In the beginning, God created. This ancient phrase, which launches the biblical account of our origins, has been quoted, printed, dramatized, advertised, preached, debated, and sung. Yet its familiarity may make us less curious about its deeper implications for us, particularly its impact on the way we approach business.
Like our Creator, we are created to think, imagine, plan, and determine what action to take. This is not merely the stoic liberty to opt for the right or the wrong, the good or the bad, obedience or disobedience. It is the dynamic ability to take the mundane, the unimaginative, and the day-to-day and beautify it, make it thrilling, and dress it by the creative powers given to us.
The Biblical call to creativity
We are inclined to presume that not everyone is like their Creator in the area of creativity. Creativity is a term commonly applied to artists, musicians, and designers. Most of us do not see ourselves in those creative fields, but creativity applies to much more than the arts! It is creating tasty, healthy recipes in the kitchen; it is creating viable, realistic business plans; it is creating a warm, inviting, and worshipful atmosphere at church.
Creativity is a universal human trait that links us to our Creator. God brought the entire animal kingdom to Adam to “see what he would call them.”1 God asked Adam to apply human creativity to His creation.
Bringing human creativity to God’s creation remains our calling today. After God gave Adam and Eve their initial instructions to be fruitful, multiply, subdue, and replenish the earth, He gave them the special charge of dressing and keeping the garden.2 Think about it: there were no weeds to pull, were there? No watering to do. No plastic to lay down.
What was God telling them to do? Adam was to make new combinations of beauty in this beautiful garden. It’s a bit like a father giving his four-year-old boy a sandbox and sand toys, and saying, “Son, see what you can make in there. Do whatever you want, just keep the sand in the sandbox.”
Our gardens today are the businesses God has entrusted to us to dress and keep. Employing the power of proper branding is one way to “dress” your business. My goal is to inspire you to employ the power of branding at a higher level in your business and rekindle your passion for your brand. Let’s begin by considering the power of some familiar brands.
What is a brand?
Look at the symbols above representing four different brands. Do you recognize them even though they are not in color? Do you know what products each company produces? What impressions come to your mind: quality, price, gender, food, luxury, or… nothing? What should come to your mind? What does it mean for a brand to have power?
In his book of brand-builder’s terminology, The Dictionary of Brand, Marty Neumeier defines “brand” as a person’s perception of a product, service, experience, or organization. In other words, your business has a reputation like a person. Branding is the effort to define and build that reputation while also building people’s trust in it. Let me give you the Roy Herr definition: Brand is the communication and actualization of who you are, what you believe, and how you act. Strong brands not only make promises, but they also provide the resources to follow through on their promises every time.
Here is another way to think about the power of brands. Think of the brand of coffee you drink. Can you visualize the brand’s logo? If you can, it is because the brand owns a piece of real estate in your brain. If you like their coffee, you are happy to have them reside there. In fact, if they continue to serve you well, you will probably sell them even more real estate in your brain. Yet branding doesn’t just reside in the brain. It goes deeper.
My father raised me to be a John Deere fan. He was a born mechanic who repaired all colors of tractors, but he taught me that green tractors are the best. We used to tell people that the United States decided which colors to use in traffic lights based on red and green tractors. People were accustomed to seeing tractors out in the field: the green tractors always kept going, and the red ones always kept stopping. If you tell that story in a farming community, you can imagine the emotions that rise in the red or blue tractor lovers!
God made us emotional people, and we make decisions based largely on feelings. Brands you love become a treasure chest, soliciting such deep loyalty that you will pay above average price for a product with their logo on it. Strong brands are built by purchasing real estate in people’s brains and giving them treasures to fill their hearts.
Brand basis
When building a brand, we need a basis. A strong basis includes the following four elements:
- Vision. This is the future you intend to forge. You have a clear picture of a new reality you want to create.
- Mission. This is how you will accomplish your vision and effect change toward it.
- Core values. These are qualities or beliefs that are essential to accomplishing your vision and mission. Consider what key beliefs or values people within your organization uphold to carry out your vision and mission.
- Business plan. This is the year-to-year, month-to-month, day-to-day to-do list. It is all the activities that must be done to accomplish your mission. It includes finance, production, and marketing.
Let’s look at an example of how this works:
We have an imaginary friend named Elijah who has a burden for the hundreds of troubled boys in the city. He believes that if he can create an opportunity to share love and friendship with these boys, over time some of them will find a new life in Jesus Christ. This is the brand’s vision.
As a boy, Elijah spent hours building model train sets from parts and pieces he collected at yard sales. Now he operates a store that sells model trains. The store offers membership
programs for youngsters with supervised playrooms where children can play for set amounts of time. This is the brand’s mission.
Elijah hires employees who have a strong faith in God, who value people and relationships, and who enjoy relating to children. These are his core values.
Notice that Elijah hires people who support his core values. People are generally motivated at three basic levels:
- The first level is hunger. The Bible says that “if any would not work, neither should he eat.”3 Selfish as it seems, working for the groceries is a legitimate motivation.
- The next level is advancement. People work to please the customer and the boss because that is the route up the ladder. This motive tends to make a person a better employee for the company, but it is still self-serving.
- The third level is service. This person wants to create positive change in the lives of people around him. When a person goes to work motivated to serve others’ needs, work becomes infinitely more purposeful and satisfying. Jesus says this person will be great in the kingdom of Heaven.4
The third level has what I call “higher purpose,” which results when your people are driven by a purpose higher than personal gain. Elijah’s best people will have a higher purpose aligned with his own vision, combined with the skills needed for the day-to-day work of his business plan, and a personal interest in the mission of young boys and toy trains. This is the basis for a brand.
Develop your niche
While branding is commonly considered part of the marketing department, it involves the entire company. To have a strong brand, you must develop a niche. This starts with market research to discover a need and then develops a solution to meet the need. Many people stop here because they think the rest is automatic. That is not true. The hard work is about to begin.
You need to promote and sell the solution to the people who need it. They might not even know they need it! Who knew they needed a cell phone in 1946 when AT&T began service in St. Louis, Missouri?
Then when you have gained enough confidence to compel customers to hand over hard-earned dollars to buy from you, you need to fulfill your promise to them and meet the need. Now you are in business! But it doesn’t stop here.
You need to continue developing and repeating the cycle to perfection—and you never finish. This is the foundational bedrock of business success. If you do this really well, you could probably survive on a mediocre marketing approach. But if you miss this point, no marketing approach will deliver long-term success.
The trust spectrum
Let’s begin to tie this together and see how it relates to your brand. Company culture is created by merging together your vision, your mission, your core values, your business plan, and your people. This culture becomes your brand. If a business were a person, we would call it his reputation. In fact, sometimes the trust between a business and its customers is dependent upon the reputation of one person rather than the reputation of the brand. This is what I call the trust spectrum.
To illustrate this, imagine an attorney on one end of the spectrum and a tube of toothpaste on the other.
When you hire an attorney, you look for someone who can write strong contracts or perform well in court. You are likely to hire him based on his personal reputation.
Several years ago, we decided to select a new accountant to serve our company. We wanted someone with expertise and experience who could guide us through long-term company growth. We invited several accountants to present their services to us, and we explained our situation and goals to each of them. We hired the one who asked us the best questions—the questions that made us think the most. We also had a strong reference from someone who had used his services and was extremely satisfied. He is a CPA. Incidentally, he also had the highest hourly rate.
We were not primarily focused on his logo or how his business card looked or how well his website was designed. We needed to know that he could help take our company where we wanted to go. It is all about our relationship with him and what he brings to us as a professional. We continue to use his services because he delivers what we are looking for. So the point is that some businesses are all about trust in a particular person.
Now let’s look at the other end of the spectrum. Do you know someone personally at the toothpaste factory? And yet you put that stuff right in your mouth! That’s because you trust the name and logo on the toothpaste package. They could put anything in the tube, and you would put it in your mouth. Can you imagine trying to sell toothpaste door-to-door in an unmarked tube?
So, where does your business fit in? Is your customer’s trust-based primarily on the capabilities of one person? Or is it based on the cooperation of a group and an organized business system? In the end, trust is best preserved by building a company driven by dependable systems.
The brand triangle
The brand triangle shows three important areas that build brand trust.
- Promotions: These are communication pieces crafted to deliver a message to customers by using words, graphics, illustrations, and photographs to communicate your Unique Selling Proposition. In the example of a coffee shop, this would include posters, coffee bags, pricing, and more.
- Functions: This is the practical value you deliver in products and services. In the case of a coffee shop, this would include flavor, temperature, eat-in facilities, lids, and customer wait time.
- Relations: This is how customers experience interaction with your business. In the coffee shop, this could include dress code, loyalty rewards, staff attitudes, and complaint resolution.
For a brand to flourish, all three sides of the triangle must be well-designed with a united focus. All three sides must work together. In my observation, we Anabaptists tend to be strong in only two of these elements. We do well at inventing solutions to problems, which makes us strong in the functions. We also do well in the relations, since our Christian values promote service and care for others. We tend to be weak in the promotions side of the triangle, perhaps due to low risk tolerance or in an effort to avoid bragging. So let’s look at some key brand expressions we should develop and use to promote our brands.
Key expressions
The name. Naming is such an important part of communication that God commissioned Adam for a large naming project right in the beginning. Creating a strong name that is memorable, aligns with the spirit of your brand, and is easily spelled and pronounced is a challenging marketing exercise.
A well-crafted name for your brand will save you thousands of dollars in advertising expense! I advise that you get professional help with this. Even poor brand names can be advertised repeatedly to the point that people never forget them. But at what cost? Well-crafted brand names travel much farther and much faster on each marketing dollar.
The logo. As the face of your company, your logo is the second most important component of your brand promotion. It should communicate your values and the culture of your brand, not in words, but in graphical language that brains understand and hearts connect with. Your logo is a symbol by which you become recognized. It should be simple but expressive. It should be unique but understood. It should be used consistently everywhere and always.
Don’t even think of designing your own logo! I have yet to see a company with a vision that regretted paying a competent brand designer to develop its logo. Like a well-crafted brand name, a properly designed logo will save you thousands of dollars in advertising expense. Brand names and logos need to be developed with your long-term vision in mind. The most powerful brand names and logos do not focus on products or services. Instead, they communicate the essence of the brand spirit. Usually, they do not even contain words or symbols that reference their products or services. Powerful brand names and logos are designed to be timeless so they do not require updates every few years because of changes in products or services or new market trends. Brand vision and design transcend market conditions and developments.
The slogan. This is a short, memorable statement that expresses the spirit of the brand, sometimes even in more concrete terms than the name and logo. “Nothing runs like a Deere” clearly communicates that John Deere’s vision is to deliver power and efficiency to farmers so they can keep rolling day and night. “Fresh, hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed” is credited with building Domino’s Pizza into a billion-dollar company.
Notice how both slogans hit a soft spot in the heart. “Nothing runs like a Deere” rings with success, which is something close to every farmer’s heart. “Fresh, hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed” is a welcome promise to a mother who just doesn’t feel like making dinner tonight.
Your brand spirit is communicated in many other ways, including “gateways,” the doors through which your customers transact business with you. These include your storefront, employees, outside reps, website, or catalogs. Gateways should be carefully designed to communicate your brand spirit and engage your customers in a positive brand experience.
Create value
In terms of sales, proper branding delivers on its promise every time. Customers will pay for brands that consistently keep their promises. Value is created by clarifying your vision, delivering your mission, nurturing your core values, and systemizing your business processes. People are attracted to your brand if your vision is compelling, if your mission meets their needs, and if they share your core values.
Whether the individuals are business partners, employees, customers, or vendors, there is synergy in the relationship. They get more of what they want. They get to help promote a cause they care about. They can accomplish more by joining forces with you than by working independently. Proper branding creates a deep level of trust, and trust oils the gears of business. It not only benefits the bottom line, but it also benefits the bottom of the heart.
Proper branding is a large task that may feel overwhelming, but like most things, it is a series of small steps. The important task is to discern the step in front of you. Take that step, and then worry about the next one.
These three books may be helpful in relation to branding. Each focuses on a different side of the Brand Triangle.
The Power of Logos, by William Haag and Laurel Harper, explains how your logo will promote you. That’s the promotion side of the Brand Triangle.
Purple Cow, by Seth Godin helps you rethink innovation and relates a little more to the function side of the Brand Triangle although it touches the entire scope.
Raving Fans, by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles, focuses on the relations side of the Brand Triangle.
Now go build your brand!
Build a garden that will please God and bless those around you!
1 Genesis 2:19 “And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
2 Genesis 2:15 “And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.”
3 II Thessalonians 3:10 “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.”
4 Matthew 20:26 “But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister.”