frequently asked questions

Companies often make the mistake of talking about the "things" they value, versus framing values as actionable behaviors. Effective brand messaging communicates the unique benefits and value propositions of the company's mission, vision and values. Your vision should describe where you're going, the mission explains why, and values depict how you are going to behave along the way.

Think carefully about how the product fits the brand architecture and choose a position that allows customers to easily understand how the new offering fits within the overall brand family. Understanding brand perception is crucial for positioning the new product within the overall brand family. Unless you have reasons for strategically separating it out from your other products, launch it in a way that stays consistent with your brand standards.

To prepare for and find new opportunities, assess and monitor your brand's identity by evaluating your company's strengths and areas for improvement with quarterly or annual surveys with your employees and customers. These recurring surveys will help you measure if impressions are changing over time. You can also conduct an audit of social and news media mentions to keep track of how and where your company is being talked about. For even more insight into what matters to your customers, consider monitoring for mentions of your competitors, too.

To minimize business disruptions, develop a strong communications plan that explains the reason for the spin off and clearly demonstrates the value of the separation to the marketplace. Create an internal communications strategy that generates understanding, buy-in and excitement from employees about the future of the company. Failure to address your internal audience can generate fear or pessimism that may potentially leak outside the organization, affecting public perception.

To generate positive brand awareness, you need to give before you take. Companies often forget about the opportunity to build brand awareness by doing helpful work for the community and aligning the brand with good causes. Putting structure behind these philanthropic endeavors helps build culture, stronger employee bonds and brand awareness through association.

The discovery phase also accelerates the change management process by building stakeholder engagement and alignment. As you solicit feedback and conduct outreach to key internal stakeholders, clients, and vendors, they begin to take ownership of their stake in your company's evolution and become champions for your brand. Create an internal communications strategy that generates understanding, buy-in and excitement from employees about the future of the company. Failure to address your internal audience can generate fear or pessimism that may potentially leak outside the organization, affecting public perception.

If you're planning on renaming your business, be really intentional about it. Put some serious time and thought into coming up with your new name. You'll want to ask for feedback from other people, but keep in mind that opinions are like noses-everybody's got one. Opinions are also subjective. If you ask your mom what she thinks of your new name but your mom knows nothing about your ideal client, her opinion is just that-an opinion. You need to ask for input from the people that actually resemble your target audience-that understand their pain, their frustrations, their wants, their lifestyle and yada, yada, yada. Those are the opinions that matter when you choose your brand name.

there is a lot of strategy in choosing colors. If you decide to do this, make sure you do some research into color psychology. Don't just pick colors because you like them or because you think your target market will like them. Do some digging, keeping in mind what you're trying to project as a company, and choose your colors accordingly.

There is risk involved. There definitely have been times when a new CEO comes in and changes everything, and it completely bombs. When you rebrand, you have to handle it very delicately with your community. The bigger your business, the more delicately you'll need to handle it. A lot of times people get attached to things being a certain way so you really have to communicate the reasons for the changes well and make it a benefit to your prospects and your existing customers.