It seems that with the rapid explosion of social media over the past few years, a lot of attention has been focused on the concept of “branding,” extending beyond the domain of the business or corporate entity and now encompassing the individual. Increasingly, anyone and everyone in the working world is told that they must have a “personal brand,” regardless of whether they are planted in some corporate cube farm, they are running their own micro-business, or simply another “reality” show aspirant seeking 15 minutes in the limelight.
Perhaps this is all an unavoidable extension of our celebrity-obsessed culture and the increasing inability of many people to distinguish between public and private personas, as their entire lives are more or less a performance, but there’s no avoiding the fact that as many institutions increasingly treat their hirelings as little more than interchangeable commodities, and capital seeks out “efficiency” (i.e. low cost to create product or service, high productivity and maximum ROI), one ignores brand-building at one’s own peril.
Brand Must Stand For Something
So what is a brand anyway? In its simplest expression, Merriam-Webster offers up the semi-helpful definition that it’s “a class of goods identified by name as the product of a single firm or manufacturer.” That’s important, but any competent marketer will tell you that it’s often the intangibles surrounding the product or service which make the Brand. More often than not, brands sell emotion, or aspirational hopes and dreams, which is one reason why celebrity endorsements are so often sought out. One running shoe made in China, Vietnam or some other Southeastern Asia workshop is probably not terribly different from a competitor’s brand, but if a highly-paid celebrity athlete is paid to wear one and not the other, which do you think is perceived as being more valuable or more effectual?
For a brand to be effective, regardless of whether it has a catchy slogan to accompany it (although this never hurts), it must represent a quality or qualities that others want to have. For a company or individual, undertaking the discovery process to understand what that elixir is and how to capitalize on it is paramount.
Repetition Is Important When Building the Brand
With the proliferation of digital technology, in addition to the traditional media channels of the “old establishment,” virtually everyone is bombarded with thousands of messages each day, designed to inform, entertain, and more often than not, sell something. It’s easy to get lost amid this signal to noise ratio, especially when in the infancy stages of establishing a brand.
Repetition is critical, because it often takes the human mind several exposures of information for it to register on a conscious level. When appealing to increasingly short attention spans, you have little time to “get out the message,” so you must focus on ideas that connect on an emotional sub-conscious level as much as possible. It is also critical to know your core audience, and to go after early-adopters vis-à-vis the marketing channels they tend to listen to first, and then start worrying about “total addressable markets” and other fancy lingo.
Consistency Is Even More Important to Establish the Brand
Say what you will about most fast food joints, but one thing these franchise operations understand is the importance of consistency – a hamburger consumed in Boise from a specific chain is more or less a clone of one consumed in Bangor, whether the latter is in Maine, New York, or Pennsylvania, to name but a few. For a brand to take hold, it must deliver a consistent experience, which necessitates that quality control doesn’t drop the ball.
This means that whether you are selling a physical product or delivering services, the buyer knows what to expect and gets exactly that each and every time the wallet is opened. If this doesn’t happen, the brand-building starts taking on negative connotations which may cause irreparable damage.
Perception Often Trumps Reality When It Comes to Brand
There’s an old expression among marketers that you, “sell the sizzle and not the steak.” While it always helps to have a higher quality product or service than your competitors, there are numerous examples of inferior products or services becoming market leaders, if only for a time, because of the ability to influence taste-makers and those on the “tipping point.” For example, my personal point of view is that Starbucks does not have the best coffee amid the profusion of vendors exploding onto the coffee purveying scene in the 1990’s. What it did understand better than most was how to sell an experience surrounding the acquisition and enjoyment of coffee, which it was wildly successful in exploiting.
At the end of the day, many products and services arguably are largely interchangeable in many applications, so it’s vital that you create the perception that all empirical evidence aside, this is simply not true. As a service provider, it is critical to understand what aspects of your own brand’s story are compelling enough to suggest that the service you deliver will better fit the needs, stated or implied, of the party you are selling to so they don’t cozy up to the competition.
Be True To the Vision
Companies by definition need to be started by entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs, by definition, must have a vision or they would never have gone into business in the first place. Successful brands are often harnessed to the shared revelation of what drives (or drove) the founder(s), emphasizing why these values or principles or desires are important to the would-be consumer. Effectively communicating the vision, and sharing in the journey towards its realization is a powerful tool in the right hands, and as Joseph Campbell revealed in his pioneering exploration of mythical story structures, connects to humans on a fundamental level.
Be inspired. Refine your vision until it’s crystal clear. Share this vision. And most importantly, deliver on this vision, each and every time. There are no shortcuts to establishing a brand, but hopefully these hard-won truths will help.
Jonathan S. Ross is the founder of Los Angeles based Black Rock Consulting, a boutique management and communications consultancy offering strategic planning and development, project management, marketing strategy and copywriting, and creative writing and content development services to start-up, early stage and more mature ventures. He is also the originator of Tao of the Zentropist, a business and personal development blog fusing universal truths found within Eastern and Western wisdom traditions.
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Tisha Tolar is a freelance writer, entreprenuer, and co-owner of 
Tisha Tolar is an entreprenuer and writer specializing in small business and marketing tactics. She is the co-owner of 
Tisha Tolar is the co-owner of