Do you live your brand?
Advertising Quotes
from local businesses
My wife just spent over 200 bucks on 3 pieces of fitness clothes from Lorna Jane. After collapsing on the floor, she gave me the 200 page Lorna Jane book that came with her purchase. Impressed by the extent that Lorna Jane truly lives her own fitness brand I want my wife to go back and buy more. Lorna's book not only is full of fitness tips and fmeal ideas, it's a book that is full of personal stories about herself, her family and her friends. It's truly impressive to see someone living her brand like that.
How do you live your brand?
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37 Signals and how they live their brand
37 signals, the makers of basecamp, say Marketing is not a department.
Marketing is everything you do. 24/7/365. Every invoice, email, phone call, error message & word on your website is marketing.
Every time we communicate we are marketing ourselves. I think it’s so important that we practice our communication everyday & pride ourselves on it!
Do you agree with their approach?
The History of the Service Central Brand
The brand journey for Service Central has been quite a journey since we incorporated the company 9 years ago, and launched to market 7 years ago.
If I can indulge, hopefully you find it an interesting example of why "branding" your business is never ever complete.
Service Central was originally named "Freeworkers". My mission was the "free employees from the shackles of employment, by making it easy for people to start businesses and win customers". Instead, my friends constantly reminded me that "Freeworkers" sounded more like I was a pimp selling welll .... u can guess. I decided we needed a name change.
In early 2005, we hired a tiny marketing agency for under $1,000 who took us through the process of coming up with a new name. She had some great techniques, and after a couple of weeks of hard work we locked in "Service Central".
I then had a mate from uni make up our first logo. I thought that Service Central sounded like a train station, so he looked on the Melways (remember them) and made a logo that looked like a train stop on the Melways. Over the next few months, we found out that our clients thought the logo looked like a tampon, so it was back to the drawing board!
We moved into an office that we shared with a graphic design agency, and sweet talked them into creating a new logo for us. Building on the train station theme, they created a logo that looks like the London Loop sign.
That said, once the logo was (finally) right, the exercise of branding Service Central was only starting. The real branding exercise came in setting the culture and standards for our growing team.
We created the Service Central "Orange Print" that outlined: Our Vision, Our Purpose and Our Positioning (yes I know its corporate crap, but it helps!!!). Then it goes on to get into detail as to The Way We Do Things, covering our Brand Values, Brand Personality, and most importantly What We are Not! We also, know who our competitors are, and who the stakeholders in our business are.
This Orange Print them becomes a central focus of our business. It helps us hire the right staff, train them in the right way, and coach them as they grow with us. It also sets the tone for every communication that we put out into the world (email, newsletter, TV / Radio Ads, Adwords Ads, Website Copy, Telephone Scripts, SMS's, and the list goes on and on).
Having our own "Brand Standard" has also really helped us over the years whenever any disputes have arisen. As we know what we stand for, how we do business, and what our approach to others is, we can stand firm in the knowledge that we know what our business would have said and how it would act in all circumstances.
Has this "Brand Standard" lost us work and opportunities at times? Absolutely! By holding high standards for ourselves, we also naturally come to hold high standards for our clients as well. This means that we can't take any shortcuts by accepting anyone as our clients, but instead we only accept people who align well with what we stand for. Undoubtedly, this has cost us money in the short term (and it is frustrating seeing people pay money to competitors that are obviously taking short cuts to get ahead), however it is this integrity that has kept us in business for 7 years now, and helped us grow from strength to strength during these uncertain financial times.
Conclusion
So how do you live your Brand?
Advertising Quotes
from local businesses
