3 Keys to Preparing Your Brand for 2020
A new year…A new decade…What will you do to prepare your brand? There are three keys to building your brand:
1. Mission: Start with examining and (re)defining your Mission. This will tell you how you are going to get there. Your mission is your journey. To help define it, you should answer these questions:
- What do you do?
- How do you do it?
- Who do you exist for?
- What are you trying to achieve for them?
- How will you achieve it?
- What value do you provide?
A great mission will include the following:
- Be focused
- Solve unmet needs
- Leverage unique skills
- Guide trade-offs
- Inspire, and be inspired by, key stakeholders
- Anticipate change
- Stick in memory
A mission statement generator might help:
- Our mission is to what : (impact)
- For who: (audience)
- By how: (actions)
2. Vision: What are we working towards? This will tell you where you are going. You should be able to fill in the blank, “Our vision is a world where _____________.“
- Why does your organization exist?
- What is the big, huge, ambitious impact you want to make on the world?
- What will be the reason you’re around 100 years from now?
- How will the world look if you’re successful?
Vision statements can be prefaced with the phrases “A world where…” or “We exist so that…”
A vision generator might help:
[Company] offers [product] to [target audience] to help them [achieve goal].
3. Culture: These are shared values, attitudes, standards, and beliefs that characterize members of an organization and define its nature. Corporate culture is rooted in an organization’s goals, strategies, structure, and approaches to labor, customers, investors, and the greater community.
What makes a great culture:
- Being a role model for the organization’s beliefs
- Reinforcing organizational values
- Ensuring that organizational ethics are defined, understood, and practiced
- Enabling two-way communications, and feedback channels
- Providing continuous learning and training
- Sustaining reward and recognition systems
- Encouraging and empowering teams
- Promoting a customer-supplier work environment
- Recognizing and solving individual and organizational problems and issues
Great culture starts with a vision and mission statement. These guide a company’s values and provide it with purpose. That purpose orients every decision employees make. When they are deeply authentic and prominently displayed, good vision statements can even help orient customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders. A company’s values are the core of its culture. While a vision articulates a company’s purpose, values offer a sort of guidelines on the behaviors and mindsets needed to achieve that vision. Values are of little importance unless they are enshrined in a company’s practices. If an organization professes, “people are our greatest asset,” it should also be ready to invest in people in visible ways. No company can build a coherent culture without people who either share its core values or possess the willingness and ability to embrace those values. That’s why the greatest firms in the world also have some of the most stringent recruiting policies. Every organization has a unique history – a unique story. The ability to unearth that history and craft it into a narrative is a core element of culture creation. But they are more powerful when identified, shaped, and remodeled as a part of a firm’s ongoing culture.
Beyond the Mission, Vision, and Culture of your organization, you will want to develop a plan of action for the year to build your brand. If you need assistance and input, be sure to check out our Brand Builders Workshops by going to brandrusso.com/brandbuilders
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RUSSO is a strategic branding agency that uses consumer insight to change the conversation; forming emotional connections with the target audience. To learn more, click HERE to learn more about our process, RAZOR BRANDING.
