Using your company’s core strengths to build and sustain your brand
By Amie Peele Carter
Strengths training is getting a lot of airtime these days. At back to school night two weeks ago, I sat in my son’s new classroom and learned about the strength training recently given to the school’s faculty. I am even starting to see a greater strengths focus in the way they evaluate students.
Back at work, though, I begin to think about strengths from a corporate perspective. What are the strengths of any given organization? And once they are identified, how can they be leveraged to better express the company’s brand? After all, your brand is the way your customers and clients experience what you have to offer.
Here are some ideas to help you link the strengths of your organization to your brand –
1. Carefully identify your core strengths. This may mean getting an objective source outside of the company to help. However you do it, make sure your methodology is sound. Identify the top 3-5 strengths that provide the most ideal vehicle to carry your message to your customers.
2. Convey your strengths visually and verbally. This step requires two levels of translation. The first is the translation of your strengths to a written and visual brand, which means that your strengths must be conveyed through words, design and color. For example, although I’ve not done any strengths training or branding with Amazon.com, I suspect that one of their strengths is making people happy. You can see that translated in the bright colors used in their logo, as well as the “smile” created in the design.
Lands’ End provides another good example. The company has a reputation for exemplary customer service, and the “Guaranteed. Period.” tag line is designed to support that reputation. More recently, this company added a new lighthouse logo to identify its core product offerings, with both the product and the brand sending the image of “going back to basics.” That branding concept identifies the strengths of the company as longevity, stability and quality.
Level two of the translation requires that the brand you select not so immediately convey your message that it does not function as a trademark. If a trademark is generic or otherwise too closely describes the products or services with which it is associated, it will not be able to differentiate your company from others in the minds of consumers. For those reasons, the best trademarks are usually arbitrary in nature, even coined words (like KOKAK).
1. Convey your strengths in real time. This requires that your employees and your leadership both embrace the company’s strengths and live them every day. At a granular level, customer service representatives must be both trained and empowered to activate the brand in their day to day work with customers. And it also means that the company’s strengths must become part of the organizational culture, if they are not already.
2. Reevaluate and rebrand as needed. Brands can become stale. Strengths can evolve and change. Re-assess and rebrand when you need to. But don’t rebrand without a real reason, because you will need to explain to your consumers the reason for the evolution of the brand. And you will need a trigger to easily do that.
3. Effectively enforce your brand in the minds of consumers. This means you need to reach your customers where they live professionally – and that might be in person, in cyberspace, on the TV or radio or some other medium. But without step 5, you will not leverage your investment in the brand you’ve developed.
Good luck!
Amie Peele Carter is a partner at the law firm of Baker & Daniels, LLP, where she practices in the areas of trademarks, copyright and ecommerce, with a focus on sports and entertainment projects. She is also a branding, marketing and strategic development consultant with B&D Consulting. Amie can be reached at amie.peelecarter@bakerd.com, or 317.237.1180.
