“Branding” has become such a misunderstood and misused word these days. One of the most common reasons why new clients walk in our door is that they want help with branding their company or organization. But when we ask them what they are really trying to accomplish with a branding strategy, they frequently don’t know.

Their answers include the following:

1. “We need a new, fresh logo.” – A logo is not a brand. Sure, the visual depiction of a company as expressed through a logo which reflects the business purpose of the company is part of an overall branding strategy, but the strategy itself has to be so much more than a nice-looking logo.
2. “We don’t really know what our brand is.” – Organizations may not know how to best interpret and express their brand, but most viable businesses know inherently who they are and what they provide to the marketplace. Good branding takes that core knowledge and basic market positioning and brings it to life in a way that the company’s key audiences can understand, relate to and develop an emotional relationship with.
3. “We want you to create a brand for our company.” – A marketing communications firm – no matter how good they are – cannot create your brand for you. Your brand is the culmination of all the various touchpoints that your organization has with its audiences and customers. It must authentically exist within your company. What the marketing firm can do is help you determine how to translate the best of who you already are into a well-packaged positioning within your marketplace that is both real and consistent.
4. “I want to be just like Brand So-and-So.” – We sometimes encounter clients who simply want to copy an iconic brand or a company which is the darling of their industry. This never works. You have to be you, not someone else. If you try to copy another organization’s brand, you will always come up short because your brand messaging will not reflect who you really are when your customers “look under the covers.”

So what are some ways to best discover, capture the essence of, and authentically express your brand?

1. A good first step is to review and really internalize your company’s mission, values and strategic plan. What are you all about as an organization? Why are you in business? What are the core values that drive your critical decisions? And what strategies and tactics have you committed to in terms of growing your organization? Answers to these baseline questions provide the foundation for brand definition and enhancement.
2. Have you conducted a “SWOT” Analysis of your company recently? (This stands for: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.) A deep dive into determining what these four things are for your particular business is a pretty critical step in a good branding process.
3. If your organization was a person, what adjectives would you use to describe yourself? Make a list of 6-8 key attributes that best describe you. Is your organization friendly, caring, knowledgeable, competent, professional, innovative, fun, collaborative, or what? Creating this list will help guide the most compelling yet authentic articulation of your brand. We call this your “brand persona.”
4. The next step is to take your knowledge of your company’s mission/core values/business purpose, your honest answers to your SWOT Analysis, and your identification of the basic attributes and the adjectives which most accurately describe you and translate that into how you want to be perceived and positioned in your marketplace. Then develop the key messages that will cause that desired positioning to become real and compelling to your targeted audiences.

These are the introspective steps that can lead to a successful determination and articulation of your brand. You short-change your organization if you skip them in your quest for the “perfect brand.”

Cathy Ackermann, founder and president of Ackermann Marketing and PR, may be reached at cackermann@thinkackermann.com.