Branding Foundations: The 3 Building Blocks of a Strong Brand
What makes some brands so recognizable and beloved by customers? Most business owners don’t spend enough time building their brand, and developing their branding, so it reaches their target customers.
The key element I want you to take away today is the word visionary.
Who is visionary?
“A visionary is a person with a great idea that provides value to others.”
If you’re running a company and you want to be profitable, you need to think of yourself as a visionary.
- What makes you different?
- Is that because you do something unique?
- Maybe you have a secret XYZ formula that makes it dramatically better to get results, or you’re just a great personality?
Visionaries are entrepreneurs, artists, thought leaders, and inventors.
By the end of this article, you will understand how you can use branding to draw people in.
What Is A Brand?
Someone once asked me what’s the difference between “Brand” and “Branding”?
“Brand” is a noun. It’s an object.
“Branding” is a verb. It’s action! It’s how you communicate your brand’s values to customers. Before you start creating your own brand, or thinking of logo and identity, you need to understand the basics first, the foundations, on which the most successful companies are built upon. I wouldn’t recommend diving into the brand strategy details without setting up a proper foundation first!
Okay, where should I start?
It all starts with customers. Your audience is human beings who want to experience stories and emotions to make a decision on your company (whether to buy from you or go to a competitor.)
I’ve noticed that many businesses have this approach where they’re going after clients. To be honest, I’m not keen on to use the term “client” because it feels very calculating to me like:
“I just want a client so that I can make money.”
It’s devoid of any humanity, so I prefer to think of it as an audience.
“When you think of an audience, you think of people sitting and looking at a stage or at a movie screen, and they’re all collectively having an emotional experience about that. “
If you have a boring movie or whatever it is, then people’s’ emotions aren’t engaged, and they’ll start to pass out soon, walk out or take naps, and this is where branding comes in, you have to draw in an audience, and you do that through the right visuals and entertainment.
If you don’t have those factors in, people won’t make a buying decision about you, so the best way to engage the audience’s emotions is storytelling. Stories are the best way to push the audience’s buttons emotionally.
By using emotions, you can really manipulate customers in a good way. That’s when people will talk about your brand, and not about the other brands, and I’m telling you right now, most people in whatever space your business in, they have really boring branding.
If you can add something special to your branding and to your user experience, you’re going to stand light-years above everybody else, so the takeaway here is stories help you engage your audience’s emotions.
So going back to our definition of branding. Branding is a series of emotions that you feel when you hear that, so a simple version of this is when I say: “Your mom.”
“Your mom,” what comes to mind?
You probably see what she looks like, and you remember some personality traits that she has, versus if I say your high school gym teacher, you probably have a different, you have a vision of them blowing the whistle, and whatever their personality is.
When you hear the name of a person or a brand, it conjures up a visual image, and it also conjures up a set of emotions. And that’s all a brand is. If you don’t tell your audience what your brand is, what your story is, and what emotions you want them to feel, and to say about your brand, then they’re going to do that on their own.
That is one of the reasons why the best brands spend millions of dollars on marketing so that when someone says Nike, Apple, or Disneyland, these strong images and emotions are conjured up, and it makes them feel good.
So, think of your business as a brand. Remember, a brand is a set of emotions that engage your audience in a way that when people pull up and say, “Hey, I want to buy from you because I like what you’re doing.” That’s the momentum that you should aim for.
The 3 Building Blocks of a Strong Brand
The best brands are built with these three building blocks :
- Vision Statement
- Mission Statement
- Brand Values
To explain each block, I’m going to use Walt Disney as an example because he was one of the most amazing visionaries. He’s made the number-one entertainment brand worldwide, so that’s something to look at.
Success leaves clues!
Imagine that your brand is like a theme park. As for Walt Disney, he literally made a brand that you can walk into and experience. You have different audiences come in with different desires, and they get to experience different emotions in different lands.
There’s Disneyland Paris. There is the Magic Kingdom in Florida. There’s one in Japan, and two in China. So it’s proved to be a very successful venture.
When you enter Disneyland, it has the entrance plaque. When you go through the turnstile, and you walk under a tunnel, and right above the tunnel is the entrance plaque, and it says something pretty awesome.
Then when you get into the courtyard, immediately after going through the tunnel, there is a plaque at the base of the light pole that also has some information, so these are essentially the vision and mission statements of Disneyland.
1. Vision Statement
So that plaque that you walk under is the Disneyland vision statement. Every day 50,000 people go to Disneyland and walk under it and get to look up, and it says, “Here you leave the world of today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy.”
What Walt did there is he baked the vision statement into the DNA of the park. With that plaque, he’s setting the stage for your expectations (Priming technique.) In behavioral psychology, priming is when the introduction of one stimulus influences how people respond to a subsequent stimulus.
So what Walt Disney did, he exposed you to expectations and experience are going to have when you’re in the park. I can assure you, Disneyland hits the nail on the head, and they fulfill that vision statement.
That’s why your vision statement is really important!
Okay, Alex, but how do I come up with great Vision Statement?
A great vision statement should be aspirational to your audience. NOT to YOU, but to your audience. I’ve had previous clients who used to come up with a great vision statement that resonated with them but not with their customers, so we had to redo everything with a CORE customer in mind.
Don’t simply say: “My vision is to make a million dollars in a year.”
While that sounds great and interesting, that’s not actionable, and that doesn’t empower your customers.
They don’t care about you, and they don’t care about your brand. What they care about is how you and your brand will improve their lives because everybody has this “lizard brain.” We want to survive, so how does your brand make their lives easier, and how does it save them time, make them money, make them sexier, make them wealthier, and all other fun stuff?
Important: If you haven’t worked out the aspirational elements of your brand, it’s not going to be hitting the nail on the head and really drawing people in.
The truth is that most brands aim to simply make money. Consequently, these are the brands that fail. But visionary brands define a higher cause that they challenge their audience to try to achieve, so again with Nike, “Just do it.”
A bad thing would be something like: “We want to earn 1 billion dollars a month, blah, blah, blah.” That’s basically, earn X amount of money by a specific date.
Brands that do that that are focused solely on money, they fail because their team is not empowered. If you’re all about, “Hey, we just want to make money.” Guess what your team is going to want? They’re going to want just to make money, and if some other company comes around and says, “Hey, we’ll pay you more.” They’re going to leave you, and then you’ve lost all the money you’ve invested into training somebody.
If you’re just trying to make money, then your team is not motivated to accelerate, and more importantly, your audience isn’t motivated to be part of something bigger than themselves. In other words, you just become a commodity.
And that’s what I don’t want to happen to your company too. An effective vision statement aspires your audience to be something greater than they currently are. It is a movement that your audience can imagine being a part of.
In addition, your vision statement should entice your audience to be emotionally supported by your brand and help spread its message. For example, people love that Nike empowers them to just do it, and then they go off. So they recommend Nike to other friends.
A ridiculous thing about branding is when you have a brand that people love, people will pay you to wear your branding on their clothes! Think about it. So I go, and I buy my Nike shirt with the big swoop on it. I’m basically paying Nike to walk around and advertise Nike, or I go to Disneyland, and I buy my daughter a little Mickey Mouse ears, it says Disneyland on it, and we go back to our home town. They’re walking around bringing the hat to school, and other kids are seeing it, and they’re going back, “Mom, I want to go to Disneyland.”
So when you have a really good brand that empowers and it’s inspiring, people will pay you to spread the word and advertise your brand, so it’s a very powerful thing!
2. Mission Statement
Since vision creates a strong foundation for your brand and helps you set big audacious goals, a mission statement defines the big picture steps that your brand needs to take to accomplish those goals.
Disneyland has the vision that sets up the expectations and the mission, which outlines “How” Disneyland will continue to fulfill the promise.
Remember that little plaque at the base of the light pole?
It describes the action steps that Disneyland’s going to do to progress further.
I really hammer this home because people get confused with vision and mission statements, so the way I like to describe it is:
“The vision is the target that you’re hitting.
The mission statement is the steps for you to go and reach the goal. “
Vision is a goal. It is a massive goal that your brand aims to hit, and if you don’t have it, in other words, if you have a lack of vision, you can end up like 95% of brands out there that fail after five years.
I know it’s pretty scary but if you look at the Better Business Bureau statistics, 95% of businesses fail after five years, and that’s because the business owner who is driving this car, not only driving it, but also building the car, as well as the road, and then you have to drive it and make money to pay for the fuel so you can drive it. If you don’t have clarity on why you’re doing all that, eventually, you’re going to burn out.
Then you start asking yourself, “Why the hell am I working so hard, “everybody else in my business gets paid before I do. “I get paid last.”
I’ve heard about business owners that have lived out of their cars so they could pay their staff because they didn’t have a vision, and when you don’t have it, you’re not clear on what your priorities are. In other words, you’re doing a lot of busy work but that it’s not inching you towards getting that vision accomplished. And when you’re not clear, your team and your audience are also not clear, and if your team’s not clear, it costs you massive money because they’re not working efficiently.
As for your audience, if customers are not clear either, they’re looking at your branding and your marketing and say, “I don’t really get this.” What do you think will happen next? They will move onto the next brand, which is clear, so this lack of having a vision or mission statement, I bet it can cost you tens of thousands of dollars in the long run.
All right, so far, we’ve covered what is a vision statement, just encapsulating that, that is the goal, the aspirational goal that your brand hopes to achieve.
Your mission statement is the journey or the adventure that needs to happen to make that goal happen, so think of this as a mission impossible.
“If you don’t have a mission statement, and you only have the vision statement, your vision is impossible because it’s not going to happen. “
You have to be very practical about making your vision statement happen, and that’s where the mission comes in. To make your vision happen, chances are, unless you’re a complete nihilist, you need a team to help you achieve that.
When you design your vision and mission, aim for the stars, think big. You can always dial it back and make it more realistic down the road. Try to think big picture because that’s going to help you attract, illuminate more people and change more people’s lives. To make it happen, you will need a solid framework, and that’s where the mission statement comes in, so a great mission statement is typically one to three broad actions that your brand can take. It gives you a clear plan to make your vision statement happen.
Admittedly, that’s not the sexiest or prettiest mission statement, but they’re a billion-dollar public company, so their vision and mission really need to speak to the shareholders, so that’s why it seems a little more corporate-y.
Apple is not saying that they want to make money; instead, they’re saying something aspirational. They want to give the best personal computing experience!
Now, as for your company, what is the aspirational vision and mission statements that you can help accomplish?
3. Brand Values
The last one, but even more important building block, is values. The brand’s values are the foundation that your brand is built on; they hold up and give strength to your vision and mission. If you have your vision and mission, but you haven’t really defined the values that those are built onto, you’re going to have a problem.
Values are very tied to company processes. They can’t be developed at the top of the organization and handed down for workers to implement. They must be designed by the people in your organization, often in the moment.
To accomplish this, a brand’s culture must be guided by a shared understanding of “how we work together” or “how we behave.” And the best way to shape company culture is to encourage adherence to a set of values.
For example, the world-class experience that Ritz-Carlton provides its guests comes directly from its master value of “service.” This value is broken down into sub-values that employees must agree to uphold.
Why I’m telling you all of this?
Because values attract and keep better talent, inspire more customers, and help a brand outlast its competitors. When potential customers come across your website, content, and printed materials, they instantly get a feel of your company’s values and vision.
Everything on your website and printed materials should reflect your company’s values, and evoke certain emotions through visuals (logo + identity design.) That’s why businesses invest (notice that I use the word “invest” instead of “spend,” because it’s a long-term game with a positive ROI at the end) heavily in brand strategy & logo/identity design. Because these brands want their visuals to speak to the right target audience, communicate the right message, and be memorable to their customers.
Brand’s values also hold up a company culture like glue. When you scale up the business, you must keep the adherence to quality and certain beliefs in order not to break everything you’ve built so far. As the adage goes:
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
You could have the best strategy in the world, but if people within your company don’t have a unified system of beliefs to follow, a set of values to reference every time they’re facing a difficult choice, that strategy will be a waste of money and time.
When a company culture goes wrong, the brand suffers immediately-eroding revenues, trust, and customer loyalty. For example, when Toyota recalled many of its vehicles in 2010, it was the direct result of a breakdown in company culture. A former executive, Jim Press, blamed the problems on a group of “financially oriented pirates” who didn’t have the character to maintain a customer-first focus.
Brand Values Exercise:
- Google “Brand values examples,“ choose up to 5 values that are going to serve as your foundation and help hold up your vision and mission statement. For example: Family-oriented, Food-conscious, Tech-savvy, Community-minded, Eco-aware.
Thanks!
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Originally published at https://30kstrategy.com
