Over the weekend, I asked you to think about what could be chipped away from your brand right now to make it even more effective. Now that you’ve had the time to ponder the extra bits that are muddying your brand’s waters, you’re probably wondering how to decide what to chip off your brand? What if you remove an essential bit and you don’t even know it!

As you develop clarity around your brand think about the visual elements, such as an icon or image, that looks nice but doesn’t add to the story you are telling.

Is it your messaging that’s not specific enough? Does it capture the true reason why people buy your product or choose your organization?

I’d like to leave you with a statistic I saw in the book Radically Transparent by Andy Beal and Judy Strauss. It points to studies that show that 85% of a company’s brand image is driven by sales interactions, and not by marketing campaigns.

This makes good sense in a B2B environment because it reminds us that when auditing the strength of a current brand, we need to think more broadly than just marketing communications.

Brands need to include the messages that customer-facing employees are communicating through their words and actions. Does your brand do this?

The hardest part is deciding what to leave in and what to leave out. There are many problems your brand can solve. There are many target market possibilities. There are many features and benefits you could communicate. The tendency is to want to tell people everything and hope something sticks. I don’t think I need to go into detail as to why this doesn’t work. I’ll let my post “Is Your Brand Overweight” do the talking.

Defining a winning brand starts with the mindset that less is more. Complexity is the enemy. Shoot for simple,  strikingly clear and distinct. Try viewing your brand like the statue of David, a block of marble you must chip away at until the only thing remaining is the purest essence of what the brand is and does.

What do you think should be chipped away from your brand right now to make it more effective?

What extra bits are adding confusion or muddying the waters?

I’ll leave you to ponder that over the weekend. Feel free to share you discoveries. And on Monday I’ll give you some suggestions of my own.

Is this your brand?

Has it become so big that it feels like you’re offering everything to anyone? I’m seeing more and more of this “quantity” over “quality” branding every day, so I thought I’d provide a helpful list of questions to help you determine if your brand suffers from too much weight gain. The questions are:

Do you keep adding (new features, new products, new messages) and rarely cut things out?

Are you in a market space where you have no competitive advantage or ability to create value above and beyond the competition? Why are you in that space? What is being in that space doing to your core business?

If you had to reduce your product line, reduce your marketing copy, reduce your team, reduce your prospect list down to the 20% that generates 80% of your success, what would you cut today?

Don’t over think this. Write down whatever first comes to mind and share it with the rest of us so that we can all learn and improve our branding initiatives together. I look forward to your feedback.

Today, I promised to share some easy fill-in-the-blank methods to help you compare yourself (your company, product, offering etc.) to something your audience can relate to.

Fill-in-the-blanks:

We are the ______ in our category.

The blank is another brand you compare yourself to that carries the associations you want your brand to be known for.

A classic example is ‘We are the Cadillac in our category’

People have a perception of what Cadillac means. The brand is associated with being premium and stylish. By connecting your brand to a known brand you instantly position yourself in a clear and compelling way.

This assumes of course that your audience thinks and feels the way you want them to about whatever you are comparing yourself to.

Another fill in the blank you can use is:

We are like _____ in these ways, but are different in these important ways _____.

This technique compares your brand with a competitive offering, which the audience likely understands, but then ensures you stand out from them. This technique reinforces how you are similar, which builds familiarity and eases the anxiety of the buyer, and then informs them how you are unique.

An example of this can be found on the website of a highly successful Credit Union based locally in Kitchener/Waterloo. They highlight how they are similar to other financial institutions and then they highlight their differences.

Anchoring your brand to a known entity is the fastest way into the brain. People will compare your brand to something. It’s your responsibility as a marketer to make the connections for prospects. If you do you, it will increase the interest level in your brand or offering as if the flood gates opened and a stampede of buyers came running to your door eager to learn more about your offer.

The way you do it is to compare yourself (your company, product, offering, etc.) to something the audience can relate to. This is especially important when introducing new technologies or offerings that are unlike anything that is currently in existence. The brain seeks familiarity because familiarity feels safe.

It important to realize that you are being compared to someone or something and are being positioned in the mind relative to that someone or something. It is your opportunity and responsibility, as someone who cares how you are perceived, to actively position yourself the way that you desire.

If what you offer is unfamiliar, it’s perceived to be risky, and it will be quickly rejected by the majority—if you have ever presented a new concept to a committee or management team you’ll know what I’m talking about. However if you anchor the brand or idea to something people already understand to be true, then you’ll see heads nodding rather than eyes rolling and blood pressure boiling.

In tomorrow’s post, I will introduce some helpful fill in the blank techniques to help solidify your brand position. In the meantime, think about some comparisons that you can make between your brand and one that your audience already understands (in a positive light) to anchor your brand in a safe identity. Oh, and also check out my past post on 3 Brand Messages in a League of Their Own for some creative inspiration.