10 Golden Rules of Remarkable Brands

10 Golden Rules of Remarkable Brands

1. Start with a big, audacious and inspirational Vision for your company. Vision is by far your most sustainable advantage. It gives your team the clarity to act and the passion to soldier on in difficult times. It gives your investors confidence you know what you’re doing. It helps your customers believe you’re a long-term player. And, importantly, it gives you a lens to keep track of your progress and report your achievements.
2. Make your mission clear through a well-articulated Purpose. This strong reason for being gives your team a clear mission, not just a job. Keep it simple and informed by what your customers want and what you can deliver in a differentiated way. Ultimately, it helps your customers understand why you exist. Branding is simple. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. There is an art to discovering the authentic purpose and passion at the heart of your company.
3. Create the Brand Idea. This is about how your Purpose gets communicated to the outside world. For Nike, the swoosh logo and ‘Just Do It’ slogan amplified the Purpose of ‘celebrating the everyday athlete’. Your brand is the ultimate manifestation of your Purpose. If you truly align every aspect of your brand – your products, your people, your culture, your image and your communications – and employ good design to present that brand in a compelling way, you gain an unfair advantage over your competitors. What’s your Brand Idea?
4. Create a clear understanding of the desired Vision for your team. What does it really look like? From a product perspective? From a customer perspective? Create a video or, better still, a VR (virtual reality) experience that starts to map the journey to achieving the Vision for your team. Branding is about delivering on the promise of your Vision in every action you take. To create a company of brand champions, everyone must do his or her part in delivering the Vision.
5. Identify the role of your brand beyond just communication to now building the complete Brand Ecosystem within the company. BX, or the brand experience is key in a world of unprecedented expectation. Whilst creating a frictionless, human-centered design experience is important, differentiating that experience through your brand is vital to ensure you stand out.
6. Good Design is good business. Design is, quite simply, the ‘soul’ of the brand. How it looks, how it feels and how it sounds. It has the potential to engage all five senses and evoke emotions. It plays a part in backing up what you say you are about and solidifies your brand. The Nike swoosh, for example, makes people feel confident. Good Design also informs the user experience, marketing communication and brand perception. It makes an impression on people that will let them know what your brand is about without bombarding them with information. And Design is not just for the product and the brand identity, it’s also for the office HQ. No brand designs better than Apple. Through the power of simplicity is has created global recognition. As Tom Peters, Global Business Management Expert once said ‘Apple makes the ugly beautiful, the obscure clear and the complex simple.”
7. Craft and master your 30-second Elevator Pitch. Who are you? What do you do? Why is it relevant to the person you are talking to? Give yourself some spin but don’t promise what you can’t deliver.
8. Weaponise Creativity. If you truly want to succeed, strive for excellence. It will make your brand more distinctive because most brands settle for mediocrity. Find the creative team your Brand Idea deserves. Don’t be afraid to work with the best. Be both remarkable and memorable.
9. Don’t sit still. Understand what it means to be totally Brand-Driven. Some people today talk about being Purpose-Driven. Your brand is a manifestation of your Purpose. It encapsulates the core idea behind the business. Its values and aspirations define the greater purpose and the drivers of progress and growth. Being Brand-Driven simply means that everyone in the company understands, believes and lives the core idea, every day. It’s the ‘why’ the business exists and ‘what’ it stands for.
10. Bring everyone onboard through powerful, engaging Brand acts that demonstrate you are living your Purpose. Brand acts make it tangible and relatable. Think adidas UK refurbishing old or unwanted adidas clothes and then giving it to those who can’t currently afford to be a part of the club. This acts reflects the Adidas ethos as a force for good.

Author: Simone Bartley BRAND ARCHITECT