November 15, 2018
Performing a Brand Tune-Up Ahead Of 2019
TONY TREADWAY
I’ve run across only a hand full of companies who wouldn’t benefit from some reflection on the current status of their brand heading into 2019. Too many of us in marketing spend our days in the trenches of applying tactics toward the year’s objectives without looking at the status of their brand in a rapidly changing market place. I hope that you will find some time with your team during the holidays for some introspection and a tune up ahead of the new year.
Creative Energy is assisting more and more clients take a deeper dive into evaluating their brand through one or two-day workshops. Key stakeholders of the brand, including C-level executives and marketing team members sequester away from e-mails and cell phones to totally focus on the essence of their brand in our brand workshops. We get their juices flowing by first asking them to complete a branding questionnaire that you can download here.
For a tune-up session, the questionnaire is a great way to turn a strategic eye toward your brand. It can be the catalyst for a broader effort and snare senior management for a more thorough evaluation or workshop.
In my experience in assisting in our brand workshops, here are a few of the benefits spoken by our clients on completion of the effort:
“Some of us in the room weren’t clear on what our brand meant internally or to our customers. It became clear quickly why we needed some help on clarity.”
A brand is not a company’s name, its products or services. A brand is a promise that through your actions are believable that provide benefits that make customers come back for more time and time again.
“Gaining agreement on our brand’s desired position in the market was a key benefit.”
Boiling a great brand position involves introspection on who your customers are and the frame of reference to your market. Equally important is truly understanding your company’s meaningful point of difference. If that point of difference isn’t clear, make it aspirational and work toward living up to that difference. This is the heavy lifting of creating a brand position that everyone understands and works to support.
“I’ve realized that the vision we created during the workshop really IS our brand.”
Your brand’s vision really is at the heart of making positive change for a company. Almost like an external slogan or tag line, it bakes in a mantra of less than 10 words that provides a crystal-clear understanding of what your brand stands for and how it will be relevant to your market.
Tuning Up Your Brand
There are many more elements involved in the process of tuning up a brand. There has never been a client who hasn’t understood the value of the exercise of reevaluating their brand in an era of extraordinary change. It’s also smart to ask a third-party to assist you in a full-blown brand workshop to overcome the powerful personalities and corporate rank of the stakeholders responsible for a brand. Everyone in the room should feel free to express their insights and attitudes in the discussion.