What is the core identity of a brand? This is how you want your customers to relate to your brand. If you get conveying your brand identity or brand idea right, it has a huge impact for the success of your brand. In this article, we shall explain what’s a brand identity, and how that should drive the core of your brand / message.
What is Your Big Brand Idea/Brand Identity => Brand Message?
Your brand is like your personality, who you are. The big idea behind your brand should drive the development and communication of who you are as an organization, both inside and outside of the organization. We love how Beloved Brands (Graham Robertson) summarized this into the diagram below:
Understanding What Makes a Strong Brand Identity
Graham Robertson tells us that a strong brand idea needs to align with the brand promise, story, innovation, purchase moment, and consumer experience. With this alignment, we can be confident that our brand maintains a cohesive identity and creates a deep emotional connection with potential customers.
Brand Promise
The brand promise is the commitment you make to your target market, on what you can offer them. Having a clear and brief brand promise is crucial for a strong brand identity that resonates with potential customers. In addition to helping build a strong brand identity, the brand promise also forms a solid foundation for your marketing strategy. This promise should be reflected in all marketing efforts to create a strong connection with your audience.
Brand Story
Your brand story tells people who you are and what you stand for. It’s supposed to make your target market feel an emotional connection to your brand and understand how your product or service can improve their lives. A strong brand story sets a brand apart from the competition, pointing out what makes our brand stand out to potential customers.
Innovation
Innovation is essential in maintaining a strong brand identity and staying relevant in the market. It involves continuously improving and evolving your products or services in line with your brand promise and core identity. Innovation should enhance your visual identity and customer experiences, making your brand more appealing to your target market.
Purchase Moment
The moment customers decide to purchase your product or service should reflect your brand’s core identity and promise, ensuring a consistent and positive experience. It is the culmination of marketing, brand visual elements, product packaging, and advertising, among other elements. A seamless purchase moment strengthens customer relationships and solidifies your brand promise in your customers’ minds.
Consumer Experience
The customer experience includes all the times a customer interacts with your brand, from when they first hear about it to after they make a purchase. Things like customer service, social media profiles, and overall customer experiences are crucial elements in this touchpoint. By delivering a consistent consumer experience, you build trust and loyalty, reinforcing your brand promise and emotional connection with customers.
Case Examples of Good Brand Ideas/Identities
If you are “stuck” trying to figure out your brand, Robertson recommends that you start by answering this question: “who is your consumer’s enemy?” This provides a focal point for you to place yourself in your consumers’ shoes, and gives you ideas to set up the brand promise. Robertson laid out a few great examples. Here are two of them:
• Apple: Using a computer can be Frustrating. Things don’t work and we feel overwhelmed and incompetent. Then, Apple comes along and attacks Frustration by making everything about technology so simple. Apple is about simplicity, not technology. Apple makes people feel smarter. Apple makes it easy for anyone to download songs, edit photos and simply use technology right out of the box. Apple’s brand promise is “we make it easier to love technology, so that you can experience the future.”
• Starbucks: In the 70’s, people love to take some time in the morning to sit down and enjoy their coffee and morning newspaper. Today, one generation later, the idea of taking time out has become even more attractive, as we face our new enemy – our crazily hectic lives. We rush to ferry the kids to school, rush to work, rush to finish that urgent project, rush to our meetings and errands, and basically rush to juggle everything before we collapse exhausted in bed at night. Starbucks attacks our hectic life with “me-time” that we can escape to. We can indulge in customized drinks and snacks, relax in a comfortable setting, and be served by people who know our names. The Starbucks brand promise is “we give you a moment in your day where you can just escape and spoil yourself”
So, what’s the one paragraph that summarizes your big brand idea/ brand promise?
Take some time out to think about it, and it’ll really help you to distill your brand message.
Where Should you Focus?
You probably have many strengths and value propositions, and we can understand if you feel reluctant to “give up” your long list of offerings to focus on just one thing. This is where these 2 simple but powerful insights from Selling the Invisible come in useful to identifying what you should focus on.
Let’s quickly review the 2 ideas here:
• Focus on the 1 thing that gives you a competitive advantage: When choosing your focal point, go for the 1 distinct thing that will give you a competitive advantage (is it your impeccable service, your speed, or something else that sets you aside from your competitors?). Use that to rally your troops and align your messages.
• Use the Halo Effect: Standing for 1 thing doesn’t mean you will lose all other appeal, because people will associate that one thing with many other things. The trick is to position yourself as the expert at the hardest task in your service – once you are perceived to be best-in-class in that task, it is implied that you also possess skills and strengths in related areas.
Here are 7 questions to help you crystallize your positioning statement:
(i) Who: Who are you?
(ii) What: What business are you in?
(iii) For whom: What people do you serve?
(iv) What need: What are the special needs of those you serve?
(v) Against whom: With whom are you competing?
(vi) What’s different: What makes you different from competitors?
(vii) So: What’s the benefit? What unique benefit does a client derive from your service?
Read more about the Hedgehog Concept to identify where to focus your business.
Presenting it as a Compact Idea
Let’s say you have found your key idea. How do you actually word it into something that is simple, compact, yet sticks? Here, we shall focus on the first of the 6 SUCCESs principles from Made to Stick (read our book summary here for more details), and that’s the principle of Simplicity.
For an idea to be compact, there must be a lot of meaning packed into a succinct message. Here are some tips on how to do that, summarized in this graphic:
Let’s take Disney for example. Disney’s brand promise is “Entertainment with Heart”, and they stand for wholesome entertainment filled with magic and wonder. For decades, the brand has touched our hearts and made magical experiences come alive for people. This core guides them in everything they do, including their internal communications. Let’s zoom on the employees at Disneyland, who are called “cast-members”, and how this idea fulfills the “Simplicity” principle.
Schemas are a collection of properties related to a concept, category or object. In this case, the use of “cast members” immediately brings to mind all the feelings and imagery that we associate with the world of movies and big stages – glamour, excitement, mystery, romance, dreams and possibilities….For the staff, it’s a reminder that they are professionals who are here to create an experience for their audience/ fans.
Generative analogies not only brings understanding to a new concept, but also become platforms for new ideas, perspectives, and creations. As “cast members”, Disney’s team can let their imagination run wild by creating their own lingo, settings, plots, awards etc. that are aligned with what their company’s brand stands for.
What a simple yet powerful concept!
By contrast, when Subway tried to be creative by calling their staff “sandwich artists”, the concept didn’t work because it wasn’t aligned with the core of their brand and business. Subway promises fresh, healthy food made your way. Nothing about “sandwich artists” relate to this brand promise, especially when the sandwich-making process is more instructional than creative.
Finding and Presenting your Core
Well, finding the core of your brand, and developing a simple yet effective and sticky idea/ message around it is not easy. And the process certainly doesn’t happen overnight. We trust that the ideas in this article can at least help to get you started on the process.
Please feel free to plug in to our free resources by registering for free here, and/ or zoom in on some of the fantastic resources highlighted above!
