5 Big Questions to Determine Your Brand’s Purpose
Branding is much more than just creating an eye-catching logo or spending thousands on a well-placed ad. In today’s business landscape, every flourishing brand should have a powerful purpose behind it and have consistency in its communication across all channels and customer experiences. Here are our top 5 BIG questions to ask yourself – to help determine your brand’s purpose.
What changes do I want to see?
Think about this in terms of the industry your business fits into, What is the problem that you want your business to solve, Is there a clear gap your service or product can fill and how is your business uniquely equipped to fight this issue? Once you clarify this you will start to form the foundation for your brand’s purpose.
How will my business make a difference?
This is a great excise in, determining “what does my brand offer that our competitors can’t?”
Write down what’s unique about your offering?
How different are you to other businesses in your industry?
What are the things that you are really good at that others can’t replicate as well?
What are some of your stronger characteristics that define you are as a person and how can you model this into your brand?
Perhaps more importantly, how can you communicate this in your brand identity i.e. through quality, customer service, marketing strategy etc.
What’s our story?
Your story is perhaps the most necessary component of branding and determining your purpose. Your story should combine an accurate story of how and why you founded your business and a story around how your customer fits into the fabric of your business.
It’s an invaluable tool in communicating with your audience on a human level and can help to create a life long authentic connection.
Remember: A great thought-out story can generate a life-time’s worth of content for you to use across marketing campaigns.
Who is our ideal customer?
Knowing who your ideal customer is can transform everything – your product and/or service, your marketing plan, value, price-point, the tone of voice, any potential partnerships, who your ideal employee is, your growth and much more.
This BIG question is your chance to think about what your ideal customer values and how it determines where they spend. The little questions are:
- What are your customer’s prevailing challenges and frustrations?
- What are your customer’s goals and priorities right now?
- What are your customers preferred form of communication?
- What platforms are they spending time on?
- What does a day in your archetypical customer’s life look like?
- What competing brands do your customers like?̋
- What makes your ideal customer happy?
How will we communicate our brand’s purpose?
After you answer the above questions and have infused your purpose across every facet of your business, you then need to figure out the most compelling ways to communicate your purpose to likely customers.
This is the moment you create a powerful marketing strategy.
What should you focus on:
Your use of language – Look at what words and terminology your customers use to describe your industry, products, and services.
Visual elements like your logo or the colours you use – Your logo will be one of the few unique features of your visual personality.
Your voice – The tone of voice you use to interact with customers via social media and content marketing is an extension of your brand’s voice.
And of course, which channels will you use to market your business e.g. FaceBook, Exterior signage, Podcast ads etc.
It’s important to never lose sight of your PURPOSE. At any moment through the life of your business, it will be a powerful driver for sustaining growth, innovation, keeping employees engaged and will lead to countless intrapreneurial opportunities.
