Many business owners feel disconnected from their brand despite their hard work and dedication. The root cause often lies in a lack of clarity, which is essential for aligning brand identity with business practices. Understanding and embracing your brand's core truth, or Brand DNA, acts as a guiding compass, turning vague intentions into a potent competitive advantage.
The transformation begins with three key phases. First, identify the core attributes that define your brand's authentic essence beyond just products or services. Next, define how these attributes translate into specific behaviors and practices, ensuring that everyone within the organization not only understands but embodies the brand's values and identity in their daily actions.
Finally, align these principles consistently across all facets of the business, from culture and leadership to customer interactions. Full alignment reinforces trust and creates a harmonious brand experience that people can feel and connect with. In today's fast-paced world, this clarity and authenticity in branding can set a business apart, making the brand not just seen but also remembered and cherished.
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In today's competitive market, building a standout brand requires a conscious, strategic, and deliberate approach that begins internally. For small to mid-sized business owners, this internal focus can be the key to differentiating their brand from competitors. Rather than focusing solely on superficial elements like logos and marketing tactics, successful brands are built from the inside out, aligning their internal values with their external expressions.
To achieve this, business owners must first become conscious of how every interaction and decision shapes their brand's reputation. Being strategic involves making choices that consistently reinforce the brand's core essence, from hiring practices to customer service. Finally, being deliberate means proactively defining and living the brand's identity every day, rather than letting it evolve by default.
When a brand aligns its consciousness, strategy, and deliberate actions, it becomes magnetic, attracting loyal employees and customers. This approach leads to differentiation through authenticity, not just through the products or services offered. Business owners ready to stand out should start by exploring their brand's DNA and leading with intention, as the ripple effect of this approach is where true brand magic lies.
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Effective personal branding boils down to one essential principle: "Walk your talk." This encompasses three pivotal characteristics: authenticity, consistency, and being generative. Identifying and embodying these traits ensures that you not only keep your word but follow through with integrity, embodying a 'good' personal brand.
Being authentic means understanding and living by your true attributes, commitments, and intentions. Authenticity flourishes when you are clear about who you are and align your every action with your defined brand values. In tandem, consistency strengthens trust, ensuring that your actions and promises align consistently over time.
Lastly, being generative involves continuously evolving and enhancing your true self across all facets of life. This self-actualization drives your personal growth and brand presence, enabling you to reach new heights. Together, these elements form the foundation of a robust personal brand, grounded in genuine self-awareness and deliberate action. Start your journey by defining your Personal Brand Presence℠ and commit to living it daily.
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Welcome to Brand Bytes! My Low Calorie, High Impact Brand Strategy Appetizers
This brandbyte is all about realizing the use of words in creating internal brand culture, brand-relevant marketing messages, and highly memorable positive customer experiences.
And as always, we start with the heart of the organization’s brand DNA. Did you know that the vocabulary you use in your daily business operations impacts the perceptions of your employees, leadership culture, and customer experiences.
Sociologists agree, that vocabulary is a powerful tool in the creation of energy, mood and perception in and among the business brand environment. For example, in your work environment you could be hearing a lot of ‘no problem’ as a response when it comes to asking others to do something for you. If that phrase were simply converted to “my pleasure” – the overall tone and sincerity in that response elicits a whole new elevated energy. This shift in phraseology is so powerful, five-start brands like The Ritz Carlton uses this and other carefully selected brand vocabulary terms to train their entire staff in setting the upscale tone for internal and external communications. This conscious use of words keeps the brand aligned with its promise and affirms cognitive resonance with its market.
So, ask yourself…from the internal standpoint, “How does your brand’s style or personality really show up through how you communicate to each other from top down and vertically?” Have you thought about incorporating language that re-affirms your own brand values? Bringing this technique into the consciousness of your culture will alter the way your employees behave, produce, and respond to their surroundings for the better.
Now, in the external or customer-facing perspective… and the area of service excellence we intuitively understand that the way customers are spoken to - that is, the language and communication they experience from your employees - is a key factor in customer satisfaction and business success. Here is your opportunity to build a communication style that reflects your overall brand personality.
Your customer’s perception of the conversation with your employees include aspects of language that convey respect and openness to hearing the other’s ideas and opinions, because of their specific tone of voice, speed of speaking, gestures and other body language like eye contact, posture, and facial expressions. Your brand’s style plays a role in how the ‘delivery’ of service impacts the overall experience of the customer. The question is, “Are all of our customer touch-points designed to be congruent with what they expect from our brand promise?”
This matters because congruency supports consistency with builds trust!
So, brand vocabulary is just ONE of the transformational outputs that turn into useful tools for our Brand DNA clients to elevate internal and external perceptions. So I challenge you to answer, “What’s in your Brand DNA?” and how can you leverage those components into areas like:
- all customer touch-points
- proposals
- internal communications
- your website
- sales collateral
- onboarding programs
- on-hold phone messages
- Email signatures
- advertisements
- And so much more!
Identifying and defining your BRAND DNA creates all kinds of vocabulary for you to infuse into your culture, systems, leadership and communication! Well, that is my Brand Byte for this time – hope you didn’t get too full! For more information on a step by step business branding process and my book, Brand DNA, or a brand assessment breakthrough session with me, go to www.brandascension.com
And remember, your brand IS your business!
Thanks for elevating conscious branding in your business!
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If you keep experiencing barriers of some kind at work, in your family, with your friends, or in your community relationships, you may be out of alignment with who you are.
This Brandbyte is about recognizing + aligning with the power of your Personal Brand.
Every once in a while the ‘flow’ of our lives gets obstructed by events or unexpected situations that cause our life-flow to derail. Getting into a more conscious, strategic, and deliberate alignment with ourselves could be the catalyst to resuming & sustaining the positive flow faster.
So what is Personal Brand alignment? It is the ability to center yourself to a construct of what you know to be true, about you. Becoming more INTERNALLY AWARE, so to speak, vs. EXTERNALLY REACTIVE. This has to do with becoming regularly conscious about taking the driver’s seat in your life and following your personal roadmap, instead of sitting on the sidelines of the highway watching things go by outside of yourself and affecting you in unwanted ways.
Personal Brand Alignment can only be achieved by identifying (naming) & defining what attributes make up the essence of your unique Personal Brand: And getting more conscious, strategic, & deliberate with…
- …the guiding principles that underpin and drive your thoughts & beliefs; and how are they perpetuated through you every day.
- …realizing your core personality/style attributes that are naturally showcased in your everyday life.
- …and remembering & leveraging those nuances that make you who you are, in unique ways
By uncovering these attributes you can consciously and deliberately align (or re-align) yourself by discerning in new ways that enable you to thrive through those attributes. Sometimes it requires you to ‘up-level’ your relationships, your careers, and 
your mindset – all for the sake of consciously co-creating with your true purpose.
your mindset – all for the sake of consciously co-creating with your true purpose.Being in alignment with your Personal Brand means less friction, more flow, less drama, more ease, less insecurity, more confidence; and ultimately more happiness. Clarity is the basis for action.
Where do you begin, you ask? ‘Ignite your Personal Brand Presence’ is an online program for solo-professionals, business owners, consultants, executives, and those simply wanting to self-actualize and live their potential. It is a step-by-step five module course to help you align your personality to your purpose and live your potential!
GET YOUR FREE PERSONAL BRAND KICKSTARTER TOOLKIT: https://brandascension.com/page/pbtoolkit
That is my Brand Byte for this issue – hope you didn’t get too full! For more information on step by step Personal Brand Clarity and Brand DNA, go to www.brandascension.com, or call 719.660.2533.
Grab your copy of PERSONAL BRAND CLARITY HERE: https://amzn.to/2ZJkXoNFollow me on YouTube!
creating authentic positioning, and building competitive advantage by aligning leadership and employees to ‘out-behave’ their competition, consistently. She also pioneered the ‘Ignite Your Personal Brand Presence’ online course and coaching program for solopreneurs who want to leverage their wisdom, expertise and personality to become who they want to be known for.