Branding is all About Colour, a Logo and Business Cards uhhh, no it’s not!
When you think of “Business Branding” what comes to mind? business cards, letterhead and a logo? About 15 years ago, that’s what I thought. Business branding is so much more than that, it’s the identity of your business. Brand practice is the key for survival. It’s how consumers connect and relate to who you are “as a brand”.
When you think of “Coca Cola” what comes to mind?
- The colours red and white
- the fancy font
- gut rot?
But this is what I think of every time I see the famous Coke logo.
Remembering Coke
When you see an old Coke vending machine, do you think back when you were a kid. I looked forward to going into town with my Dad because I was going to get a bottle of Coke. Driving into the gas station, I was very fidgety, and when he turned off the truck, I couldn’t get out of it fast enough, running up to the vending machine, putting my nickle into the slot and out comes this little but heavy glass bottle of cold sweet heaven.
Now, almost 50 years later (yes, now you have an idea how old I am), so much has been said about how “unhealthy” Coke is. YouTube videos showing how Cola is used to remove rust off a tailpipe, health warnings about the sugar level and the ultimate faux paux…on April 23, 1985, Coke decided to change it’s formula for the worlds most popular soft drink. This sparked consumer anger that no business has ever experienced. How dare they! Consumers complained by phone, by letter and after what seemed an eternity, “New Coke was short lived and discontinued a few short years later.
When consumers are in such love with a brand, it could be suicide to make any changes.
If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. Hmmm really?
January 27, 2015, Global News had a segment that announced Coca-Cola was changing it’s Canadian recipe to contain less sugar. It was also introducing smaller cans and small glass bottles. They said the move was due to a steady decline in North American Sales. Was this acceptable by consumers? of course it was! You see, in this modern day, consumers drive the brand, not the other way around. A brand can try to guide it’s consumers, but armed with the research capabilities of the internet, consumers are much smarter now.
Does this mean people have the same memories about Coke now? When I walk into the grocery store, this is what I think of when I see the newly packaged Coke cans and bottles. You can buy a 12 pack of regular cans for $5.99. You can buy a 6 pack of the smaller cans for $4.99. Huh???? In Cokes defense, the grocery stores have a lot to do with pricing. What I think of now is people are having to pay more for smaller cans in order to get less sugar. It’s not just Coke, other brands are doing it as well. Does this leave me with a negative emotion regarding the brand “Coke”. No, not really, but I don’t drink Coke anymore due to the sugar content and the sugar free versions have artificial sweeteners which have their own controversy. I have recently tried a different brand of cola which has no artificial sweeteners. The cost was $5.99 for six regular sized cans. No calories, no aftertaste, no artificial sweeteners and tasted almost like “Coke”. So is this a brand I trust? I can’t say that at this point, I don’t know enough about the company, it’s history, their views on the environment and health concerns. Will I purchase this on a regular basis? no, because I don’t have the same attachment to that brand as I did with Coke when I was younger.
What does Coke have to do with Your Brand Practice?
Simply put, it demonstrates that your brand is so much more than colours, promotional material and a logo. I believe a brand has it’s own life force. People will either like it, feel nothing or hate it. People will follow that brand around, but if that brand does something to “tick them off”, they will get into a fight and won’t speak anymore. The “friendship and trust” is gone. So does that mean that you must change your ways to keep your consumers happy? because we know that consumers drive the brand.
Brand Practice and Brand Trust with a Health Coach
Here’s a scenario: You’ve been a successful Health Coach for 10 years. You believe your calling is to motivate and inspire people to live a healthy lifestyle, by teaching them about food choices, being active and balanced. You also teach Yoga and Meditation. Your students see you as an expert in being balanced and are the epiphany of a healthy lifestyle. You charge the fees that you deserve and your customers are happy to pay those fees because they trust you.
What your customers don’t know is that you are an occasional smoker who likes a drink every night before bed and a few times a week, you eat at fast food places. If your customers saw you doing this, would they trust you anymore? what would happen? it’s likely that you will lose the respect of all your customers, they will leave, you will have a very negative reputation in the industry and you’ll be labelled as a fake. If your clients are all local, you might as well shut your doors because people talk.
Your brand is it’s own life force and if you worked your brand like the Health Coach described, your brand is on a suicide mission.
Brand Practice and Building Brand Trust Shouldn’t be Hard
If you are a home based or brick and mortar small business, building your brand trust is easy and you don’t need to pay a branding expert a gazillion dollars for something you should already be doing.
- Your calling is building top quality custom furniture, but you use plans you got on a file sharing website and fake some modifications and call it a custom design.
Stop!
Your calling is building top quality custom furniture and you use specialty software (or someone skilled in specialty software) to design the plans for the idea you drew out on grid paper.
Be Authentic! - Your calling is to inspire and motivate people, but you’ve had a bad day and fake your way through the latest webinar by putting on a forced smile and telling everyone how great your feeling and that you’re having such a fulfilled day.
Stop!
Your calling is to inspire and motivate people, but you’ve had a bad day and you use this opportunity to share with people how to get through something like this in your latest webinar. Your inspiration is that we are all human and not everyone has a perfect 24/7 day.
Own it, don’t fake it! - Your calling is to teach people how to design their own professional eBooks. You use pirated software, but write in your eBook that people must buy Photoshop.
Stop!
Your calling is to teach people how to design their own professional eBooks using free and economical software apps on the internet. Such as the planning and brainstorming app called MilaNote. Graphic design apps such as Canva or a very affordable Adobe Creative Cloud Subscription.
Don’t lie to your fans, it’s just wrong on all levels!
Side Note: in a post I did last week, I wrote that I feel very uncomfortable writing more than 500 words. At the beginning of this paragraph I think I’ve written over 1,200 words. Holy Smokes!!! what happened? I feel so strongly about this topic and the thoughts and words just flowed naturally. I didn’t intend on writing about this topic, it was going to be on choosing brand colours, but it developed into a much better story.
Does this mean I lied to my readers?
Does this mean that I don’t feel passionate
about something if I only write 500 words?
No and heck no. What it means is that I’m developing over time writing to a different audience. Do I make mistakes when business blogging? of course I do, I’m not perfect and that’s not what my brand is about. I, Gisèle Grenier love to encourage people to embrace imperfection. I write the way I speak and although sometimes it doesn’t make sense right away, that’s why there is an editing process, that’s why I read my posts aloud and that’s why I get Joe to review them. Is my writing perfect after that? No way and I’m totally ok with that.
My audience last year were people interested in painting and drawing, most of my blogs were video posts.
I drove myself nuts trying to figure out how I could blend the two brands together: business to consumer for art and business to business for brand building and consulting. I gave up, because there is no need to have one brand to do both. This is called being Multi-Passionate and I thank PuttyLike.com for helping me get through this.
Do I tell my business customers about my art passion?
of course I do! I have business contacts that like to dabble in art?
Do I tell my artsy fans about my business passion?
of course I do. I have consumer contacts that want to make some money from their art?
I’m so blessed to have the best of both worlds!
Be true to who you are, practice what you preach and although consumers drive a brand, making changes to your services is perfectly acceptable. What’s not acceptable is going against your values and beliefs to keep customers happy. You want people in your tribe that have the same values and beliefs that you have. That’s how you build trust in your brand and it doesn’t cost a thing.
What’s ONE thing that are you doing to build brand trust? Does your Brand practice what you preach?
Another Side Note: The editing windows is tell me me that I’m now at 1696 words! I’m a rock star!!!
Hello, you are so right about brand consistency! The more that you can build your brand on your values the easier it will be for the folks that you want to work with you to find you. I have been spending time on identifying what mine are and how I want that to come through in my business. It has helped me to look at some blogs that I follow with a different eye so that I can identify varied ways to bring that consistency across as a service professional.
That’s great to hear!
Gisele, I love how you have a multi-passionate business. We don’t have to have one or the other. We can have both! Love it.
Yes, I agree that one has to be honest about one’s brand. It is a good habit to remember to think about one’s brand when making decisions. And I like the idea of a business having it’s own life force. That’s a great way to think of it.
I’m just starting my brand so this is good to keep in mind.
Hi Erika,
Just starting out your brand is like discovering who you are. It can be a lot of fun 🙂
Oh Gisele, I so love your self-expression and it is as if we were having a chat. It took me some time to get beyond a brand just being our colors, logo, cards, packaging and it was blogging weekly that has helped. When you are passionate about many things it takes careful decisions to mix and match.
In the case of our business, both my daughter/partner & are passionate about our product, creativity, inspiration, nature, color, quality of gemstones but she more than I, about fashion. So to be authentic, that is often the content she adds to our blog.
Our jewelry graphics are consistent, we post tuesday fashion jewelry tips & thurs Fashionisms that each have its own consistent look. Over time, people recognize our jewelry & our separate collections, so I believe we are on our way with our branding.
That is awesome to hear that you and your daughter are in business together! It was your blog post about summer fashion and my email about hot weather with jewelry that really connected with me to place that order 😉
My takeaway was to be true to my heart. Sometimes i can get so caught up in pleasing clients that i walk away from that core principle.
Yes that happens to some of my clients when they are dealing with their clients. I say to them Stay true to your values and never fake it. If your client can’t accept that you are not willing to sway away from your beliefs, they they are not a good fit for a relationship. Could you work with 10 of those types of clients?
Where to start in responding to your wonderful post, Gisele! Firstly, I was addicted to diet pepsi many years ago and although my mother “suggested” it might be contributing to my worsening digestive health, the doctors never said to stop. Lesson learned about how unhealthy all sodas are for our health if they contain sugar or artificial sweeteners. Maybe I’ll resurrect a post I wrote about Beyonce endorsing pepsi. 🙂 And as far as branding ourselves, this was a big topic of conversation with my designer, who is also a friend, when he asked me what I want to be when I grow up. We came up with a new word, I’m officially a multifacetist, as I have many things I do, like you, that make up who I am. I love that you do not segment art for art people and business for business people. In this modern day world, people are more than one thing and have many interests that could or could not overlap. Branding is very key and growing that and remaining consistent is truly important. If people like you and your brand, you are on your way to building a tribe which is the most important. It doesn’t matter how large your tribe is, it matters that the follow you and love all that you share. Great post and congrats on getting out of your own 500 word comfort zone!
Hey Beverley! I’m a Multifacetist too! Creativity is my umbrella and everything I do under that umbrella involves creativity in business, art, pet portraits, creative cooking, funky creative home and outdoor decor and even matching Mia’s hiking backpack to mine. For those that don’t know who Mia is, she’s our 3 year old rescue and I’m a huge advocate for pet adoptions. I think if we bring all our passions to what we do, things seem to evolve. So my love for animals makes it so easy for me to connect with my contacts who are in the pet industry for collar, treats, outerwear etc.
thanks for the kudos on the 500 word count. Next week is a special blog day. Joe is posting his very first blog post here. It’s fantastic it all started with receiving a pizza flyer 😉
Branding is something I’m building since my business is only 6 months old. But I think that finding my tagline has helped. Also, many businesses are about ideals, so when people fall short, I think there is forgiveness and understanding.
I know you really put your values into your brand and that will attract customers with the same values. Makes it a much better fit for that relationship. Taglines is like that 140 character description equivalent to the 30 second elevator speech to Warren Buffet.
I love your suggestion about how to turn around a bad situation in a webinar situation. Something similar happened to me during a coaching call — it was just two days after I put my 16-year-old cat to sleep and while I was (more or less) fine doing the busy work online, I was not prepared emotionally to work with a live person one-on-one. So at the end of the call, I told her that I would credit her account for that call and told her why my affect was so flat. It was good learning for me.
I’m so sorry you had to go through that. What this shows is that you are human with true emotion. It took me 4 months to recover after the passing of our Harley. Working from home made it very hard because he was always there. Was the person on the call sympathetic?
This is so true Gisele and it isn’t just about color, but about building trust with your brand, recognition of you and what you are about. Valuable tips!
Glad you enjoyed reading!
Here’s my story about that. Five years ago, I received a call from that Ashley
something website that promotes marital affairs.
The big advertising placement might have saved the magazine from going under as
traditional advertising met a Waterloo from 2008 on.
The message did not reflect my values as a publisher and I declined.
We closed the doors to the mag…I found my new world in online marketing…and I’m
here today!
No regrets.
I applaud you for standing ground!
and.. is it the same client that was just recently hacked? 😉
I have been thinking about all of this a lot lately as I am now working full time as the Director of Strategic Relationships for my husband’s mortgage company. I can’t “sell” mortgages because I am not licensed to do so but I can “sell” my husband’s credibility and integrity and passion for the business. He has spent over 20 years building his “brand” as an independent broker who will always find the best possible loans for each client’s individual circumstances and not some cookie cutter product that would make the most profit for the lender. So far, so good 🙂
Great advice! It drives me nuts when people think their brands are just their logos. I agree that you should never have to fake your way through your work or put on a facade for your customers. They want you to be yourself!
well said.
Thanks for expounding the essence of business branding. I agree with you that it is the identity of your business. It is being able to sustain its added value in the height of business stiffer competition.
Glad you enjoyed it Lorii!
We agree – Branding is so much more than just a logo!
Hmmm. Gut rot… I guess they left that out the Coca-Cola adverts. Seriously though, I have some very special memories around coke because when I was a child we only ever had it on holiday when we got them from the clubhouse. It’s smart that Coca-Cola know how people used to think affectionately of those glass bottles you used to get them in. They still keep to that original bottle shape (although plastic isn’t quite the same). They tap into the nostalgia some people feel and stay true to their brand. You’re absolutely right in everything you said… Branding is far more than a logo and some colours. It’s about values and evoking an emotional response in others. That must start with ourselves and how we conduct ourselves. Great article!
Clive, I saw some of the old vintage looking bottles at the grocery store last week. Boy, it brought back memories…again! But that faded when the image of that pop being used to clean rust off a tailpipe 🙂
Excellent key points. You definitely got the wheels in my brain moving. Thank you.