Branding yourself: A critical decision

We’re talking about brand strategy here.  Not advertising, and certainly not an easy grasp for amateur marketers.  So how developed is your company’s brand?  Is your message clear, concise, and consistent?

Here’s the professional’s process:

There is a process used by professionals to get to clear messaging.  It starts with “discovery,” the process of finding the strengths of the company in the minds of all stakeholders.  That requires careful questioning, accumulation of results, and then the creation of a strategy for making a message reflect these advantages.

Branding a cow seems so much easier.

We start with our intended audience, asking ourselves who we are talking to, what we need to say, and how we are going to say it.  We want our audience to know what we stand for in the fewest, most memorable words.

Think of this as our core message. 

We define (clearly) what we give (our core attributes) and then why it matters, or what our audience gets (the benefits).

[Email readers, continue here…]   A good brand strategy then lists supporting arguments for both the give and the get.  Once we have done this, we should be ready to create our audience–facing message, which we know as advertising.

What we usually do wrong

Very few of us have conducted a brand strategy effort, and much of our advertising reflects this, with wasted ad dollars spent as we nibble around the core message and miss targeting the primary “get” message in our ads.

You can follow the steps outlined above and attempt to define your core message or seek help from a professional.  It seems that most often, this extra effort to define brand message would be cheaper and much more effective than our present attempts at “spray and pray” advertising today.

Or you can hope your present advertising is effective – and concentrate on learning a new skill at the ranch.