Your BRAND is the perception of your organization that lives in the minds of your audiences.
Every interaction your audience has with your church or organization forms thoughts, feelings, and perceptions in their minds. In this understanding of a BRAND, everything speaks—business cards, website, words and posture, interaction with volunteers and staff. All of these things contribute to your audience’s perception of you.
With a strong brand, you communicate effectively and consistently across all communication channels.
The branding process is one way to fully leverage the hard work of getting clear about your vision, seeing it come to life in all of your communication.
THE QUICK SUMMARY – Brand Identity Breakthrough by Gregory V. Diehl
Does your business have a story to tell? It should! Every new product can be unique in its industry. Does yours stand out from the crowd?
After a life of exploring the way people exchange value in over 35 countries, Diehl teaches business owners how to have conversations about brand strategy. In Brand Identity Breakthrough, you will learn how to develop a strong business identity by combining your personality and values with the functionality of your products to become irreplaceable to your audience.
Whether you lead a growing company, or are just starting a business, Brand Identity Breakthrough will give you a smarter way to think about new product development and business model generation. With undeniable, well-organized logic, it will show you how anyone can sell more, and at higher prices, so long as they give customers exactly what they want.
* Learn how to build a unique selling proposition for your product
* Learn the best methods for how to sell a product to customers, no matter what you offer.
* Overcome the sales learning curve, and sell products in both physical and online marketplaces.
A SIMPLE SOLUTION
We live in a world where we are sold to hundreds, maybe thousands, of times a day and have become ridiculously blind to those trying to sell us something.
But we’re always up for a good story. Stories are the most powerful form of inspiration and persuasion in the world.
Great stories are ones that others want to retell. Think about folklore, urban legends, or other stories you have heard. Most of those stories are not from your own experiences or ones that you have created. They are often stories that have been passed along to you by somebody else, who has also gotten it from another person.
Now place the power of stories in terms of your organization and its mission. When you have a mission that is much larger than yourself, you are able to attract the attention of people. People don’t want to be a part of an organization; they want to be a part of a mission. The story you tell should be inspirational and give people a purpose.
Organizations who learn to use stories have a feeling of authenticity and humanity about them, almost a magnetic quality.
If you learn to tell an engaging story about what you do, you will capture the interest of more people, and they will automatically qualify themselves for what you offer as they learn and retain the most important elements.
A good narrative is designed to tap into the natural curiosity and emotional engagement that everybody has within them. It is the exact same way that a truly captivating movie, book, or even a song can draw us in from complete indifference to being fully invested in whatever is going on.
Characters in our head become just as real as the people we know, even though they exist only as information in our memories. It is a universal tendency for all of us to want to give our minds interesting new ideas to play with and engage our emotions.
Your narrative is business is the story that you should be telling the world about why your business exists and how it can change lives. Think about gradually moving away from “what we do” conversations, and weave an engaging story about the motivation, purpose, personality, methodology, and results you offer.
With a strong narrative, you will incite curiosity in strangers who would otherwise ignore you. You will have a stronger personal investment in the actions of your organization because you will believe in what it stands for and what it does. Your actions will make sense within a larger framework of purpose,, which will build upon cumulative progress.
Gregory V. Diehl, Brand Identity Breakthrough
A NEXT STEP
Narratives are mental structures you use to organize information about the world.
Author Gregory Diehl suggests the following questions as a starting point in building a narrative for your brand.
Gather your team together, and write the following four questions at the top of four chart tablets.
- Define your idea – “Why should this exist?”
- Define your target – “Who needs this specifically?”
- Define their needs – “Why should they care?”
- Define yourself – “Why should they come to us?”
Discuss each of the questions with your team, making notes of the comments for each question.
How can you use the comments to help craft a narrative for your brand?
Excerpt taken from SUMS Remix 109-2, released January 2019.
Part of a weekly series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader
Regular daily reading of books is an important part of my life. It even extends to my vocation, where as Vision Room Curator for Auxano I am responsible for publishing SUMS Remix, a biweekly book “excerpt” for church leaders. Each Wednesday on 27gen I will be taking a look back at previous issues of SUMS Remix and publishing an excerpt.
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