What Does Your Brand Boil Down To?

Many business owners find it difficult to articulate brand characteristics likely to turn stakeholders into loyal brand advocates. If you had to boil your brand down to just a few words, what would be left?

Answer 6 Questions to Discover What’s at the Heart of Your Brand

Reduction is a cooking process that results in intensification of flavor. Many marketers try to do too much with an ad, campaign, web page, email or social post and end up diluting their messages when they should be shooting for concentration, instead. If you boiled down your brand to its essence, it’s core, what would its most intense flavors be?

People (leads, prospects, investors, clients, customers) rarely connect with a brand because of its corporate-based characteristics. Unless your brand represents the only business of its kind, corporate characteristics rarely help to differentiate a brand, let alone provide values that make people feel connected to it.

Loyalty and advocacy don’t happen based on mechanics. Any business can provide quality products or services that perform as expected and produce the desired results with a high level of customer service.

Sound vaguely familiar? That’s because most mission and vision statements revolve around ‘aspirations’ like these!

In How to Write a Mission Statement, WikiHow describes a mission statement as a message that distills(meaning, “to subject to a process of vaporization and condensation, as for purification or concentration”) the heart and soul of a company in an engaging, memorable paragraph or two and that it is your opportunity to create a compelling (meaning, “evoking interest, attention or admiration in a powerfully irresistible way) picture of your company for the rest of the world to see.

Take a peek at your own mission statement. Does it represent a concentrated, powerfully irresistible statement about your brand and your business?

Most don’t.

6 Questions Will Get to the Heart and Soul of Your Brand

No one ever described their administrative assistant this way: “Jane is 5 feet tall with brown hair and types 90 words per minute.”

When was the last time you described a friend or co-worker in terms of mechanics? Most often, when telling someone else about a colleague, friend or loved one, we speak in terms of the unique values and characteristics that set them apart from most others: intelligent, caring, nurturing, talented, hilarious – or even the negatives, sometimes – lazy, self-centered, untrustworthy, etc.

You shouldn’t be describing your brand in terms of mechanics, either. One of the exercises you can do while working on brand identity is to ask and answer the question: If your brand were a person and walked into the room, what words would you use to describe it?

This exercise takes people out of thinking about the technicalities of “what we do” and into the area of values and characteristics they value (or don’t!) that describe the brand. These are the words that speak to the brand’s heart and soul. They can be used to identify values a business aspires to retain or those they desire to leave behind.

Answer these 6 Heart and Soul Revealing Brand Questions Denise Lee Yohn of Harvard Business Review recently published a very helpful article title, Start-Ups Need a Minimum Viable Brand that included a list of six questions business owners and brand marketers can use to better define the essence – the concentrated heart and soul, if you will – of what is most important about their brand.

• what do you stand for?
• what do you believe in?
• who do you seek to engage?
• what distinguishes you?
• what do you offer?
• what messages does your brand send, and how is it perceived?

As you answer these questions relative to your own business, think about them not only in terms of the responses you come up with, but also, afterward, boil down your list of responses to those answers which define only your business (are not true of competitors) and therefore truly differentiate your brand.

You might also like: 5 Ways to Make a Brand Story Amazing