Accidental, arbitrary, superficial and non-branding. These are a few common approaches to branding. Since they’re all covered in our forthcoming book we’ll only cover one here. Let’s talk about non-branding and how it affects your business. We explored this idea briefly in our first post this month, but we will flesh out the business effects Read More
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Don’t Settle for Bland Branding – Take A Step Toward Authenticity
Taking on the idea that branding is unimportant can result in a type of branding we call non-branding. Non-branding — choosing to be a bland brand — doesn’t just hurt your bottom line. It lowers margins (or keeps them low) and sucks the life out of your interactions with staff and customers. It creates and Read More
For Brands, Love is the Bottom Line
Seems like everyone these days is a copycat. Brands who used to mean something are now trying to predict where culture is going so they can run to the front and pretend they were always leading the parade. Understanding and practicing love is the difference between brands that use people and brands that really serve Read More
3 Ways Love for Employees Builds Your Brand
It’s sometimes tempting to think that you can buy your way to creating a great brand. But there’s a limit. Sure you can hire a branding agency like Resound to help you organize your values, personality traits, and brand story, and create a website and a logo and visual and verbal guidelines. But if you Read More
3 Approaches to Defining Your Brand Personality
Personality is such a vague thing to define. Building your brand personality traits can seem confusing, and most people don’t really know where to start. But if you find yourself being responsible to manage situations like this, here’s what you can expect from the process. By the end, I hope you feel confident to manage Read More
Get a Head Start on Your Mood Board with Pinterest
So you’re either a small company, a small department or for some other reason can’t commit to a rebrand. Here’s a little something to help you get from where you are to something that a designer and writer can use to create a mood board and get you started on visual and verbal guidelines. And Read More
Get Practical about Values
Listing a set of values is pretty easy. But if you don’t allow yourself and your staff the time and energy to build your values into a culture, the values will never have the power to build your brand. Let’s talk about values and how to get past those roadblocks so your brand can benefit Read More
Live your values. Even on a Tuesday
When the mountain-top experience is over, and the hard work begins, what do your values look like? This is the real test. What do your brand values look like when they’re lived out at the lowest level? In the end, you only benefit from the values that you live out. And you only live out Read More
Protip: Find Your Brand’s Enemy
When you identify your enemy, you give everyone inside and outside your company a shorthand by which to understand and describe who you are, your values and what you probably do. Think about it: Your enemy: termites. Your organization: pest control Your enemy: the confusion of the tax code. Your organization: tax prep. Your enemy: Read More
No Brand Can Be Everything
Brands fail when they try to be everything. And even though we can easily tell the difference between brands that know who they are and brands that don’t, developing your own brand can seem random and uncontrolled. Let’s see if we can arrive at some clarity. “The World Needs You As You Are.” And it Read More
