Your Brand

Your brand is the promise you make about your work—a guarantee of quality. As with any promise, it implies a relationship, this one between you and all your potential customers. It tells them what to expect from your company. A brand tells them how you are relevant to their lives, and how you are different from other companies. In short, a brand suggests to the world how to perceive your work before they have even experienced it for themselves and—even more—prompts them to want to experience it for themselves.

If it is consistent, relevant, and distinctive, a strong brand will accomplish three things:

• Differentiation
• Customer preference
• Premium price

Why is it important to define your brand identity? Because, by implication, it also defines your customers, and all your other relationships. Those relationships define your success.

Bottom line, defining your brand means being clear about who you are, where you want to go, how you're going to get there, and with whom. It means beings direct about attracting those people who will value your work. You have the power to define yourself to the world. Why let others do it for you? By branding, you create your own self-fulfilling prophecy.

Difference Between Brand Identity and Brand Image and Corporate Identity

The term "branding" has become a media buzzword. In the process, it has morphed into a fuzzy concept, referring to everything from identity to logos to advertising campaigns.

Brand identity is basically what you want the consumer to think about your company, and brand image is what the consumer actually thinks about your company. A company must strive to ensure that their Brand identity becomes their brand image. Corporate identity is one of the tools that helps this happen.

Brand identity refers to who you are, it is the total proposition that a company makes to consumers - the promise it makes. It may consist of features and attributes, benefits, performance, quality, service support, and the values that the brand possesses. The brand can be viewed as a product, a personality, a set of values, and a position it occupies in people's minds. Brand identity is everything the company wants the brand to be seen as by the consumer.

Corporate identity refers to how you project your identity out into the world. It is concerned with the visual aspects of a company's presence in terms of logo, design, collaterals (name, color, typography, tagline, etc.). Corporate identity should interpret the Brand identity into its design using corresponding colours, packaging, all the way down to the type of paper you use for your letterhead. A corporate identity is concerned with four major areas of activity ...products/services, environment, information and behaviour.

Brand image, on the other hand, is the total consumer perception about the brand, or how they see it, which may not coincide with the brand identity. Companies have to work hard on the consumer experience to make sure that what customers see and think is what they want them to.

The Positioning Statement

The goal of the brand identity process is to write a positioning statement, which explicitly situates your work vis-à-vis your audiences and other offerings in the marketplace. The final statement may be brief (one or two sentences), but it results from substantial research and reflection.

In order to write the positioning statement, you need to understand four things about your work: 1) what you do, 2) who your target audience is, 3) who your competition is, and 4) how audiences benefit from your work.

What you do. First, revisit what it is exactly that you offer to the world. What is your core essence? Think about what you believe in, and what you stand for. Consider the visionary qualities of your enterprise.

Target audience. A positioning statement focuses on your customers. If you expect them to spend time and money, you've got to be able to articulate why they would want to — from their points of view. In other words, how is your work relevant to their lives? So your second step is to ask yourself: who are your intended audiences? Which are core, which occasional, and which peripheral? Why are you aiming to sell each of them on your work? And how will you go about doing so?

Competition. Third, take a long, cold look at all your competition. Who directly competes with you for your customers' time and money? Who are your indirect competitors? Compile a profile of each competitors' offerings: what are they offering, and to whom? How are their offerings similar to yours, and how are they unique? Only by understanding your competition can you recognize and capitalize on the unique value of your own work. And then you can position your company where it is most effectively appealing to your potential audiences.

Benefits. Finally, make a list of the benefits of your work to your customers — from their perspectives. And be careful not to confuse features with benefits. Features are the defining elements of your work—world-class developers, for example. Benefits are the tangible or intangible ways that audiences gain from experiencing those features. In other words, how will customers benefit from your services?

Make your positioning statement concise enough to explain in a short elevator ride. This "elevator pitch" should be comprehensible to anyone who's never seen your company. So delete from the positioning statement any world jargon or industry shorthand.

Once you have written a branding identity, you can proceed to designing an image and campaign that will communicate your uniqueness to your target audiences. Name, logo, color, typography—all those elements, and more, can project your core essence to the people who most matter to you. A strong brand image, if delivered consistently, will give your message high visibility and staying power. All that's left, then, is to deliver on the promise.

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