One of the most common mistakes that businesses make when building a brand is focusing on who they are. Instead, brands should be built upon what that business ultimately aspires to achieve.
Why?
Imagine you’re a small software development company, and right now you’ve got a pool of clients in your local area. This is who you are right now. Building a brand based on this is OK if you’re sure this is where your brand is staying. But if you have a vision of moving forward – expanding globally, for example – building a localised brand can make it more difficult for you to achieve your business goal. International clients may not be interested if you’re communicating a local message, in a local voice.
Failure to define your destination can mean you build a brand that doesn’t get you there.
Envisioning your path
Before building a brand, it’s important to be clear about where you see yourself further down the line. If you’re a startup, this can be a particularly difficult task. Asking these questions can help:
- What keeps getting me out of bed each morning? What am I trying to achieve?
- What brands inspire me, and which businesses do I respect and admire?
- Who do I want to help and support through this brand?
- What impact do I want my brand to have – on customers, and on the world?
- Where is there space for my brand within the market?
- Where do I see the business in the next 5 years? Or the next 10?
Together, the answers to these questions form your brand vision: your plans for the future. And when you have this all sorted out, it becomes easier to develop a brand that will get you there.
Vision and branding go together hand-in-hand. When you understand more about where you want to be, it becomes easier to create logos, taglines, messages, communications, designs and more that facilitate the journey you want to be on. It means you can build a brand that’s going to continue sharing the right message as you grow and develop, rather than keeping you stuck in the past.
Finding the right balance
Of course, there is an elephant in the room when it comes to building a brand based on where you’re going, rather than where you are today: the fact that the two may not align especially well.
Going back to the example above, just as international clients may not be attracted to a local brand, your local clients today may not feel connected to a brand built on a foundation of global reach.
It goes both ways.
The solution to this is to start small when developing your brand, and ensure you’re always connecting and engaging with your primary target audience first. By incorporating flexibility into your brand, and giving yourself room to grow, you should find that you’re able to expand on your brand message as you edge forward towards your goals. It’s better than having to start from scratch!
