Get High at Work!

4 Steps to Determine How Well You Know Your Brand

Written by

Kevin Sandlin

in

,

This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog.

how well do you know your brand

How well do you know your brand? DO you know your brand? Actually, “brand” is an uncomfortable topic for many startup founders and small business owners, simply because they weren’t thinking about their brand when they started. It’s not a knock on them. Every entrepreneur has a vision of how their organization can change the world and how they can make a lot of money. But very few enter into the world of entrepreneurship intentionally considering and planning their brand.

But don’t worry! It’s never too late to establish your brand—though you may have to re-establish that brand because the market has told you what your brand is, instead of the other way around. Once you intentionally create your brand, then you can set out to make sure you hire and partner with people who uphold and support your brand, and then build your brand into everything about your company.

In the meantime, try this simple 4-step exercise to see how well you – or your employees – know your brand. Answer each of these 4 questions in the form of a tweet, using 140 characters or less. Add an image if you like, if that helps illustrate your brand, but the 140 characters should also stand alone.

  1. What are your core values? Here’s a great recent example.
  2. What industry or market problem are you solving? Hint: Start with “why.”
  3. Who is your optimal customer and how do you reach them? Here’s how to find them.
  4. Describe your business. See what Guy Kawasaki says.

Per Mr. Kawasaki’s advice, you and everyone who works for you should be able to spout everything in these four tweets verbatim. It’s not a memory game, but a culture game. You hire people who uphold the values on which you created the company, and then you bake it into the culture each and every day, with the understanding that your brand is everything you do.

Also, this isn’t anything new, but perhaps more people are talking about it. Way back in 1994, Charles Brewer started Mindspring, which eventually became Earthlink, one of the largest ISPs in the business. He built the company on what he called “CV&BVs” or core values & beliefs.earn More About Branding In Our Digital Marketing Course

Comments

Leave a comment

More from Kevin

  • 6 Best Practices for Social Media Marketing Newbies

    This post originally published on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. You’re just starting out actually marketing a business or non-profit organization using various social media channels and tools. You’re not a social media marketing expert yet, but you will be very soon. What’s your next step? It’s wise to start off with some boundaries…

  • Digital Marketing 101: Social and Search Paid Advertising

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. This post is the fifth in a series of six posts we’re calling “Digital Marketing 101,” in which we have broken up the General Assembly Digital Marketing class into six bite-sized chunks for those who are considering entering the digital marketing space, or who…

  • Digital Marketing 101: Owned Content Marketing

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog.   In the first three parts of this DGM 101 series, we established that your marketing must start with your brand, and your brand is “everything you do.” Then you set up your web property and marketing plans so that you can measure everything…

  • Digital Marketing 101: Measuring Your Digital Marketing Efforts

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. “You can manage only what you measure.” There are many different versions of that mantra, and all of them hold true. Just as in fitness and weight loss, if you don’t start with a baseline, take regular measurements, and see what’s working, you can’t…

  • Old marketing vs. new marketing: the only difference is data

    I love finding old ads for products we used to own in our childhood or teen years, like this 1983 Jeep Grand Wagoneer. Classic! I also am a huge fan of the series “Mad Men”, which is the essence of old school marketing, better known as advertising. Back then, it was similar to the old…

  • It’s not you. It’s me.

    I led an all day seminar this past Saturday at General Assembly in Atlanta. This class was a 6-hour event in which we compressed the 60 hours of the GA Digital Marketing class down to 6 hours, lunch from Chipotle included. Here’s a good description of the class and here’s a follow up to the…

  • 3 things that make it hard to tell your story

    It is my business to help entrepreneurs and small businesses tell their stories. Telling your story with great, compelling, consistent content builds trust among your audience, and helps them know that you have a solution to the problems they face every day. Most entrepreneurs don’t think they can tell their story, and they also don’t think…

  • Why to Tell Your Story

    I’ve written recently about telling your story and how to keep telling your story ad how some stories write themselves, but haven’t really delved into some deeper reasons to tell your story, so here’s the “why” of telling your story, both your personal story and the story of your business. I spent the day today on…

  • The Seven Things You Must Do to Win at SEO

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly blog. Most non-developers are completely ignorant of, if not intimidated by SEO. Even some software developers won’t go near it. SEO has been called “black magic,” “dark art”and “pseudoscience,” most likely because if you happen to get it right, you win all the Googles! And everybody wants…