More baby talk: Your brand is your business language
Posted on 07. Apr, 2010 by Kelly Hobkirk in Brand Positioning, Branding.
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.
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