Tips to Building Brands of Purpose - Podcast
A short skip back, our friend Yolanda Albergotti invited Conspire principal and founder Jeremy Mumpower to join her as a guest on the Five Easy Things Podcast. Yolanda, a small business owner herself, picks the minds of entrepreneurs, founders, and folks at the helm of a wide spectrum of industries, from lawyers to CBD start-ups and everything in-between.
Yolanda’s podcast format is short and sweet. Task the guest to stay around 15 minutes and drop all of the business knowledge that they can.
Jeremy was challenged with paring down the Conspire brand building process to five easy things, while making the steps digestible and actionable for the audience.
Episode 81: Five Ways You Can Build a Brand of Purpose
Originally shared on Five Easy Things the Podcast, Summer 2022.
Five Tips to Build your Brand on Purpose
Set Your Points
If you're going to build anything, you're going to have goals in mind. I love alliteration, so all of my ways, are going to be “P” words.
So, the first one is POINTS.
You have to know what your ‘Point A’ and your ‘Point B’ are to get towards those goals. And to have a plan, you have to know where you're starting and where you gotta go.
Shake Things Up, Positively
Number two is about your value PROPOSITION.
Every company or organization has products or services, and you have to know how to position those in a unique way to differentiate yourself.
Products or services, either one that you have, and you might have both, must make a unique selling proposition. You have to stand out amongst a lot of noise out there.
This is where we talk about being positively disruptive, right? When you catch that harmony, it's gonna make ears perk up and people pay attention. To stand out from that noise you're going to be positively disruptive.
Finding Place and Space
Number three is PLACE. You have to know your place.
We talk about that at Conspire as “competitive landscape.”
Sometimes you're looking for emulators, like best-in-class examples of what you can create. Other times we call it “marketplace,” because it's not really always about direct competition. Still, you have to know what's out there, what people are exposed to, so that you can know what's being done well.
To be different, we compare what's being done that well, with what makes you unique, in order to find some whitespace. That’s your place to really fulfill a need and stand out. Then you can drill it down to things like geographic location, cultural differences, and other focused demographics that are very important to consider.
Connect People to Your Purpose
Number four might be the most important in my opinion, PEOPLE.
You have to know who you need to reach and who they are. Most people make most decisions based on emotion. If you can inspire people and connect on an emotional level, then you can get them to move.
If you're going to do that, you have to know what these people are like.
I spend a lot of time stressing with our clients that often the people that they need to move are probably not a lot like them. It’s important to understand your brand is for those that you need to reach.
Anyone who is responsible for developing a brand should love the brand. It's like a living thing that you need to care for. You should be proud of it. You should be the biggest champion of it. But you should also know it's not primarily for you. It’s for the people.
Keep Your Promises
Lastly is PROMISES.
We call core values our promises. What will you not compromise? What do you promise yourself and others to never waver from?
From a small team to corporate setting, it's about creating standards for culture. When you build a brand from the inside out, those promises also apply to your customers. It’s crucial to be consistent with who you say that you are.
That's real authenticity. But to do that, you have to really put parameters to those values. Core values, we call it the DNA of your brand, are promises.
How to Hone In
Each of my five things are an actual exercise in our brand strategy offering. When you work with our team, we'll workshop all of these points through pretty cool collaborative exercises we use to dig deep for each of these points.
Take “people” for example. Conspire has an exercise to create ideal customer profiles. We get as detailed as we can, sometimes even creating a narrative that helps us really use our imagination and get inside a customer's head.
In a perfect world, we'll have a primary customer, we'll have a secondary customer and a tertiary customer, because we have different types of people we need to reach. We build these profiles to have as much demographic information and and as much understanding of customer personality. It’s imperative to know what drives them by looking through the lens they see the world with. Only then can we really design branding and communications that resonate with them.
Ready to refine the lens? We can be your guide.
