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
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3 Reasons Building Your Brand Personality Wastes Your Money
People hate companies, but they like other people. Many companies focus on competence or low price, but people want to do business with other people. Still, with all of the work it takes to come across as human, if you can’t do it consistently, people smell a fraud. Isn’t it better just to stay a 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
3 Ways Brand Values Build Your Business
In the ‘90’s, we talked a lot about whether or not character matters. If you’re wondering, your values are the most real thing in the world, informing how you live out your brand values. Here’s why values — and character — both matter. To put it another way, values inform character. And character pays the Read More
5 Reasons Your Brand Story Isn’t Gaining You Customers
You can’t deny that the brand story is all the rage with companies these days. Pop open forbes.com or Inc.com and you’ll likely see at least one article on the homepage with the words “story” or “storytelling” in the title. And I can’t tell you how many consultants, agencies, and even former literary authors I’ve 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
Protip: Pretest Your Brief
The creative brief tells anyone touching or reviewing the piece—whether it’s a blog post or set of social media posts—exactly what the piece is supposed to do. So how do you pretest its effectiveness? Find out if it inspires your creatives. “What is it we’re selling, who’s it for, and why does it matter to Read More
4 Reasons You’ll Have To Rebrand This Year (Part 2)
In our first part of this series on rebranding, we covered the first two reasons you’ll need to rebrand your company: You have a new vision You’re scaling up Both of these focused on the positive, internal changes that are causing your brand to need to change to keep up with your company, leadership, and Read More
