If 2020 has taught us one thing – it’s that anything can happen, and pretty much overnight too.
This is why it’s vitally important that you review your brand on a regular basis.
Because anything really could happen and the last thing you want is to be left behind while everyone else is refocusing and recharging their businesses in a slightly different direction.
Here are some of the core brand areas you need to be reviewing on a regular basis:
Messaging
Your brand is constantly evolving, which means every element that makes up your brand are evolving too – your message being one of those. This is a big one, because depending on what your core brand message is, it could become defunct and inappropriate pretty quickly. I would recommend reviewing your brand’s message on a regular basis – ideally every quarter. Or when a monumental world event happens, like Covid19, Black Lives Matter etc.
Taglines
A lot of the big, well known brands like using tag lines, but even some of those can become redundant in uncertain times. Take KFC as an example – their tagline would normally be ‘It’s finger lickin’ good’. If they’d kept that in place this year, it would have been inappropriate, so of course they had to change it and they’ve now blurred out ‘Finger Lickin’. So if you use tag lines within your marketing, make sure it’s appropriate and if it isn’t, review it and adapt it.
Ideal Clients
This is another big area to review on a regular basis because your ideal clients can change. In my business’ lifetime to date (over 5.5 years), my ideal client has changed 4 times. Luckily they haven’t changed in a dramatic way, more so the stage of business that they’re at.
There are so many elements that make up who your ideal client is for you, and these can change at any given challenging moment. It could be their values change, their priorities, their problems, needs and desires change. So it’s always a good idea to review your ideal clients and really step into their shoes and think about how they are feeling, what are they thinking and how you can help them.
It could even be that who you thought was your ideal client no longer is, and actually your whole brand needs to refocus to accommodate a new ideal client for you. If this is the case, that’s okay. You just need to get clear on who your ideal client is and potentially adapt your current services/products or create new ones to suit.
Marketing
Marketing and branding do gel together quite a lot and marketing essentially becomes the vehicle for helping you get your brand message out there to your ideal clients. So reviewing your marketing efforts on a regular basis is also key, looking at what is working, what isn’t working, how you can simplify/enhance the process to make more of an impact.
Your Brand’s Mission
This is another core area of your brand not to be overlooked. It’s important to look at your brand mission from two perspectives:
1. Does it personally compel you? Especially if you are a personal brand because your mission will be tied to you personally so you want to be making sure your mission compels you. Your mission needs to be front of mind all the time because it’s a reminder to you about what you are here to do, who you want to help and why.
2. Is it inclusive? The Black Lives Matter movement has taught us this year that we need to stop, listen, review and be open to our subconscious flaws. So I really want you to ask yourself whether your brand mission is inclusive.
Review your brand as part of your CEO routine.
I don’t know about you, but I love routine and I’m sure I read somewhere that in order to introduce a new ‘habit’ into your routine, the easiest way to do that is to anchor it onto an already in place habit. For example, if part of your daily routine is putting your make up on in front of the mirror and you want to improve your health, why not do 5-10 squats at the same time. You can do this with your regular brand review too, and no I don’t mean squat while you review your brand, though if you want to do that too – then go right ahead 🙂
It could be you already set time aside each quarter to work on your goals for the next quarter, so can you add on another 30 mins to review your brand.
Or it could be if you have a CEO day each week in your business, why not anchor in time to review your brand and the above elements to make sure everything is in alignment.
I would love to know from you – will you review your brand going forwards, if you haven’t been already and how can you build this into your routine?
