Which ingredients for a brand?

It is easy to think that creating a logo is all we need to do to build a brand. Then sprinkle liberally on everything and 'Bob's your uncle'!

However, your logo is just one element of your brand. Focusing on it and overlooking the other parts means that many other ingredients are left behind on the table. Ingredients that can add a lot more flavour and uniqueness.

If you view your brand like a delicious cake, you can see that your brand is made up of all the ingredients in your business:

• how you show up - your messaging, both offline and online

• how you speak - your tone of voice

• how you carry yourself - your values and your visuals

• who you speak to - your audience, positioning, community

• why you do what you do - your purpose and vision

  Within each of these areas are more detailed sub-branches.

Branding is about deliberate differentiation.

Why brand?

So that your dream audience understands what you are about, and why they should care.

It can be very difficult to stand back and assess these areas for yourself. We're standing too close to the wallpaper to be able to see the pattern!

Working with a brand strategist will help you get clear on all aspects of your brand. You can then build a plan to be cohesive and consistent across the various places where your brand shows up.

Asking for feedback from clients and customers is invaluable. This enables you to see how your brand is being perceived from the outside. Armed with this information, you can start to assess how wide the 'perception gap' is. This is the distance between how your brand is currently perceived and how you want it to be perceived.

Building a strong brand is an investment in an appreciating asset. It grows in value over time, which adds to the value of your business. It can be used for leverage and can appear on the balance sheet as an asset.

A client that I worked with was struggling to sell her coaching courses (even though they were low-priced). She even struggled to fill her free courses. It was very disheartening because she is talented, highly-qualified and experienced. She always worked hard and did her best to show up on social media most days.

We stepped back to take a 10,000ft view of her brand... Over time, the various aspects of her brand had become misaligned. They felt like they came from different businesses. She was using different styles in her communications. When one style didn't seem to get a response, she changed to a new one. At the heart of all this, she was unclear about her core audience.

We spent time working together on her brand foundations. When that was complete, we moved on to the design stage.

Now, a year later, her brand is coherent and selling her courses is so much easier. She has raised her prices by almost 300%. She feels much more confident about her business and her ability to grow it in the desired direction.