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Evaluating Your Brand
What is your brand? Not your logo, not your corporate colors, not your tagline, but your brand--the essence of who you are in the minds of your target audience.
We've been doing a lot of work with clients recently to help them define their desired brands, evaluate the current positions they hold in the minds of their target audiences and develop strategies and tactics to "move the bar" toward their desired brand perceptions.
The steps are very straight-forward:
1) Gain clarity around your desired brand image.
How do you want your audience to perceive you? What attributes would you most like them to think about when they think about your organization or its products and services? Importantly, how would you like them to perceive you relative to your competitors?
2) Determine what they currently believe about you.
Your desired brand identity--or, as we like to refer to it, your "personality," does not always align with how you are actually perceived. So, it's important to gather input to determine what gaps may exist. In some cases, you'll want to improve perceptions around a particular attribute. In others you may find that a positive perception exists that you weren't even aware of, but that you might be able to capitalize on or leverage.
3) Identify the gaps and opportunities and create strategies and tactics to address them.
Review the gaps and determine which areas are most important to impact as you work to improve the perception of your organization, relative to your competitors, in the minds of your target audiences. What areas might have the most impact in both positive or negative ways? Which strengths should you leverage? Which weaknesses should you work to overcome? Then put processes in place to maintain position, or move the bar in the right direction.
Easy? No--especially for service organizations where the product is not tangible but impacted by interactions with people (who are inherently harder to control than product packaging, for instance).
Important? Yes. I'm often surprised at how many organizations do not take the time to explicitly determine the attributes they would like to define their brand. It's a critical first step. If you haven't taken it yet, there's no better time than the beginning of a new year to do just that. Commit to strengthen your brand in 2013!
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