Brand Purpose, Values & Personality
If you want your company to be great, it has to be for a reason much deeper than simply making money. That reason for being is a clearly defined brand purpose. Your WHY: where your brand strategy and business strategy intersect, how you will benefit people’s lives and wider society. Your brand values – the foundational beliefs and building blocks of your company’s culture – support that purpose, while your brand personality informs how your business behaves and interacts on a human level with people, serving to communicate clearly what makes your company stand out. These three key elements are critical to branding or rebranding your business.
Proposition & Positioning
Why will a customer pick your brand over that of a competitor? It won’t always be based on price alone. Very often, the deciding factor will be your Unique Value Proposition (UVP), the identifiable traits your brand possesses over those of your challengers. Brand positioning aligns that proposition in the mind of your consumer, distinguishing your product or service and establishing what your brand will be clearly recalled for, and associated with, when the time for decision arrives.
Brand Naming
What’s in a name? When it comes to your branding and rebranding, especially, the answer is quite simply: everything. It is a brand’s most valuable asset, it is often given the least attention. Crazy. Especially when you consider that first impressions last, and that your name is the first component of your identity that a consumer will evaluate. From your brand’s name, very often subconsciously, a person will assume and interpret your overall personality and tone – before looking at a single piece of messaging. A strong name will make it easier for customers to identify and remember you, differentiate you from your competition, build a relationship, and even infer what your company stands for. Find out more about the 7 key attributes of a good brand name.
Brand Promise/Tagline
A powerful tagline will convey the very essence of your brand positioning, capturing not only your customers’ attention, but your key product benefit or service. The shorter the phrase, the more impactful it will be, which at TOTEM we believe should be no more than six words. The greatest taglines are highly memorable, focus on a single proposition, and firmly root what your business is best at in the mind of your customer.
Employer Branding
At TOTEM our philosophy is that an company’s reputation is a two-sided coin. While one side faces outward at its customer, the other focuses inward at its talent. In an increasingly competitive job market, a positive employer brand is essential to how you position and promote your company to boost employee satisfaction, retention, and engagement. A strong employer brand strategy defines the essence of your company. Why you do what you do, what you stand for, and the type of people you want to attract will be captured with the creation of candidate personas and employee value propositions.
Brand Architecture
As the name might suggest, your brand architecture is the structure upon which your brand strategy is built. It provides clarity around your products or services and how your company brand and sub-brands relate to one another. The best brand architectures are intuitive, with a clearly defined and integrated system of names, symbols, colours, and visual vocabulary that makes it easy for customers to understand the relationships between your various products or services, and how each offering will meet their individual needs.