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Sweet marketing music

Tanner Montague came to town from Seattle having never owned his own music venue before. He’s a musician himself, so he has a pretty good sense of good music, but he also wandered into a crowded music scene filled with concert venues large and small.But the owner of Green Room thinks he found a void in the market. It’s lacking, he says, in places serving between 200 and 500 people, a sweet spot he thinks could be a draw for both some national acts not quite big enough yet for arena gigs and local acts looking for a launching pad.“I felt that size would do well in the city to offer more options,” he says. “My goal was to A, bring another option for national acts but then, B, have a great spot for local bands to start.”Right or wrong, something seems to be working, he says. He’s got a full calendar of concerts booked out several months. How did he, as a newcomer to the market in an industry filled with competition, get the attention of the local concertgoer?

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by Eric Hayward
June - July 2008

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Steps to build a brand

Eric Hayward,
Grossman Design:
612.986.9412
eric@grossmandesign.com
www.grossmandesign.com

Practical steps
can lead to
brand makeover

EVER WATCH OPRAH? It’s not all about buying the perfect pair of jeans, or the stars’ secrets to losing 40 pounds. You might actually learn something, such as the real power of branding.

I’m referring to a regular feature on the show where experts offer wardrobe makeovers to hapless fashion citizens whose look has fallen flat. The moment to watch for is the surprised excitement and confidence these guests display when walking out on camera to reveal their new appearance.This is a great metaphor for the experience business owners have in getting a new visual identity for their company.

Unlike these guests on The Oprah Winfrey Show, nobody is going to sweep in and reinvent your visual identity for free, without your involvement. The not-free part of this reality isn’t so great. But view your necessary involvement as a blessing. Visual identities that work come together when you take responsibility for your brand, before the creative people even get involved.

How to make one

A lot of hype and pseudo-academic terminology surround the term “brand,” as writers struggle to put into language something that isn’t about just language. A brand is a system. It’s the common way you represent everything that really matters about your company or product to customers and the world, using repeatable words and images.

Steps to build a brand:

1. Start by defining the most basic information customers need to know. Do you sell coffee, computer parts, pharmaceuticals, soap? In a point-by-point comparison with competitors, you’ll want to know if yours is finer, cheaper, faster-acting, more convenient or more moisturizing.

2. Boil that down to the real ‘human value’. This is the taste, togetherness and leisure of a hot beverage. It’s the unique performance, productivity and fun a computer offers once it has the right parts. It’s the singular freedom, vitality and confidence a person gets from feeling healthy and smelling good.

3. Add creativity and smarts. Here’s where the magic happens. The ideas you’ve outlined in Step 2 are associated in customers’ minds with certain colors, shapes, images, sounds, textures and poetry. You want to discover those (creativity) and find a consistent, repeatable, flexible way of representing them (smarts).

The good news (or bad news, if you are lazy) is that you can do a lot of this yourself. Anybody who knows his or her business can easily handle much of Steps 1 and 2. It will take an afternoon or two at Starbucks and a few pieces of notebook paper. To fill in the gaps, you may seek a trusted adviser for facilitation, review or some help generating ideas. As for Step 3, your involvement at key stages in the process makes all the difference.

Now it’s time to translate the brand definition you have on paper into a visual identity. You will assign the job to a creative team or hire a firm. When it comes to handling creative talent, design and advertising clients often fall into two categories.

No. 1: clients who get too involved for their own good.

These clients feel insecure about trusting the process. They end up giving specific direction to designers rather then presenting outcomes the artist can apply his or her creativity in working toward.

The result is often cluttered, as the designer tries to include too much specific direction from too many parties, or boring, as the creativity has been squeezed out of the process.

No. 2: Clients who don’t get involved enough.

Sadly, these clients have told themselves they simply aren’t creative. They feel they should defer to the experts completely. The resulting design may look great, but doesn’t exactly suit their taste or purpose. The artist has been left to do a lot of guesswork.

These clients forget that their own brains are hard-wired to appreciate color, taste, smell and texture, and that every American holds an honorary doctorate in consumer science.

We weed through thousands of brand messages every day. We are certainly qualified to form some opinions on our own corporate identity.

To get the results you want, you’ll have to strike a balance between these two extremes. Provide enough input for designers to work with, but give them room to do what they do best. Creativity thrives on information and freedom.

Give your creative partner the information you defined in steps 1 and 2 of your brand-building process. Also spend some time reviewing the packaging, Web sites and advertisements of other companies. Don’t just focus on your industry. Pick out examples in two categories: Those that work, and those that you just like. Show these examples to your designer.

From there you have to let go. If you’ve chosen a partner carefully, they are probably trustworthy enough to make good choices on your behalf, given the freedom to do so, even to make choices that look different, at first, than what you had expected.

If you are a little surprised, it’s probably a good sign. It means your designer has not simply regurgitated back a literal interpretation of what you asked for.

Unexpected payoff

If you’ve ever chosen a breakfast cereal for the box, or a real estate agent for the face, you already know more than this article needs to tell you about the impact of visual identity on customers. There’s plenty of great research to support that, too.

But it’s not just customer opinion that counts. The real power of a new look can be the renewed feeling of legitimacy, clarity and passion it provides employees and management as they step out into the marketplace. It brings a deepened sense of belief in the value and promise of the business itself; one that leads directly to more sales.

Your role in defining your business’s wardrobe is significant. By taking the time to do some needed thinking about your brand, you can lay the groundwork for the future.