As part of the Wired Sussex Breakfast Workshop sessions, we invited Martine Warburton, Creative Director at Puree Design and Branding and Marketing Consultants Anna Fisher & Jamie Collana of Advantage Agency, into The FuseBox on Thursday 21st July to share their expertise on building a brand for your business.
With backgrounds and expertise ranging from small business brand conceptualisation, development and design to corporate advertising, the discussion covered the key ingredients of a brand as well as essential considerations within developing and delivering your brand identity.
There are a million messages thrown at us every day; as well as traditional media channels, billboards and the TV, we've got 6000 tweets being sent per second (that's 500 million per day); and that's only one online platform!
As a business you should be looking to build emotional connections with your audience. It's easy to talk about what you love to do when you live and breathe it every day, but this won't necessarily resonate with your audience.
Here I've shared some of the insights from the session.
What makes your audience tick?
Have you identified a certain niche? Is there a particular audience you're trying to reach?
Think about your business' unique words. What words set you apart from other people? I.e. the words 'professional and trustworthy' are pretty obvious, not very creative, won't make you stand out from the crowd and also doesn't really reflect a brand's personality.
If your brand were a famous person, who would they be and why? What kind of person would they be? Would you wan t
Building a brand / building on your existing brand
It can be useful to have an outsider to facilitate a branding workshop for your company; having someone to playing devils advocate and act as your audience ensures you don't get lost in the woods and only see the trees.
You vs the Business
A brand should feel genuine.
A brand can expand to many people as well as reflecting one-person bands. Messaging is key within giving the illusion of company size.
Should you fit in, or should you differentiate yourself?
You've got to be credible if you're going to be brave and differentiate yourself from other brands!
Food for thought
When conceptualising your brand, don't necessarily start with what you do but why you do it. What's your purpose, what are your ambitions, what are your goals?
Useful Resources
Here are Martine's top 5 reads on branding
Start with why - great book by Simon Sinek about why you should understand and communicate your businesses 'Why' before the 'How' or 'What'
Simon Sinek's excellent website has some exercises people can do to discover their why...and this video summarises the concept and why it works so well here.
Puree's brand discovery and brand development process is explained pretty succinctly here.
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Wired Sussex Breakfast Workshops are fortnightly events taking place on Thursdays from 9.00am – 11.00am at The FuseBox. These events are designed to be very practical and to give you access to expertise and knowledge that will help you and your business.
See what’s coming up on the Wired Sussex website here. And if there’s any subjects that you’d like to see covered, feel free to drop us an email!