-create effective and authentic vision and mission drafts.

You and your team are brand ambassadors. Your beliefs and behaviors directly impact how potential and current customers perceive your brand. In this lesson, learn how our personal values are formed, why our thoughts and behaviors are a direct reflection of values, and how and why values-based business outperform those who aren’t.

Companies approach and construct Core Values in very different ways. To help you decide on the preferred approach for your business, I’ll share the Core Values of 5 very different companies, along with my insights on their individual approaches.

Get specific, step-by-step guidance on how to combine data from your Internal Input Survey with facilitated discussion and processes in a collaborative team session to discover, refine, and express your company’s Core Values.

It’s critical that the components of your Authentic Brand Blueprint are relevant to allyour likely buyers.While you already know who your likely buyers are – or at least have some strong assumptions – you’ll learn in this lesson how to identify, organize and express your current and desired target markets and audiences as specifically as possible. The resulting chart will help you and your team litmus test your remaining components as you develop them, ensuring each one is relevant to all your markets and audiences. It will also help you and the team prioritize and more tightly focus marketing and sales efforts moving forward.

Knowing where to focus sales and marketing efforts for the quickest success can sometimes be a challenge for start-ups. I’ll share the stories of how two start-ups went about deciding on their target markets and audiences.

A powerful brand strategy can’t be created in a silo. In this lesson I explain why you need current data on your markets, competitors, and audiences as well as why you’ll do this research now in the process rather than as the first step. The Discovery data tools resulting from your external Discovery work will prove invaluable to your Blueprint development and business in numerous ways.

You’ll learn specifically what to research on your competitors’ brands and where to find the information. I also explain how to structure and summarize your findings in a spreadsheet for easy comparisons later on. In fact, I provide a downloadable spreadsheet template that you can populate as you go.

Getting insights from actual human beings in your target audiences is like gold when it comes to developing a compelling brand strategy! And, it’s not that hard to accomplish! I guide you on how to identify and recruit your interview candidates, what to ask them, and your options for collecting the data. I also share how to create your summary report of findings as an easy-to-use data tool. This course includes a downloadable document of suggested Target Audience Survey Questions to help you further with this work.

Once you’ve completed your Discovery work, it’s wise to go back and reflect on your new vision, mission, values, and target markets and audiences within the context of your findings. I briefly explain why you may or may not feel the need to make some tweaks now before calling them final and completing the rest of your Blueprint.

You’ll learn how to effectively structure and name your array of offerings so that buyers can see the answers to their need or desire in what you sell. Even if you only sell one thing, how you name it makes a difference.

In this lesson, you’ll learn what a positioning strategy is and why it’s key to helping your business stand out from the crowd. I’ll also share the 4 characteristics of an effective positioning strategy.

Here, I share the strategic brand positioning statements of 3 very different kinds of companies. And, I break down the components of each so you’ll have a clear understanding of how to think about and structure your brand’s positioning statement.

You’ll learn what types of data to cull from your Discovery reports to help inspire your business’ brand positioning strategy. I’ll also provide specific processes for facilitating a session in which team members co-create several potential options and then home in on the right one.

You’ll learn the importance of a brand personality and why, for most businesses, I recommend an approach based on carefully selected emotional and rational attributes rather than a single archetype.

In this lesson, you’ll learn which data to highlight from your Discovery reports along with the specific process your team should follow in a collaborative session for co-creating your brand’s personality attributes.

Building true understanding and connection with buyers requires focused and differentiating messages that provide rich insights about your business – more than specific service or product messages can accomplish on their own. I share why it’s going to be fairly simple to develop your brand messages once the previous components are complete. And, I step you through the key characteristics of effective brand-level messages.

You’ll learn my pillared-approach for creating focused message themes along with proof point messages to support those themes. I also explain the specific process and writing techniques you and your team will use in a session to co-create your brand message themes and proof points. And, you’ll see two examples that both follow this structure but are very different in approach.

This is the factual paragraph or two that perfectly sums up the who, what, where, and why of your business. I’ll share my specific formula for creating it using the work you’ve done in prior components. And, I share the short and long versions of a client’s company descriptor, breaking them down so you can see how I developed them by integrating other elements of their Authentic Brand Blueprint components.

In this lesson, you’ll learn what a brand manifesto is and why it must be truly authentic to your brand and culture in order to connect emotionally with your buyers.

You’ll see 3 very different, real-life examples of brand manifestos to help you and your team decide on an approach that’s right for you.

In this final lesson, I provide guidance on using your Authentic Brand Blueprint to drive improvements across numerous areas of your business, including your marketing content and visual brand identity as well as your sales, leadership and human resources practices.