A carefully developed brand is similar to a carefully sculpted physique. It must be honed and sculpted to meet desired goals. Like a body builder, a brand needs to be proportionally shaped from top to bottom. In the world of Marketing this boils down to whether or not your brand identity is built with enough brawn to shoulder your foreseeable growth. You don’t want to get to the point where you have to play a desperate game of catch-up with your brand’s new-found ubiquity.
Like everything else in life and business, why not prepare for it while you still have time?
Continuing with the theme of a person’s body as a comparable framework to a business’s brand, let’s talk about the legs first as they really serve as the basis for stability and are critical in order to support forward momentum. You need a carefully crafted messaging hierarchy consisting of a positioning statement (succinct, 25-40 word statement that details who you are, what you do, for whom and why you’re different) and supporting key messages (concise, powerful statements that offer key differentiators of your business in support of your positioning statement). Let’s assume this messaging hierarchy in whole serves as our body’s two legs.
Next up is the midsection or torso. This part of you brand serves as a powerful foundation with which all other parts feed into and leverage. For this illumination, we will say the midsection is all of your sales and marketing collateral that promotes your messaging hierarchy and arms you and your salespeople with the tools they need to effectively sell your products and services. These elements of the marketing arsenal include brochures, press releases, sales sheets, company backgrounder, articles, success stories, etc.
The next two areas we will consider your arms. For this article, we will equate them to a strong physical and online presence. If you have a storefront and/or a website you must ensure it accurately reflects the values of your brand. If you are a high-end consulting business then make sure your web presence conveys this, for example. Likewise, if you are a nonprofit, it wouldn’t make sense to have an office with $5,000 antique leather chairs. Your arms enable you to reach out and touch. Your web and physical presence do just the same. They serve as your means of reaching your customers, prospects, partners, and so on.
Finally, we have one’s head or face. For purposes of our illustration, this will serve as your diligence around keeping your eyes and ears on your market and your competitors to ensure you are communicating a brand that differentiates. It is not enough to run a wonderfully success business with blinders on. You must be aware of your surroundings and how to best operate within them.
In the end, just like with a person’s body, a brand needs to be well maintained. Like eating right and exercising, it is important to make sure you are doing things necessary to help, rather than harm, your identity.
Great article. I never thought of a brand like that before.