Brand Yourself

A no-nonsense brand toolkit for small businesses

Lucy Werner, Hadrien Chatelet

• Publisher: Practical Inspiration Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788602754
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

***BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS 2022 SHORTLISTED TITLE***

Brand Yourself walks you through everything you need to know about creating a business brand, from brand strategy to picking out fonts, building your personal brand and affordable creative tips to make an impact with your business. Packed with practical exercises, examples and industry hacks and supported by an extensive interactive playbook online, this is the essential guide for business owners on a budget. Build a brand that stands out and that connects with the people you want to reach.

Lucy Werner is founder of The Wern, a PR and branding consultancy, She is also author of the bestselling Hype Yourself and a publicity expert who is a speaker, lecturer and course creator.

Hadrien Châtelet is the creative director of The Wern and leads the design arm of the business. He is also cofounder of Lucy's two children and they work together in their garden in east London.

Together they have over 30 years' industry experience and have taught thousands of entrepreneurs how to stand out and find success.

CHAPTER 1

HOW TO COMPILE YOUR BRAND STRATEGY

QUOTE

A BEAUTIFUL BRAND IS AMAZING, BUT A MEANINGFUL ONE IS BETTER.

Hadrien Châtelet

Before we get really stuck in to the hard work of building your brand strategy, let’s take a look at exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about branding.

WHAT IS BRANDING EXACTLY? WHAT ISN’T IT?

Branding is a dynamic process. It is more than just your product, logo or colour palette. It’s about your reputation. It’s what your audience feel about your product, service or company. But mainly, it’s what they remember about you. In that way, PR and branding cross over. It’s why Hadrien and I combine a lot of our strategic thinking across our clients. Done well, your brand, just like publicity, is about conveying a feeling to your audience.

Honestly, if I had a pound for every time a small business owner approached us and asked for a logo, thinking that was their brand, we’d be a very rich agency. It’s a common misconception that creating your brand starts with a logo design, but a logo is just a symbol. It is something that helps your consumer to remember who is talking and what their behaviour is. This is why logos are often the avatars (or profile pics) for social media channels, because on seeing them we instantly understand who is communicating.

The brand is more than just your colours and fonts, too. These are all part of what creates the look and feel, but it’s the whole package that conveys your emotion. Think of it like this: Hadrien wears colourful clothes, but that doesn’t define his personality; it is simply another element that makes up the tapestry of who he is. If you were to take the clothes away, brand Hadrien still exists (albeit slightly chillier). It should be the same with your own brand.

Another misconception we often come across is that the brand is the product. Again, this is only one small part of the overall picture – branding isn’t about something physical or tangible. Flyers, marketing materials and the way your product looks and feels can operate as part of the promotional tool of the brand, but they don’t embody the emotion and feeling of the overarching brand.

As we can see from all of these misconceptions, there’s a common thread: a lot of small businesses think that branding is about the visual appearance of their business. And absolutely, having a good-looking website and an identifiable colour palette is going to help you – but this isn’t what branding actually is. These things come from decisions you make about how to use your brand – in other words, your visual identity comes from your brand strategy.

The brand strategy is the business plan for your brand. When you create your brand, you need to think about what you want your audience to feel.

Let’s take the concept of a book. You start with a preface or an introduction. This first part, like where we introduced ourselves to you, is where we set the scene. We explain where you are, where and who we are and where we’re going to go together. Creating the brand is just that. It is scene-setting for your business. It’s the look and feel, the culture. But more than that, it is the feeling, the heart, the emotion of the people that your audience get to experience when they work with you or buy from you.

So, let’s dive straight in to how to build your brand strategy.

BRAND STRATEGY

This is the most important part of your branding exercise. There are millions of ways you can execute your brand to appeal to all of the senses, and millions of ways that brands can give you different emotions or connections with their audience. But there are only a few ways that are going to be successful for you. That is what we are trying to find – the exact set of conditions where your brand speaks in the right way, saying the right things, to the right audience.

One of the most important things for you to do, to help you find this set of conditions, is to define where you are going. You don’t want to start this journey without a destination in mind – so a huge part of all the brand strategy steps that are in this chapter is about defining the goal that you are aiming for with your brand. This chapter is all about finding out where you are going, and planning how to get there.

To help us achieve this, we are going to run through the following sections:

– competitor research

– values

– vision

– mission

– purpose

– audience mapping

– brand behaviour.

Ready to get going? Great! Then grab your notebook, or download our branding playbook at hypeyourself.com/playbook.

COMPETITOR RESEARCH

Looking around you is the first place to start. While larger companies might have access to more expensive tools and resources to conduct competitor research for them, we want to show you that it doesn’t have to be an expensive, time-consuming or overcomplicated process.

Look at your sector, your competitors, what is new, what is old – and learn from them. You can learn best practices as well as mistakes you need to avoid – so look for the good and the bad. There are probably a few companies that do the same services or are at least close to you and your product or service offering; look at how they are doing. They’re potentially doing not too shabbily; if so, you can learn from what they are doing well and think about how you may wish to incorporate this behaviour. You may also have an idea of what they are doing badly – things you fundamentally do not want to be doing.

Like the old aphorism about keeping your friends close but your enemies closer, you need to really understand and know your competitors because otherwise you are going to struggle to define and market what it is about yourself that is unique. So checking your market and your competitive set is the first and most important step for all the prep work we will do in Chapter 1.

ACTIVITY

COMPETITOR RESEARCH

Step 1: identify competitors

Download our playbook or grab some paper. Find three competitors that are doing what you are doing, and two companies that might not be competitors, but who are innovative and lead a trend.

QUESTIONS:

1. Write down the name of the company and their business URL.

2. What does this company do? Look at how they are defining themselves.

3. What do they do differently from others? What can you tell from this about what your own unique differences are?

4. What product or service do they offer? What is their pricing structure?

5. Do they have a key strength that you can learn from?

6. What are their weaknesses? Where can you do better?

7. What does each company make you feel? What type of adjective comes to mind? Safe? Expert? Playful? Dishonest?

8. Note down or screen-grab the use of colour, font/typefaces and styles.

HINT

The last exercise in this list is going to really help give you clarity. If all of your competitive set is using the same format, this is going to give you the perfect opportunity to stand out. If there is a broad spectrum of brands, it is going to give you even more confidence to carve out your own space.

Step 2: competitor mapping

Theodore Roosevelt once said that ‘comparison is the thief of joy’ and it is worth noting that spending too much time focusing on other people and what they are doing is energy that could be better spent on yourself and your own business. So for clarity, we are only encouraging you to look at your competitors for this one exercise.

Where is your space? Positioning yourself/your company in your chosen market is a useful exercise and might reveal that you are missing an opportunity to place yourself i...