“We give great customer service.”
“We meet our clients’ needs.”
“We have cutting-edge products.”
Ho-hum.
If you want boring, use statements like the above. If you want branding, you’re going to have to probe deeper.
When I work with clients on branding for their companies, the information-gathering interview often ends with the client saying, “Wow! I discovered more about my company in the past two hours than I ever knew before!”
How can this be? After all, the client is the expert on their own company. In reality, I am not uncovering anything “new.” By probing deeply into a company’s products, services, benefits, competitors, case studies, challenges, and more, I simply help the client to verbalize the knowledge, expertise, and experience that they carry at an almost unconscious level.
Going deep is essential to developing innovative, compelling branding. Without it, companies all start to sound alike. It is when you probe deeper that you find the true characteristics, values, and benefits that define a company’s brand. It is by asking questions – even the same question in several different ways – that you discover the language and tone and voice that encapsulate the brand.
If you want to define or refine the branding for your business, it can be hard to probe as deeply as you need to on your own. You may be too close to your company to see clearly. The interview process by a third-party can be tremendously helpful in pulling your knowledge into the daylight where it can be examined and codified into a brand that will make your company stand out from your competition and be compelling to your target market.
There’s no reason why your company should sound like every other company in the marketplace. Branding can showcase the unique nature and value of your company. And the key to great branding is to probe deeper.
Author: Paula Marolewski