This month, we’ve explored a wide range of concepts around branding – from brand audits, to brand identity, to rebranding, and everything in between. We believe that in order to serve you best, we ought not only to extend this information to you, but make sure you feel equipped to carry out the vision you have for your brand in this new year and new decade that you’ve cultivated throughout the course of our Brand New Year series. This week, let’s take some time to discuss how to develop a more personalized, fulfilling and humanizing approach towards pursuing your brand aspirations.
The Big Picture
Simon Sinek transformed culture with his TED Talk “Start With Why”. He encourages us to operate from within ourselves, and then express our “why” to the world through what we create and are able to offer others. He flips our productivity mindset on its head by giving us the freedom to pave our own way and live out of our own purposes, ultimately creating for ourselves a more fulfilling and personal version of success.
It’s out of this place that we encourage you to set the goals and desires for your own brand that will move you closer to the goals you wish to achieve. Not mine. Not your competition’s. Yours.
Use this opportunity to cultivate your brand to be what you want it to be, how you want it to grow and why you want it to exist. Let your drives and aspirations come from within yourself, and watch your dreams actualize.
To do this, take a moment and brainstorm your big picture by answering some of these questions:
- Why do you do what you do as a company?
- What would you like your company to look like in the next three to five years?
- Take a look at your current goals, or the goals you’ve been considering to implement. Do they align with and support your company’s vision for future development…your “why”?
Conceptualizing this big picture should naturally get you excited about moving forward. The best movements made in my companies have happened with smaller, more approachable goals that support a meaningful bigger picture to me. I’m able to approach those tasks with greater motivation because I know exactly what I’m working towards.
The Next Right Thing
Once you’ve created your big picture, I encourage you to work backwards to formulate a timeline that will keep you in step with pursuing this dream. For example, if you want to be fully self-employed by 2023, what must be true for this quarter and the next that will bring you one step closer towards your big picture? Or, if you have a product and your big picture is to be able to provide your goods to communities in all fifty states, what must be true for this year and next in order to get you there? These smaller goals will serve as a runway that will ramp you up to those bigger goals.
In our article about brand auditing, we explained that the key areas to maintain and strengthen in your brand should include your:
- Target Audience
- Brand Identity
- Messaging
- Brand Guidelines
Focus on establishing a few goals for each of these categories that you feel would best augment your branding and business strategy, and make sure that for each goal you set your sights on, assign to it the value it has in contributing to your big picture.
It’s not rare for you to end up with a lengthy list of goals—don’t let this cause you stress. Space them out throughout the year from most significant to least, and tackle them one at a time. You’ve got this!
Let’s Get To It
We’ve covered a lot of ground over the course of this Brand New Year series. We’ve walked through the fundamentals of branding, applied some helpful practices to our brands, reviewed and analyzed our strategies and uncovered ways we can make our brands stronger. Let this new year mark the start of a new season for your company, focusing on how to set goals to help you intentionally focus on bettering yourself. Throughout the year, if you find yourself at a dead end or simply need a bit of guidance and assistance, we’re always here to help!
