The Fatal Branding Mistake: Solopreneur Insights, Vol. 21
You're my hero.
Across the Solopreneur landscape, I see talent and skill and grit and optimism. I see people like you using skills to provide value to others, working hard to grow your audience, expand your network, and increase your sales. I see you learning new skills to support your efforts. Skills like copywriting, sales, and networking that help generate leads.
But, you’re missing the most powerful skill of all. The one skill that would supercharge all other skills: Brand Strategy.
Your brand is the one characteristic that you can never escape, provided you’re doing anything at all. Imagine trying to exist in a society while preventing yourself from having a reputation.
It’s not possible.
Brand is kind of like a reputation for someone selling a product or service. Whether you like it or not, every word, every action, every association, every conversation is part of a brand that is building up each day.
This means you must pick one:
Passively allow your brand to happen to you.
Consciously inject Brand Strategy into the actions you’re already taking to influence the outcomes you desire.
The power of Brand Strategy is the line between the people you admire most and the people who never cross your mind. Your favorite people resonate with you, connect with you, provide value to you, and make you feel part of something better. All of these translate to more exposure, more influence, and more money.
The best part? NONE of your favorite people have anything that you don’t. Not on the fundamental level, at least. They simply learned the skill of Brand Strategy and are using it to communicate clearly with you and smoke their competition.
It’s time you learn to do the same. This article introduces the most fundamental Branding concept of all. Understanding it will mean the difference between a lukewarm brand and one that sets people’s hearts on fire.
What is a Brand?
If you’re like most people, the word “brand” conjures up visual imagery. After all, the origin of the word “brand” in this sense refers to a hot, metal icon singed into the hide of a cow.
What most people don’t think about is the information stored within the icon burned into that poor cow’s bum:
Who owns the cow?
Where should the cow be?
What’s the reputation of the cow’s owner? If I’m caught with this particular cow in my field, is that owner going to shoot me or thank me for keeping it safe?
Today, we can draw a line directly from the icons branded into the cow hide to corporate logos. Except, unlike the few bits of information stored in the cow’s hide, the corporate logos store much more information. Consider your favorite brand. When you see their logo, you’re seeing a visual storage of:
The company name
What the company sells
What they stand for
Who else buys from them
Their history
Your relationship with them
How you feel when you engage with them
Their culture
Why you prefer them over a competitor
How much they cost
What engaging their product says about you
Of course, you don’t consciously think about all of these things when you see the Apple logo. Or the Amazon logo, or Nike, or Tesla. Instead, all of these attributes (and many more I didn’t list), combine into one emotional feeling. Which brings me to the best definition I’ve ever found for what a brand actually is. The following is from Marty Neumeier, a Branding legend, in his book “The Brand Gap”:
A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a company, product, or service.
Have you ever heard it described this way? In this simple statement, Marty establishes that a brand is not a logo. The logo is just the symbol for the ACTUAL brand.
Where does a brand live? Do logos or even companies have magical life forces of their own? Of course not. A brand lives within each person who interacts with the brand. No matter how aligned, each person will have a slightly different version. Or, in many cases, extremely different versions.
Think about it this way. Professional sports teams are known as some of the strongest brands on the planet, complete with all the hallmarks of branding: a product, symbols, traditions, culture, raving fans, etc. Each team wants to attract fans. After all, they have their own bills to pay. But, they also want a certain number of people to hate them. Yes, hate them. After all, what would happen to the excitement of watching sports if we never actually rooted for anyone? Never felt the thrill of victory or the devastation of defeat?
When FC Barcelona fans see a FC Barcelona flag, they get excited. When they see a Real Madrid flag? “Booooo!” And vice versa. Same goes for Packers and Cowboys or the Yankees and Red Sox. You’ll see examples all across sports.
I use these as examples, because they show how one brand can conjure up two completely different experiences. The fan loves it. The rival hates it. I’m not recommending that you purposefully try to get people to hate your brand! But, I do need you to understand this: The strongest brands elicit strong emotional responses. That “gut feeling” I referenced earlier is an emotional response. It has to work this way, because humans will feel long before they think. This is why we emphasize the art of eliciting emotional responses in Brand Strategy. This is why I say things like, “Lukewarm is death.” It’s also why the fundamental cornerstone of a powerful brand is truth. One small lie can destroy decades of brand equity.
Start with the foundation
For now, I want you to understand the critical idea that will separate you from everyone else making fatal Branding mistakes. It's the same critical idea that your favorite people and brands understand deeply:
You do not own your brand. Your audience owns your brand.
The ONLY role you play in this process is influencing them. And, there’s A LOT you can do to influence them. In the coming weeks and months, I’ll dive into the details of exactly how you can do that. I’ll cover all the components of a strong brand, from values and beliefs to core messages to trust to look and feel. You’ll learn how to build a powerful audience of true fans. You’ll learn how to attract high-quality customers. You’ll learn how to turn sales into the easiest process in your business. I hope you’re ready, because we have a lot to talk about.
– Torrey