Hello readers. It turns out the business world needs less of a revolution and more of an understanding of branding, so I am winding up the Branding Revolution blog. I tried to create something that would affect a profound change in the way people viewed their brands. While there has been some success on that front, I’ve uncovered more effective ways of communicating the core ideas behind this blog.

In staying true to my own beliefs, it is time to create something new, and I’m working on that now. Branding Revolution’s old posts will be moved off to the archives of my other sites, Train of Thought and KellyHobkirk, both of which have been experiencing steady growth.

While I am sorry to see Branding Revolution go, I am quite excited about the new site in the hopper.

I will make an announcement here when the new branding site is up and pouring on some brand goodness for everyone. In the meantime, keep revolutionizing those brands! (or at least keep them evolving).

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?

[Heads up: This post is three times as long as a normal post, but I promise it will be worth the read. If you skip to the end, you will be completely lacking context and it won't make any sense at all, so give yourself a good five minutes to take it all in. If it wasn't worth it, send me a rock in the mail.]

This is a great exercise to do at least once every few years. It’s also a great way to define or redefine your personal brand. Your life experiences shape what you believe in and how you act. This exercise can have a profound effect on how people perceive you, how you think about yourself, and how you market yourself.

How did I get where I am today?

The question presents an opportunity to really reflect on the defining moments of my recent past, the things that have reshaped me as a person, and changed the way I approach both life and business.

How the change began

I was working an average of 80-90 hours per week back in 2003 when a long-time client made some out of the blue bizarrely violent threats on my life. Ironically, I had helped this client increase annual revenues by over $3m and increased advertising response by 700%. By all accounts we were doing great work for them. I considered the client’s comments seriously, and decided the risk wasn’t worth the business. After eleven years of working with the client, I abruptly ended the relationship and instantly lost 60% of our revenues.

The sudden downturn in business provided the perfect opportunity to take a good long break. I traveled some and discovered the art of relaxation. For two years, I took on projects that were more appealing and less profitable, and I worked less.

When I decided to rebuild in 2005, things had changed quite a lot, but I plugged away at building a new network and gaining new clients until the business was again healthy. It took me until 2007 to bring the business back to where it needed to be.

Then a few things happened that really derailed Train of Thought. One large client stiffed us for several months of work, and it was a big hit. We recovered just in time for another client to do the same thing, and that one nearly sank us (these two events caused some major policy changes that have virtually eliminated the possibility of not getting paid). That was 2008. Somehow we made it to 2009, but by the time I got there, the stress caused by fallout of the non-paying clients had taken a huge toll on my immune system.

Then I got sick. Really sick.

It’s just about impossible to explain your levels of physical pain to another person in any sort of comprehensible manner. And before you try, know this: No one wants to know, and in all likelihood, no matter how hard you try to convey your pain, it’s highly unlikely that anyone will “get” what you are saying. Pain is an individual thing that everyone experiences differently, and each person has enough pain of their own.

I hit an all time low in April of 2009 when I got nailed by a stress-induced illness. Shocks of pain racked my body several times per day. After breaking bones and tearing muscles in the past, I thought I had a high pain tolerance. Until this, I didn’t truly know what pain was.

Two weeks in, I honestly thought I wasn’t going to make it, and to be totally honest, at the height of the pain there were a couple of times when I didn’t want to make it. That sounds ominous now, but at the time, it was difficult to think straight. You ever wake up bolting upright from your blissful twenty minutes of sleep, screaming at the top of your lungs from the pain? I hope not. I wouldn’t wish the experience on anyone. It felt like someone had driven railroad spikes right through my body (not that I would know what that actually feels like).

Three weeks into this, an acquaintance saw the anguish on my face, and told me about an herbal remedy that works specifically on virus-related pain. I got some, and to my utter amazement, it worked. Three more weeks of living with the pain at about 20%, and I was healthy again.

With barely enough time to get enough miles on the bike, I picked back up my goal of riding the Seattle to Portland bicycle ride. I made it, completing the 204 mile ride for the third and hardest time. I got to enjoy a special exhausted moment, riding across the line with my good friend Jerry Baker. It was his 30th STP.

Then, the fit hit the shan.

The following week, I needed a root canal. The dentist accidentally poked a hole through the bottom of the root and pushed the infected nerve down to the jaw instead of pulling it out. He left it there and sent me home. I thought I had learned about real pain in April. I was wrong.

The nerve he poked through just happened to extend up the jaw to my right eye, ear, trigeminal nerve, temple, and all the way up to the side and back of my skull. For two months, several times per day, I experienced 6-minute shocks of pain that racked the entire right side of my head. They were completely random, coming on with no warning. I had to take painkillers the entire time just to be able to tolerate the barely dulled pain. I was literally crying or screaming at the top of my lungs every time it happened. At one point, my doctor’s office had me scheduled for an emergency MRI of my brain to rule out the possibility of brain tumors. Even a year later, writing this now is difficult, so fresh are the memories.

When you’re on painkillers, many things happen, and all of them are bad. The worst side-effect for me was an immediate blurring of my vision. I never needed glasses before this, but I had to get a pair of fairly strong glasses just to be able to work. My vision never recovered.

And what of the dentist who did this? Well, he refused to acknowledge that anything was wrong at all. Nearly every time I called, he told me he didn’t have any appointments available, and said the mysterious comment, “You shouldn’t be in any pain,” whatever that meant. It seems lost on him that his error cost me roughly four months of my life and salary, not to mention the lost marketing time. I found it disturbing that he essentially blew me off after admitting his error.

When I finally emerged from the pain and endured a foggy recovery month, three things happened:
1) I found myself incredibly angry.
2) My financial life was in tatters.
3) I no longer knew what I believed in.

You might think that pain is part of what defines me, but nothing could be further from the truth. I focus on the positive, so it’s the wisdom gained from the experience of being in extreme pain that has reshaped me. Pain itself is not a thing to be defined by. To hell with pain.

The anger

My anger was a natural reaction to an unknown quantity. There was no way to predict this. I felt like I deserved some great reward for surviving, but there wasn’t any apparent reward. There was no one to be angry with (except the dentist), and no way to really address the anger. After about a week, I finally decided that the reward was getting to continue living, fighting and surviving, hopefully with some happiness along the way.

My destroyed financial life

When you get sick, big banks do not care. They treat you like you are scum of the earth. In fact, if they know you are really sick, they come after you like sharks sensing blood, trying to get any last remaining pieces of your money before you croak. It’s a disgusting thing to experience because it shows you how utterly, grotesquely inhumane big banks can really be. In my case, it was Chase Home Finance, holder of my mortgage servicing, who aggressively came after me. So, while I was battling skull-gripping pain, Chase was calling me 5-6 time per day, rudely demanding house payments, which in some cases were not even behind schedule. They called as early as 7:40AM, and as late as 8PM, seven days a week.

I had never learned about the six-month rule that says you should always have six months of salary in the bank to cover expenses in a time of crisis. No one told me about that until after my crisis. (No one to blame of course.)

When I got sick, I pulled back on all marketing because I didn’t know if I could complete the work, and I did not want to disappoint my clients or cause them any delays. As with any business, when you stop marketing, you will inevitably experience a slow-down approximately six months down the road. That is exactly what happened to me.

Additionally, I had to spend about $7k out of pocket to cover medical and dental expenses. I had to literally choose between my health or my house payment and taxes. I chose my health. I’ve been clawing my way out of this situation ever since. A year on, I will be truly lucky if I can manage to keep my house.

My beliefs, rediscovered

Once I got over the anger and shock of my newly destroyed finances and credit rating, I began asking myself what I believed in. This was another natural reaction to the experiences I had gone through. Virtually everything I had been investing my time and energy into before getting sick had abandoned me when I needed it most. So what did I believe in?

The answer did not come quickly. Initially, I told myself I believed in nothing. It’s kind of hard to go anywhere from there though, so I kept asking the question. Eventually, one thing emerged: People. I believe in people.

My belief in people

How did I come to the conclusion that I believed in people? After all, Chase’s people had treated me like crap. The two nonpaying clients and the dentist were clearly looking only to protect their own tails. Still, these particular individuals comprised nothing more than a bank’s staff of underpaid, corporate brainwashed employees, a couple of people with different priorities, and a dentist who should have retired while he could still see straight and had better judgment. These people did not define all of humanity.

It was people who helped me through, helped me survive. You can read about those extraordinary friends in a thank you on my personal blog.

My personal brand, redefined

What does all of this mean in the context of my personal brand? Well, let’s add it up.

• I’m an experienced businessman who has enjoyed the highs of success and the lows of hard times. I enjoy working hard to exceed my clients’ expectations. I enjoy a mutually respectful working relationship. I can solve my clients problems, and they pay me well for my expertise.

• I’ve lived through health hell, and I’m aware that it can get worse, which helps keep my priorities in order.

• I’m a fighter and a survivor.

• I believe in people.

• I no longer sweat the small stuff, and most stuff is small. In other words, I have a good perspective and objectivity.

Why is this valuable for personal branding?

Try thinking about your personal brand this way:
When you know what drives you, you have goals and purpose. When you know what you believe in, you have self-confidence and trust in others. When you have wisdom, you can better prepare for whatever may come your way. When all of these elements are present, you have the clarity needed to focus and succeed.

SO: Goals, purpose, beliefs, self-confidence, trust, wisdom, focus, clarity, and preparedness. These are all essential building blocks for personal and business success. We all have our strengths and defining experiences. Reflecting on them can show you insights into how you see yourself, and how others know you. Those insights can provide the fuel you need to increase your confidence, communicate your brand value in a more compelling manner, and reach greater success.

The number one thing my clients get in working with me is broad-perspective strategy and creative, that can only come from a wealth of life experience. Before I lived through this, I did not describe my work this way. I was one creative among many. Now I know beyond doubt that I’m unusual. This inevitably effects my marketing.

This changes my brand positioning, my personal brand, and my prospective clients’ perception of me. In short, these experiences have reshaped me as a person and a professional, making me even more valuable to (and appreciative of) my clients.

To apply this lesson to your own personal brand, check out my next (much shorter) post.

Did you find this helpful? Share you own experiences in comments below, or feel free to share your story privately on the contact page.

Brands are designed to connect with people in direct and meaningful ways. The experience of connecting is among the most powerful ways your business can start a long-term relationship with people. Social media, on the other hand, is made to create indirect experiences.

Why rely on the weaker animal? Try as you might, you cannot dictate which social media tools your audience will use. Sure, you can guess that facebook and twitter might be among them, but who’s to say that your interaction on those platforms will reap the rewards you seek?

I shudder just a little when I read that social media provides a new level of interaction between a business and its customers. Why? Because it doesn’t – Well, perhaps it does sometimes, but by and large the value of the interaction has degraded to gutter churn. The feedback companies receive via social media channels is weaker and arguably less accurate than anything they received before social media existed. Turning that weaker feedback into valuable data can easily be likened to polishing a turd.

Before social media, you could get a consensus of valuable opinions and relevant feedback by surveying actual customers on a daily basis — in fact, it provided a great opportunity to have a real conversation, but now with social media, similar feedback is garbled at best and wildly inaccurate at its worst. Now, instead of surveying actual customers, companies are taking in opinions not only from customers, but also from non-customers, competitors, planted reviews, opinionated people with too much time on their hands, people with superiority complexes, and even people who would never in a million years buy their product.

When you use inaccurate data to fuel your branding and marketing efforts, you net a wasted budget and meager results. It undermines your confidence to boot. When you can rely on real, accurate information, you can enter into your marketing with greater confidence, stay true to your brand, and expect a higher ROI for your efforts.

The biggest difference between social media and real marketing

Social media gives companies another way to procrastinate from real marketing. Social media profiles are not nearly as powerful as your brand. They consistently lack the critical types of interaction that form strong brands. With branding, we create a real, truthful dialog about you and your business, then you bring it to life when people experience the true essence of your brand.

With social media, people often create an image, which is really little more than a forgery of who you are. Companies hire consultants to create their profiles, which are frequently not true to their core characteristics. The question is not, “How can you try to relate to facebook users?” The real question is, “Which part of our brand is relevant for the channel?” I read some profiles and wonder who do they think they’re fooling? And why? Social media is supposed to be about creating a real dialog, not an image, a fake, a forgery. Fake elements undermine your brand instead of enhancing it.

Brand elements are designed to create a meaningful experience. Social media is designed to create online (indirect) interaction. A meaningful brand experience is more successful in creating a hot prospect, or in essence, in connecting with real people. Experience is real, and nothing can replace it.

To read about how to create social media profiles that are consistent with your brand, check out: 5 Steps to branding your social media profiles.

Unless you’ve lived under a heavy rock for the last few years, you probably know that social media is now considered an essential part of a marketing plan. You may have a thorough understanding of social media, or you may be a little confused by how to incorporate it into your marketing without wasting enormous amounts of time. After all, you already have a full-time job and managing several social media profiles can feel like a babysitting gig. If you ever get confused by thinking of social media as part of your brand, here’s some good news: Social media is not part of your brand.

While social media can be a part of your marketing, it’s not part of your brand. About the only way that social media relates to your branding is brand reputation, and that’s easy to take care of. Just be nice, and tactfully defend your brand if someone attacks it. If you’re floating tweets out there, keep them relevant.

If you think of social media as an essential part of your brand, think again. Social media is networking, it’s marketing, it’s a series of interactive directories, but it’s not part of your brand. You can’t set up a few social media profiles and accurately claim you have created a key component of your brand. Why? Because in and of themselves, social media profiles are not you, and they do not replace experience with you. In fact, social media profiles are a weaker tool than virtually any key component of your brand.

And get this – when you set up social media profiles on a plethora of sites, then promote your profile on those sites, you are actually building those sites’ brands more than your own. You’re in effect saying, ‘Hey, come spend your time on this other site,’ rather than ferreting people to your next relevant brand touch point.

Does social media have a place in your marketing? Sure it does. For most businesses, that place is called networking. Use social media to boost your online presence, and social networking sites like Biznik (a particularly good social networking site) to network. It’s an exceptional site for business networking — but it is not a key component of your brand. If you’re selling something which can be purchased online, use social media to build awareness and community.

Let’s illustrate the point

Your company is on LinkedIn, facebook, and twitter. Familiarity with the channels is high, and the channels gain instant recognition. People leave your articles, profiles and website to go visit a social media channel, where they get distracted by a facebook virtual gift or a post by a friend. LinkedIn, facebook, and twitter gain more familiarity while you gain less time and net only one indirect interaction.

Sometimes people start strong relationships on LinkedIn, facebook, or even twitter, but it’s rare compared to them finding you in a more meaningful way such as meeting you, organic search results, or a compelling, truthful ad that speaks to their real needs.

A more direct scenario is better

Your website is real, truthful, and relevant, so people naturally find you on an organic search. They read your site, and they call or order. They remember you because your service rocks and your brand is strong. Simple and to the point interactions win, hands down.

If you’re worried about how your social media will effect your brand, set it and forget it. Create your profiles, keep them true to your brand, protect your brand reputation by being kind, and tactfully defend yourself if someone hits you below the belt. Beyond that, monitor your social media usage time, and make sure to spend more time on high ROI marketing methods.

To read about how to create social media profiles that are consistent with your brand, check out: 5 Steps to branding your social media profiles.

It’s well-known fact that the current generation was brought up using facebook and LinkedIn to find each other. My brother used facebook as his phone book when he was in college. Now it’s how his family stays in touch with friends, in an indirect way of course. Large businesses know that the best way for them to connect with customers is still through large-scale media, but small businesses can connect with potential customers on a small scale using social media.

This post will show you how to keep your social media profiles true to your brand and connect with potential clients at the same time.

To complete this task, you will need the following:
• Logo in JPEG, GIF, and PNG formats
• Tag line
• Profile photo
• One brief paragraph describing you, your business, and your specialty
• One brief paragraph describing you personally, including both professional and personal interests, in that order
• Detailed description of your product or service
• Scissors and paste

Create consistent profiles

Businesspeople have pretty thick skulls these days, but in spite of that I wish to impart the following idea into the thickness of your skull: Create consistent profiles, create consistent profiles, create consistent profiles. Got it? Good.

You may be asking, ‘Why create consistent profiles?’ The answer is 3-part and simple.
1. Consistent profiles help people learn and remember who you are without confusing your message.
2. Consistent profiles save you bucket loads of time.
3. Consistent profiles consistently reinforce the critical info about you that people need.

Some social media sites have their own unique characteristics, and it’s fine to tweak your profile to fit those idiosyncrasies, but keep it consistent wherever possible.

Instructions:

1. Create a JPEG, GIF, and PNG of your logo. Start with a large hi-res file, and scale down. Never scale up, unless you are working from a vector file. If you are scaling your logo, do so only proportionally. You will probably never need an image larger than 200 pixels for a social media profile, so create a 200 pixel wide file (for both horizontal and vertical orientations, if your logo is used both ways).

2. Fill in the blanks using your brief and detailed profile text. Remember, consistency is key. Use the same descriptions on each profile so people know you are not schizophrenic. If you are inserting your tag line, keep the wording exactly the same as it is on your identity.

3. Use the same photo across the board. Make sure you like it.

4. If you have a video and are naturally good on camera, great. If not, no worries. Place your video on those profiles that allow it. If your video blows, don’t use it. Your brand doesn’t blow (hopefully), so don’t use any elements that might bring it down a notch.

5. When finished filling in the profile blanks, don’t touch them again until it is relevant to do so. If your profile text sucks, hire a copywriter to make it great. A good copywriter can turn virtually any boring text into rockstar text that engages the right people. Keep it real.

Is it really that simple?

It really is that simple. Keep your profiles consistent, and your brand will thank you. Your social media life can be short, sweet, and relevant without wasting copious amounts of your precious marketing time.

Now, take the scissors and paste, and go make something. Don’t eat the paste.

If you’re an entrepreneur, at some point you have no doubt had people tell you that your idea was crazy, you wouldn’t make it, or you should do something else. Plenty of über-successful people have heard this kind of thing. Think if Steve Jobs had listened to naysayers who called the Mac a toy. iPod and iPhone were also “supposed” to fail. Good thing someone believed in them.

Sometimes in brand strategy meetings, I encounter people who don’t believe in what they are doing, or they are severely lacking in confidence because they have listened far too long to people who do not believe in them. That’s one of the cool things I love about strategy: it can expose problems, illuminate new perspectives, and provide people with a unique opportunity for self-reflection and massive inspiration.

One of the most important lessons I learned early on in my career was that if you seek advice, seek it from those who truly believe in you. People who believe in you reinforce your belief in yourself (rather than instill any sense of doubt or negativity). You need little more than belief to carry you through the tough decisions and rough times that it takes to succeed.

I might have been a ditch digger

Before I went to school for graphic design and advertising, I had my detractors. My older brother told me I could never make a living as a graphic designer. It was too hard he said. Another relative told me, “Art isn’t a career.” People told me I shouldn’t move away from home. I took it all in with a grain of salt.

Instead, I followed my heart, and I listened to the people who believed in me: my dad, mom, and my trusted teacher. They totaled three people whose voices stood out above all the rest, all the people who would rather I succumb to fear than follow my dreams.

I recall seeing a handwriting analyst on a drunken lark late one night with some friends. She told me I would never make it as a graphic designer and that I should focus on manual labor! Good thing I tossed that advice right into the ditch.

After graphic design school, I was fortunate enough to find my way to good professional mentors. They consistently told me that my portfolio was atypical for an art school graduate; that my thought processes were different, and my solutions stood out from what they usually were subjected to in meetings with aspiring art directors. My adviser repeatedly pounded into my young impressionable brain the idea of opening my own studio.

After gaining some professional experience in senior level design and advertising positions, that’s exactly what I did. My previous positions as graphic designer, two stints as an art director, and another as marketing director gave me the well-rounded background and confidence I needed to really excel.

Do you believe in what you are doing?

I met a physician a few years back who wanted to hire me to design an identity for him. During the intake interview, I got the feeling that this doc was severely burned out. I asked him if he enjoyed his work. After a very long pause, he replied, “No, you know I really don’t enjoy it anymore. Patients don’t value what I do enough. I would rather be doing something else, and I just want to make a lot of money at this point in my life. I would like to do something else.”

Imagine if those thoughts were driving your daily motivation while you stayed in a job you don’t enjoy. It’s no crime to get burned out. But if you no longer believe in what you’re doing, it’s healthy to rediscover your belief or shift your focus.

Love what you do, do what you love

If you love what you do, on the other hand, it’s easy to keep believing in yourself. Your interactions with your your personal brand or your corporate brand, as well as your clients and peers, reinforce your beliefs, providing inspiration and motivation on a daily basis.

Doing what you love makes work seem like play. Listen to the wisdom of people who believe in you, even when their advice may be tough to hear, and believe in yourself!

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.