Introduction
from Brand Buzz
by Adrienne and Greg Weiss
While brand and branding are buzzwords these days, there is a lot of confusion about what exactly building a winning brand entails. As brand experts and inventors of brands, we want to help you make your brand stand out and truly tell and sell who you are to your customers. We have worked with blank-slate start-ups, such as Build-A-Bear Workshop and Five Below, both of which were sketches on napkins when we started working with them and eventually became public companies. We have worked with mature and well-established brands, such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. Regardless of the size, age, or reputation of your company, or your own personal brand for that matter, the important thing is not where you are starting; it is where you are going. If you encompass the three principals most important in creating a positive brand culture, you will always have your brand compass to lead you.
The importance of a brand should not be underestimated. The collective details of your business can be great, and your customer experience can be great, but without an overarching story, you will have trouble creating a strong and connective relationship with your customer. You need a big basket to hold everything together and create a common mission. When raising money with investors, when talking to the press, when forming a marketing plan, the one thing that often elevates, inspires, and creates momentum is the “vision.”
We want to offer you the three secrets to help you build a better brand.
Branding, as you will read in the pages ahead, has three main components: First, every truly great brand tells a great STORY. A brand can have an engaging logo, fashionable colors, and cool artwork, but if there is no core story—no emotional and intellectual anchor—then the customer will not have anything to hold on to. The news flash here is that the story is not a story about the business; it is a consumercentric story answering the question “What’s in it for me?”
Second, a brand creates the feeling of a CLUB that people want to be a part of. For a brand to be great, people must want to associate themselves with it. The brand must create a desire for affinity within its customer base.
Third, a great brand acts like a COUNTRY with its own language, ceremonies, and customs. A brand must have its own way of doing things—you want your customer to feel like Dorothy stepping out of black and white and into the brilliant color of Oz.
We use these three pillars to benchmark the true greatness of a brand and help companies create their own brilliant brands. Routinely, we find ourselves tasked with telling a company or team’s story succinctly, artfully, and in a way that would capture the imagination of the public. In the stories in the pages ahead, we will cover the building of brands through these three pillars of storytelling, club making, and country building. Each company presented had unique circumstances that required unique, creative thought, but regardless of the industry or challenge faced, the process of building a brand remains the same.
Start with the details. Many times people do the big things first and then lose heart, time, or money when it's time to do the details. Guess what?! The consumer’s attention is in the details.