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?

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.

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?