How to understand your brand

By simon | 11 December

Who is your brand?

We’ve started working with a new client this week, one I’ve known about for a fair amount of time and one where I am good friends with the owner of the business.

It’s come to the point where we need to position the brand correctly – up until now it has grown fairly organically under its own steam, but as it reaches the next phase of its life cycle and is called upon to directly engage with the consumer, it needs to ‘grow up’ and set out its stall of who it is and what it stands for.

Most initial conversations I have with brand owners revolve around how to engage, and some of the time, identify their target markets. In this case, the target market is pretty evident and very well understood by the operator. What is not evident however, is the personality of the brand.

Again I’ve run workshops were we analyse the behaviour of a brand in order to understand how it would engage in its marketplace, but this one was different, and so we took a different approach: we actually took the step of turning the brand into an actual person and giving them a life history, personality, likes and dislikes. It was only a first step – with the description running across a couple of pages – but it was a start. As we expand and work with this brand further, we’d look to personify it even more – maybe even create a physical image of it as a human being.

The result?

What we created gave us the chance to see the brand in a much clearer light, allowing us to understand not only how she (turned out she was female!) would act with consumers, but also how she would act with different target demographics. Next steps in building the marketing plan around this new found life history became a whole lot easier – especially when looking at establishing aspects of the plan like brand pillars.

So next time you’re struggling to work out where to take your business brand, where to advertising, how to market or how to engage your consumers, maybe spend an afternoon workshopping your brands personality and see if that reveals any new paths. Even if it doesn’t, it can reveal some hidden depths to your brand that you may not have previously thought about or explored.