The Big Idea or “What is the essence of your brand?”

A brand is a collection of thoughts and feelings based on your experiences. Thoughts and feelings are “intangibles” while your products and services are “tangible”. Tangibles you can touch, see, smell, hear, and taste, but intagibles you just feel.

• Riding a Harley-Davidson Motorcyle feels liberating.
• Sending and important package via FedEx feels safe.
• Experiencing Disney World with your children feels magical.

What does it feel like to interact with your business? It’s easy to underestimate feelings and focus only on the tangibles, but people are emotional beings. We make decisions based on feelings, so you need to be able to express what your all about as concept or idea that is emotionally engaging. This is The Big Idea. It needs to be focused and it needs to be different. It needs to be so essential that you could offer different products or services and they would still fit. Eventually The Big Idea should be short, simply worded statements, but you can start just by getting all your thoughts and feelings down without worrying to much about length. You might want to look at your vision and think about why you started your business. Beyond being successfull or making money there was a reason, probably an emotionally charged one, you decided to build a business from scratch. This can be a great starting point, even if it’s very personal. Could other people relate? How? Alternatively you could try and put yourself in your customers shoes. Why did they choose you? What do they really care about other than the quality or features of what you offer? Is there something that you both believe, thats bigger than either the person or the company? Lastly, if you’ve done work on your busiess model and have a set of value propositions, you could try and look at them as a group and see if there’s an overarching theme or idea that they all fall under.

Brand Attributes or “What does your brand look and feel like?”

Really, brand attributes are just adjectives used to describe your brand. For example, IBM is seen as “older,” while Apple is perceived as “younger.” Apple is almost known entirely for its brand personality: innovative, stylish, intuitive, cool, casual, easy-going and friendly. Defining your brand attributes is important to help you differentiate yourself from competitors, as you would want to focus on those attributes that help you stick out. They also help make sure that your activities are inline with your brand. Together this group of adjectives gives you something to evaluate things like messaging and the look and feel of touchpoints. Lastly, they help someone like a designer develop solutions for you that will fit with the personality of your brand. There a few ways to help you arrive at your brand attributes:

Brand Promise or “What are you going to do for me.”

A brand promise is what the company promises to the people who interact with it. But it isn’t a literal description of what a company does. It’s a description of the company’s character. It’s the feeling the company conveys to its stakeholders. Two restaurants may have substantially similar menus, but they provide different atmospheres, different associations, and different customer experiences based on their brand promises. A brand promise can be explicitly articulated to the public, or it can be come to life more subtly in the delivery of the brand experience. A few years ago, FedEx declared that it was the only choice “when it absolutely, positively has to get there overnight”—an overt promise that still resonates today. The ultimate goal of branding is loyalty. A loyal audience seeks repeat brand experiences and recommends the brand to others. Brand Loyalty drives most purchasing decisions and loyal customers are willing to pay a premium for their choice. Branding is defining, promising and delivering. When you promise and then consistently deliver you generate loyalty.