Conscious Brand
There is a great quote by Nelson Mandela, “Vision without action is just a dream, action without vision just passes the time, and vision with action can change the world.”
Action is what makes your brand real. If you do not take action, you do not have a brand.
Your brand is the perception held in the minds of your staff, clients and community. It’s made up of all of the experiences, qualities and emotions that they experience when interacting with every aspect of your company. Your ability as a company to make the experiences you create distinctive, relevant and consistent creates a strong and memorable brand.
To build a remarkable brand and make your presence felt, you must be clear on what your brand is, how it should feel, how it should look, how you should say it and how to create these experiences consistently.
By being consistent, you reinforce your brand without causing confusion. Repetitive actions are necessary as it takes multiple times before you can break through the barrage of thousands of messages people receive on a daily basis. This fact alone makes a case for consistency and connecting with people at an emotional level creating your energetic presence. This consistency and regularity creates your energetic presence, the life-force behind your brand.
Your brand experience strategy is a conscious choice.
Your brand vision calls attention to the actions and behaviors that all your team members exhibit and the experiences created for others on a daily basis. Having a brand strategy is important so that you can:
– Create consistent and extraordinary experiences
– Consistently create memorable experiences for clients
– Increase employee collaboration and involvement, which creates a sense of pride and satisfaction
– Create a culture that is stimulating and rewarding
Your brand experience drives all communications, marketing elements and your organization’s purpose, particularly the company culture. It must also drive the customer value chain — each activity an organization undertakes should lead to added value to the target audience. If it doesn’t, it should be reevaluated and possibly eliminated.
Your brand experience is directly translated into and supported by your brand identity standards and systems. This ensures your brand experience is realized at each point of contact with the customer, resulting in a total brand experience.
When done right, your brand experience transcends your products and services. In essence, you are selling your brand experience — your brand life-force — more than anything else.
We work with our clients to start putting together a framework for actions and how their brand presence should be perceived. To get you thinking about your brand strategy, here is an exercise we collaborate with our clients on that we call: think, feel, do and say.
When customers interact with your company, what would you like them to THINK?
When customers interact with your company, what would you like them to FEEL?
When customers interact with your company, what would you like them to DO?
When customers interact with your company, what would you like them to SAY?
When answering these questions, it is important to think about your vision, purpose, intention for why you are doing what you are doing, and your product or service offerings. Aligning key aspects of your business with what and how you want your target audience to experience allows you to identify areas for which you can develop a framework for the experience, image, message and feeling for your brand.
Remember, how you show up each day, being present and intentional inspired by purpose-driven intention, belief and action centered around something greater than yourself generates remarkable outcomes.