I often wonder what the man was thinking in the moment his eyes rolled up. I seriously doubt it had anything at all to do with, ‘I could have done it better.’

Is any brand perfect? I hope not. Perfection is the end of aspiration, and luckily, perfection is entirely subjective. I might question the lack of symbolism in your company’s logo, but you love that logo. It’s part of your identity that you interact with every day. It’s perfect to you. I may suggest a way to make it better, or I may keep my trap shut, instead finding the path into your mind to understand your relationship with your logo and its deeper meanings.

Perfection takes time. A lot of it. It takes more time than most businesses have before they expire from lack of action. When is the time to stop refining a design and make a choice you can stick with for ten or more years? That’s a tough question, but you’ll typically know the moment. You can feel it in your heart.

As both an artist and brand consultant, people often mistake me for a perfectionist, such is the stereotype of an artist. I may be among the least perfection-bent designers around, yet I have a deep passion for creating and enhancing symbolism, as well as crack execution. I strive to design logos, identities and communications that inspire, and advertising or websites that really connect on a deeper level. People often mistake my passion for exceptional design as a desire for perfection. I suppose it’s a fine line.

The next time you’re looking for a perfect something, try seeking out meaning and connection rather than perfection. You’ll probably find that perfect whatever-it-is much faster.

Many companies today lack a real brand. Sure, they have a logo and a website, a business card and perhaps a tag line. Maybe they have a brochure or other collateral, maybe not. That sounds like some of the components of a brand, doesn’t it? Sure it does, but the truth is none of these items constitutes a real brand.

So what is a real brand?

Well, to answer that, you have to back up a little bit, and ask some other questions, such as:
• How genuine are you?
• How real is your company’s ethos?
• How dynamic is your purpose?
• How clear is your business plan?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, chances are you or your company have pretty pictures and a smooth story instead of a real brand.

A real brand or personal brand is genuine and true. Every element of it has actual meaning. There is no space-filler, no made up stories, no compromises. The stories surrounding a real brand are true, and as such, people can really relate to them.

See the difference? Now think about your own company and its brand. Is it real?

You may be scratching your head about my babies to branding analogy, or you might just think I’m nuts for making this connection, but this is important because it drives home the very reason why branding is so critical to business success – why it is so important to undertake the process of branding right from the moment of immaculate business conception.

See, we humans have an innate need to categorize and label durn near everything. We start labeling and categorizing from the very moment we become conscious, out-of-the-womb babies. Actually, strike the ‘durn near,’ and just keep the ‘everything.’ We label EVERYTHING. Every single thought, emotion, person, thing, and action we come into contact with gets labeled in our brains. This is how we identify with literally everything in our lives.

Brand Context

Think about your day. You wake up, possibly naked, completely unlabeled. You look over at your significant other (if you have one), and your mind calls up the label you have for that person, whether it is ‘wife’, ‘boyfriend,’ ‘Julie’, ‘Pat,’ ‘Robert’, or whomever. You get up, stumble into where? The ‘bathroom.’ You pick up what? ‘Toothbrush.’ To brush what? ‘Teeth.’ Next, you walk to ‘kitchen’, where you eat ‘cereal.’ These are basic labels. Without them, you would have no way to relate to or describe the things you desire and need every day.

Add some more detailed labels to the above items, and your labeled day starts looking like this relationship:
Wake, think about Julie, walk to bathroom, brush teeth with Sonicare and Colgate, walk to kitchen, eat Healthy Valley brand cereal, grind Victrola organic coffee beans in Braun grinder, put on your Lucky brand jeans, Banana Republic shirt, and Nine West shoes or Nike sneakers, read the Wall Street Journal while drinking Victrola coffee, find your keys, and drive your Honda on I-5 to work at (insert company name here), go to lunch with Bob at Cafe Lulu, drive his Prius back to work, punch the clock, and head home to your house in the Ravenna neighborhood of Seattle.

There are over twenty-five labels in the above paragraph. 25 labels! In the span of what? Half an hour of your day?! Without them, the paragraph could not possibly exist because there would be no description, no language.

Now, this is the cool part, the part where it all comes together, where you see that you absolutely must brand your business right from the very start if you want people to know, buy, love, and talk about you.

The moment you’ve been branding for

Remember those 25 or so labels I just mentioned two paragraphs up? They make your day describable. Without them, there would be no way to describe your daily thoughts, emotions, and interactions. You would have no way to relate to the things you buy. No way to relate to the people you know. No way to even describe what happens after the moment of waking.

Think about it another way: If you asked a brand-spankin’ new, freshly born baby to describe the birth process, they couldn’t do it! A baby has no categorizations, no labels, no relationships, no language, nothing, nada, zip, zilch. Babies can’t speak right away. They have to learn the language.

Now, try asking a baby to describe your company. You know they can’t do it because they can’t speak your language. Asking your customers to remember your company without first branding it is precisely the same thing. Without knowing your business language – your brand – they cannot do it. And you will not become a compelling part of their dialog.

Brand = Business Language

Your brand is the language of your business. People have to learn your language to be able to speak it. The more articulate your business language – or brand – the more useful and memorable your business becomes.

Your brand positioning tells people how to categorize you. Your logo and identity give them the easiest of ways to remember and relate to you. Your tag line helps them further categorize you. Your website is the place where they can connect with your brand. Your marketing increases awareness of your brand.

Your customers rely on your brand to be able to categorize and label you so that when they need you, they know exactly which thought to recall, which logo identifies you, what you do, what you provide to their day, why they need you.

If you rely on word of mouth for much of your marketing, you can see that without developing your business language – your brand – right from the start, people won’t know how to talk about you. If you develop your brand, people will learn your business language, and an important part of your marketing will suddenly have a powerful dialog, a way to exist, be remembered, and remain in people’s thoughts and conversations.

Imagine you are a baby. You are sheltered in their mother’s womb for nine months. Everything you need is provided in a warm environment. When born, you transition from everything you need being completely taken care of to 100% needy in the span of just a few minutes. If that’s not a shock to the system I don’t know what is.

What happens next? You are cleaned off, checked over, wrapped in a blanket, held and coveted. Everyone around you is joyful and smiling. You are fed, held, and instantly loved.

Then you learn how to learn. You are taught, and you grow into a full-fledged, working, breathing, consuming adult.

We spend the entirety of our adult lives working to get that same feeling, that same attention, utter bliss, love. There are a plethora of ways to define and attain those feelings; products and services designed to fulfill our desires and needs. If you brand your business, products and services just right, you can be among the tons of entrepreneurs and companies ready to provide them.

If you fail to brand or do so without integrity, you will get beat out by those who do it right. They’re the businesses who understand that telling their story in a true and meaningful way will create an almost magical bridge between their business and clients – people who are looking to connect, to capture that feeling of being held and coddled, taken care of, loved.

It’s not hard to brand right, but it’s much easier to brand poorly – just like it’s easier to reject than to accept. The cool thing about babies is that they can accept nearly anything. While I’m not suggesting that you talk to your clients like they’re babies, I’m saying that keeping it simple – keeping your brand true and real – is a much more sound brand strategy.

People appreciate honesty and integrity. Wrap them in the blanket of your true story, your real brand. Take care of them, and they will welcome you into their lives on a regular basis.

Objectivity has long been one of the most important qualities that graphic designers and consultants bring to the table. Its value cannot be understated, especially when it comes to personal branding.

Your identity is a tough thing to objectively examine because you are personally invested in it on a daily basis. You have a close relationship with your identity. This is important though because you are asking your prospects and clients to have the exact same type of close daily relationship with you and your brand.

Most people are not capable of objectively examining their own personal brand because 1) They are too close to their own beliefs and rituals to have true objectivity, and 2) They lack experience in brand development (especially the effective variety).

Give it a try

There is a good chance you’re thinking you are the exception, the one person in the world capable of objectively examining your identity. You might be right, but realistically, the chances are not so good.

Don’t get me wrong – I encourage you to try it. In fact, I will be starting a series of public examinations of my own personal brand right here on Branding Revolution. Just like you, I am one ambitious mofo.

I fully expect to discover some things during this exploration that will make even me uncomfortable, but that’s a natural part of the process. It’s what we do with the knowledge gained that counts.

I’ve worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs and companies on local, national and international levels during the last 25 years, and honestly, I have met only a small handful of people capable of an objective self-examination of their identity. I have met a ton of people who thought they could do it, tried, and failed miserably at it. I’ve met people who accepted their own biased examination as the gospel truth, which inevitably leads to self-delusion and an ineffective personal brand. I admire people’s optimism and efforts nonetheless.

Now you might be thinking, ‘OK then, I’ll ask my friends for help.’ Think again. Your friends are already personally invested in your identity. They have thoughts and perceptions of you – both positive and negative – that no one else has. They prop you up, push you down, and are closer to you than nearly anyone. They are great for gaining alternate perspectives, but they are insiders, too close to you to be objective.

I am blessed with a gift for examining, processing, designing, and verbalizing people’s identities and helping them discover their personal brands. I am exceptional at it, yet I am aware that no one can know what everyone thinks about each aspect of them self. When I want an objective opinion about myself, I seek outside feedback. I highly suggest that if you are serious about discovering, exploring, and developing your personal brand, you seek external, professional help. That said, you can start laying the groundwork for discovering and defining your personal brand today.

You have your own set of impressions based on your intentions. The people who interact with your personal brand have different perceptions and experiences. It is entirely possible to align both yours and your clients perceptions and experiences. In fact, that is one of the primary goals of personal branding. It is not an easy thing to do by any stretch of the imagination, yet it is extremely empowering and worth the effort. If you can gain additional perspectives from an objective outside resource, all the better.

You can start by reading this post and doing the quick exercise it contains.

What does your personal brand look like?

The short answer: It looks like you. You are the most clear picture of your personal brand.

Now for the longer answer that I can’t give in an elevator: A personal brand is much like a corporate brand except, well, more personal. It’s a combination of your visual and verbal dialog, combined with your actions, but when a brand is taken to a personal level, the elements that make up those three core ingredients are much more intricate.

When I zero down this equation to one person, I’m looking at nearly every detail that effects how people experience you and how you experience yourself. I also look at what makes you the person you are.

How do you get a snapshot of your personal brand? A quick picture is worth the roughly half hour it takes to put together. Here are 3.5 not-so-easy steps to discovering your personal brand. The last half step is SUPER IMPORTANT, so don’t skip it! It’s that first little baby step that you have to take if you want to evolve and grow. I promise you it will feel good.

1. Look into your eyes

If you want a picture of your personal brand, get up out of your chair, walk to the nearest full body mirror, and take a long hard look. Look at your excited eyes or the subtle wrinkles around them when you smile. Check out your posture before you straighten it up. How is your energy – both before and after coffee? Now, look down at your shoes and the clothes you wear. Notice how they make you feel. Got that feeling in your mind? Good. That’s a big part of how people see you.

2. Look out from their eyes

Note: It is nearly impossible to do this objectively by yourself because you have a daily relationship with your brand, yet I encourage you to give it a try.

Take a long hard look at your business card, logo and website – the most basic core elements of your brand identity. Remember, your identity speaks for you when you are not there. Your brand identity is a huge part of how people perceive you because most of the time, you and your clients are not together. Most often when people interact with your brand, you are not there, but your brand identity is. Does your identity speak to you, your audience, or both?

Read the copy on your site. Is it vibrant, exciting and positive, or does it put people to sleep? Does it drone on about the same old things, or are you bringing something totally unique to the table? Are you hiding your best secrets, or are you putting it right out there, hands open and on the table, driving home your unique qualities and winning approach?

3. How active are your actions?

Think about the things you say and the tone of your voice. Ask yourself some of questions, such as: Do you have integrity? Do you make empty promises, or do you follow up on your commitments? Think about how you treat people and how you respond to their needs. Do you speak with wisdom and authority? Are you quiet and reserved? Think about the sum total of your actions. Got all those things in your mind together? Write them down.

Add it up
Now, add up the results of items one, two, and three. Without gaining the incredibly important objective opinion (you can do that later), you will have a super quick capsule of your personal brand.

Your Assignment (the all-important .5)

You can start defining your personal brand today. It isn’t easy, but it is worth it. Tell me what you see when you look at yourself, your logo, business card and website. Tell me how you treat yourself and everyone you come into contact with.

Do you like what you see? Is it real? Do other people like it? Do they see the same things as you? Is there something you would like to improve?

I challenge you to think differently about your personal brand. Think about how to make it better by investing in real, meaningful, icky, scary, empowering change. Tell me in the comments one thing you can do to improve your personal brand – so it’s stated, and might actually become real to you. (If you’re shy, just put “Superhero X” in the name field.)

There, didn’t that feel good?

Do you love your brand?

You might be thinking, ‘What? No, I don’t love my brand! It’s a marketing tool. It’s made up, created by some artsy graphic designer. I love my spouse, my kids, but my brand? Heck no!’

That’s OK, but write this down as something you need to think about changing.

Do you live your brand? Chances are you do. And if you live it, you are connected with it. If you are connected with it, you might well love it, even if you don’t know it.

Loving your brand is absolutely essential to your business success. If you don’t love your brand, no one else will either. And that’s really the whole purpose of a brand – to be loved.

You don’t have to hug and snuggle up with it each night, but you do need to share your deepest thoughts with your brand. You need to have an inner dialog with it (you probably already do). Your brand dialog is what you think each time you connect with your brand.

A picture of negative brand

Many years ago, I worked for a company that essentially had a negative brand. They had a logo that beat people down within the company and discouraged customers from buying into the brand. The logo was an icon of a setting sun, most often presented in blood red or black. It had nothing to do with their industry, and it presented a negative metaphor, which ironically rang true. No one ever knew if they would have a job the next week, and customers didn’t know if they would be able to get service or warranty repairs.

When you talked with the salespeople, they were focused solely on short-term sales. They wheeled and dealed and almost always lowered their selling price. To listen to them, their selling sounded strained and almost sleazy. No matter who was hired in the role of manager, that person openly said that they did not believe in the company. Accounting was regularly tasked with cooking the books for the financiers. The receptionist, in full view of the retail entrance, had the bizarre duty of peeling off non-canceled stamps from returned postcards – ostensibly to save money.

I am not making this up.

Do you have a mental picture of this company? Now think about if you worked there. How much would you love your job? Really – how much? Chances are, you would hate your job at that company. You would be rocketing your resume out all over town. You would be there for no other reason than to collect a paycheck. Your inner brand dialog would harm your motivation and performance.

It starts at the top

Here’s the kicker: All of these negative duties and dialogs come from the top. If the top dog doesn’t believe in their brand, employees won’t either. If you are infusing any negativity into your brand, it trickles down, and your clients and prospects will see and feel it. Your brand’s negative messages give people pause.

If you’re reading this, chances are you are an entrepreneur, president, marketing director, or VP at your company, or at the very least, you are probably in a position to directly effect your brand, leading by example.

Learning to love your brand requires more than just stating it – you have to truly live it. You have to make it permeate every aspect of your professional dialog. When you do that, you can shape a positive brand experience for everyone. It’s truly game-changing stuff.

Your brand is kind of like breakfast, the most important meal of the day. Your brand is the motivational fuel that gets your business through each day.

Take it in, each and every morning, just like the eggs and toast, protein shake or coffee you crave at the start of each day. Each of us interacts with our brand every single day, whether it’s Monday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday.

Monday-Friday, you have a relationship with your brand. You think about it, you see it, you interact with it. Saturday, that relationship probably changes. Your brand relationship on Sunday is very likely different from Mon-Sat.

As you drive to work, you may be thinking about a ton of things, but chances are that some of your thoughts are centered on some part of your company’s brand.

Monday is the day I use to set the tone for the week. I generally get a ton of work planned and started. Monday is the day that Train of Thought is in my mind all day, from the moment I wake until I put the computer to sleep late in the day.

Tuesday is most often the day when I connect with my craft. I sit at the drafting table and draw or paint. Traditional craft one of the big differences that sets my brand apart.

Wednesday through Friday I work my tail off. Saturday and Sunday are days I use to recharge my soul. It’s time away from my corporate brand, days used to connect with what makes me, well, me.

All week long, when I see my logo, I know what it stands for, and as a result, I am reminded of what I stand for. Train of Thought’s identity provides motivation, it tells me why I need to stay on task, and it reinforces the importance of following the creative path, practices and procedures that have led to our success.

Exercise: Get a clear picture of how you interact with your brand each day.

1. Carry a pad of paper and pen all day.

2. Write down every single way you interact with your company’s brand. If you think about work, write down your thought. If you imagine your office, write down how you imagine it. If you have positive or negative thoughts about how a meeting will go, write them down. If you think about a person you have to interact with, write down your thoughts about the person and the interaction. Is your identity on your company car? Write it down. Does the paint in your office match your identity? Write it down. Do you think about how your efforts need to reflect your company’s reputation? Write it down. Each and every time you see your company’s logo or identity characteristics, write it down. Think about the feelings your brand identity evokes.

By day’s end, if you are writing down every single thought that has to do with your brand, you should have at least 70-100 entries. If you have significantly less than that, you may be taking your brand touch points for granted, not staying true to your brand, or you’re not engaged in your marketing.

This exercise works for both corporate and personal brands. Give it a try. You might be surprised at just how much your own identity is wrapped around your brand. If you try it, and you find the results surprising, add a comment below.

Branding is hard work – no two ways about it. It’s a never ending effort that pays off in more ways than most people realize. Your brand effects your daily motivation, your approach to your work, and your overall success. It drives your marketing, and ultimately it is one of the two strongest forces driving your business.

Businesses who skip branding often fail because they lack the basic definition of who they are and why they exist in the context of consumerism. Without that stated knowledge, they lack the core foundation that should be driving their marketing in a compelling manner, instead relying on a vague sense of why they exist and who they serve.

This opens the door for bad planning, bad deals, and poor decisions. Look at the banking industry if you need an example of companies who fail to utilize the true power of branding. Banks continually put out messages that don’t connect with reality, and they obviously make poor decisions that effect not only their bottom line but their customers’ as well.

If you skip creating a clear, concise brand, what do you have instead? Emptiness. How can customers connect with emptiness? They can’t.

Where does emptiness get you? Nowhere. Think of a dog chasing it’s tail. He may be having fun for a few minutes, but he is most definitely not getting anywhere.

If your business is lacking a clear brand identity, you have the following expensive, time-consuming problems to contend with on a daily basis:
• Your people are lacking in clear direction.
• Your marketing is lacking in purpose.
• Your customers don’t understand you.
• Pandora’s Box (or jar really) is open.

That’s some pretty weighty stuff! And it can have a dire effect on your business.

This may not always be apparent. You may be able to do ok without a brand identity, but you will never achieve your greatest success without a meaningful brand because the above items will to a large extent always be true. A strong brand is often what separates those businesses who merely survive and those who are growing by leaps and bounds.

Questions to ask yourself:

• How much more revenue would you bring in if your brand recognition increased by ninety percent?
• How much more effective would your sales team be if they had a deeper sense of purpose that they can find only at your company?

Your brand is made of three primary components: visual, verbal, and action.

The first creative part of virtually every brand development is visual design. I’ll cover the verbal and action components in upcoming posts.

Your logo and corporate identity, including your business card and website, set the visual tone for your brand and many of your marketing communications. Colors, graphic standards, and type selections are all determined at this phase.

One of the most common questions I get on first contact from someone looking for a graphic designer is, “What items do we need for corporate/brand identity?” There is some variation according to usage and business type, but for nearly every businesses I recommend the following basic items as a start:
1. Logo
2. Business Card
3. Website
4. Letterhead
5. Envelope
6. Tag line
7. Overview Brochure
8. Mailing Label

Here is an overview of each item, along with the reasons why nearly every business needs them:

Logo
Your logo is the visual cornerstone of your brand that tells people who you are, and does so in an incredibly memorable way. It sets the tone for all pieces and graces nearly all of your marketing communications. Love it, and never leave it.

Business Card
Even if you never leave the dark dungeon of your home office or the confines of your plush leather chair, you must have a business card. And not just any business card. Your business card has the power to make a huge first impression, or to be silent as a lamb – even if it’s coming out of an envelope. Never skimp on your business card design or printing. Avoid cheap online printing of your cards, at all costs. If you have to go that route, fine, but consider it a temporary stop-gap measure. Or better yet, find any way humanly possible to budget for a great card, and it will pay off in spades.

Website
Your website is the first or second point of contact for many people. Make it great. Budget well for it. Do not put up a website that you have to apologize for. If you’re not impressed by it, no one else will be either. If you have a small budget, keep an open mind, and find someone who offers an outstanding solution within your budget. It may take time to find them, but someone can do it. Work incrementally if you have to. Never settle for a lesser website than your brand deserves.

Letterhead, Envelope and Mailing Label
Many businesses use these items few times in a year, however, those few times are usually worth investing in good design and printing. If you send someone a fat proposal on a lasered letterhead in an ink-jetted envelope, with a hand-written label, you’ve just sealed your fly-by-night look on your hard work. Why risk losing that $43,000 contract? Spend the $400 on offset printing, and look professional every time.

Tag line
While your logo tells everyone who you are, you tag line succinctly tells people what you do and what you stand for. Your logo and tag line are a potent combination of meaningful, memorable brand smack.

Overview Brochure
Think brochures are outdated? Think again. When your computer, iPod or iPad are absent, your brochure can make the sale. I’m not talking about that yawn-inducing tri-fold in your dentist’s office. I’m talking about the uniquely formatted and crisply designed rockstar brochure that makes you feel like two million bucks handing it out. The one that can be passed on to someone easily and with a word of recommendation. The one that makes eyeballs bulge and helps people connect with your company. Your overview brochure is your impressive, convincing voice when you can’t be there.

Investing in professional brand identity materials does three things:
1. It makes you feel more professional.
2. You project more confidence, thus you sell better.
3. It makes the difference between looking like a fly-by-night organization or a real business.

A good graphic designer can put together a package of the above items that best suits your needs and budget. Sometimes we add in t-shirts, thank you cards, bookmarks and other branded items. Going in with a list of what you want can help. During your graphic designer search, make sure your prospective designer can handle all of these elements well.

Find this article helpful? Please add a comment or question below. Thanks for reading.