To know where your brand is going tomorrow, first you have to understand where your brand is right now. Following my previous blog on “what’s in a brand?” where we focused on why branding is important, here we look at how to evaluate your brand.

Analysing your company can be an incredibly difficult thing to do because it’s so personal. There is often a discrepancy between what you want things to be and what they actually are.

Below I have drafted a series of questions about your organisation. In answering them you will have the foundations for being able to start to build the brand you want and also a far better understanding of how your brand will help to develop your business.

Branding questions

Focus on your business when answering the following questions…

1. What is the mission of your business, what have you set out to achieve?
2. Is your business achieving what you want it to?
3. What do you want other people to know about your business?
4. What are your core-values, what do you want other people to say about you?
5. What are your passions, what drives you?
6. What are your talents? What do you do better than your competitors? What skills do your customers recognise in you?
7. How would you position your company? Are you the high-cost, high-quality option, or the low-cost, high value option? N.B. You can’t be all things to all people. Who you are should to some extent be based on what your target customers want and need you to be.
8. Do you know who your competitors are? What do they do better than you? What do you do better than them?
   
   Focus on your target audience when answering the following questions…
9. Who is your target market?
10. Currently who do your products and services attract?
11. What products/services do you offer? What are the qualities of these services?
12. What does your business specialise in?
13. If you could only market one product/service which would it be?
14. What qualities would you associate with your business? Think about the personality you want to convey e.g. is the personality of your company innovative, creative, energetic, or sophisticated?
15. What do your customers already think of your business?
16. What differentiates your business from its competitors?
17. What’s your company strap-line, what does it say about you? If you don’t have one, what should it be?

Now that you’ve answered these questions, you will be in a far better position to start to plot where your brand is going and to be able to ensure its heading in the right direction. Oxford Creative are experts and able to work with you to assist moving your brand in the direction you want it to go.

Phil Wright has been working in the Comms industry for over 15 years and is a director of Oxford Creative.

Although Oxford Creative is a shiny new company, the team consists of a bunch of very experienced Digital Media professionals. The mix of youth and experience really works – we wouldn’t want it any other way.

But there’s a potential pitfall in being surrounded by designers and developers every day – it can be easy to lose perspective, and to become detached from the ‘real’ world.

And that’s what makes the team I work with so interesting – and so good at what they do. I think it’s part of what makes any team a successful one – our mixture of youth and experience, different skill-sets, backgrounds and outlooks gives us character. It makes us who we are – and it allows us to pull back and look at each other’s work from differing perspectives.

The perception of what constitutes good design can be highly subjective. For example, one of our Flash developers recently found a ‘really cool’ Flash site that uses cutting edge AS3 (apparently). He (very enthusiastically) showed it to a passing client contact, who looked at him funny and wondered what all the fuss was about…

Know your audience

The point is, if you’re building a site for Flash developers, your visitors will be visiting your site to check out your Flash skills. They will, in the main, have the latest version of the Flash player installed. They’ll happily wait for a few seconds for your intro to load and for your Flash interface to build.

The flipside is that on any other type of site, for any other type of audience, your sexy animation had better add value.

When we put together a team to create a website, our starting point is to ask ‘why‘. Why will visitors come the site? What are they looking for when they hit the homepage? How easy is it for them to find it? If you don’t take the time to think about these questions, and to build the answers into your design, they’ll be off before your whizzy Flash intro has loaded.

Site visitors spend an average of 30 seconds on a home page. In that brief, 30 second window, you have to draw them in – intrigue them – offer up the information they’re looking for, and an easy way for them to find out more about it.

Pulling it all together

But usability isn’t just about a fast loading interface or a good use of typography. A really well designed website, or product, or piece of art, draws you to it. It makes you want to look around, pick it up or keeps you staring at it for a little longer.

In his book ¹ Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, Don Norman talks about the 3 levels at play in design: visceral, behavioural, and reflective:

Visceral design is about look and feel. One of his examples of visceral design is the 1961 E-type Jaguar: it’s the kind of car people fall in love with and want to own. How well it works, and how much it costs, are afterthoughts.

“Behavioural design is all about use,” says Norman. “Appearance really doesn’t matter: performance does.” Behavioural design is about getting products to function well, and about making that functionality easily accessible – an area where technology products often fall down.

Reflective design about creating things you want to show off to your friends. An example is Philippe Starck’s Juicy Salif, about which Starck reportedly said: “My juicer is not meant to squeeze lemons, it is meant to start conversations.”

Needless to say, it’s quite a challenge to create anything that satisfies all 3 of these criteria. It’s even more of a challenge to push every button inside that 30 second window…

But at the risk of repeating the mantra of every CSS guru on the web, I think the route to success, from a web design perspective, is to truly separate design from content.

If we work to tick the first 2 boxes – if we strive to design websites that draw users in, matched with functionality and ease of use, then ultimately it’s down to the quality of the content to determine how ‘cool’ it is, and whether visitors stick around.

That leads us to another aspect of website ‘stickiness’ – the content. The art of creating website content will be the subject of an upcoming post, but suffice to say, if designers can be too close to the design to recognise its flaws, that risk applies equally to content creators…

Which brings me back to our in-house team, and their part in our usability testing.

You know that if Sophie, Video Producer and all round non-techie, looks at your monitor and a frown starts to wrinkle her brow, you need to have a rethink.

We can bleat as much as we like about visitors being used to this type of interface or that particular technology. Sure – we have to keep up with the latest tech. But it has to work for the consumer. Sometimes we’re too close to it to make that call. So if Sophie can’t find it, our visitors won’t either.

¹ Source: The Guardian

A fresh start

Starting any new company throws up a whole series of questions. I don’t mean the fundamentals like, what will we be doing, or who’s involved, I’m thinking about the questions around the brand. Already working in the arena of branding and corporate identity, the challenge of applying all my knowledge and experience to ourselves got me to re-evaluate “what’s in a brand?” Branding has moved far beyond the label on your product, it now refers to your corporate personality, your reputation, corporate identity and image.

“The tangible manifestation of a corporate personality is its corporate identity. It is the corporate personality under cultivation”
Wolff Olins

Your brand positions your company; it says who you are, what space you work in and defines how you act. Your brand isn’t your company name, or even your logo. It’s not your website or your office building. Your brand is all this and more. Your brand is everything you do, from the way you answer the phone, to the attitude you adopt as you walk through the front door in the morning. It’s the type of coffee that you serve or the layout of your invoice, your latest TV commercial or the way you sign your emails.

Think about it, everything combines to create your brand and when everything is pulling in the same direction it strengthens your brand. Everything; everything you say, write, create and do has an impact on your brand. The most successful brands in the world know and understand this, you don’t have to be a global multi-national to have a strong brand, you need to have a vision, get your team to understand it and stick to it.

The importance of brand engagement

In a market swamped by competition, rational choice has become all but impossible. Brands create stability and a safe haven amidst the turmoil around them, representing clarity, consistency and status. Consumers have an innate need to create an emotional bond with a product or service, it helps to define who they are and justify their engagement.

Nowadays products and services are taken for granted, quite often the only distinguishing factor between them is the brand. As Seth Godin sets out in his book Purple Cow, you need to make yourself remarkable to engage your audience.  And once you’ve engaged the consumer it’s not just a product image, it’s also reflected on their own image too. In modern society brands shape how we see ourselves and also how others view us.

With this knowledge we can see that it is vital for a brand to engage with its audience; for it to resonate and gain empathy. The great thing about online marketing is that you can be who you want to be and make your stand. Your niche will be carved and your brand assured.

Brand Identity

Your brand has to work hard projecting both outward and inward ensuring both your customers and employees understand who you are.  It needs to be invasive seeping through every aspect of your business. It should say; who you are, what you do and how you do it and it can also elude to where you want to go.

So ask yourself who are we? Are you serious or light-hearted, stylish or rough around the edges, global or local, are you exclusive or bargain basement, are you technology or people led, are you a pioneer or a “me too”, are you elitist or down to earth.

Whatever you choose your brand to be, ensure that you’re being authentic. Don’t try to be something you’re not, this is the easiest way to fail.

If you’re changing direction, don’t expect everything to slot into place overnight, but make the first step. The first step to offering outstanding customer service is to start doing it. Believe that you offer outstanding customer service. Learn from your mistakes; instil in others your passion and vision for your company. Pretty soon you will find that your mistakes are fewer and the whole process becomes a little easier. Before long you will begin to get a reputation for offering outstanding customer service and it will show. It will become synonymous with your brand, then any contact your customer has with your brand will strengthen that emotional bond they have developed and you have created yourself an advocate; a walking, talking billboard, offering free advertising and personal recommendation.

I thank Jonathan for pointing out this gem of presentation at the TED conference by Joseph Pine http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joseph_pine_on_what_consumers_want.html Can you stand behind your brand, head held high and say “yes, this is us”.

Phil Wright has been working in the Comms industry for over 15 years and is a director of Oxford Creative.