Learning Branding

Learning branding can make marketing easy. Crafting and executing a brand strategy for your practice, business, or YOU is easier than you might think.

Learning Branding for Your Business is a Good Investment

Today we are inundated with brand promises, ideas, content. Depending on whose data you believe, we’re exposed to around 5000 advertising messages per day. That’s 1,825,000 per year!

How on earth might you stand out in all of the noise?

Maybe Learning Branding Is About Reasonableness?

Many Ophthalmologists and the people who run their practices tell me they “Hired XYZ local agency because they worked with Anheuser-Busch, or Coca-Cola, or Nike, or pick your favorite mega-brand.” When I hear this, I always ask a prickly question that sometimes makes people uncomfortable.

I used to ask them what they believe their “brand” has in common with those brands, and if they believe it is harder to market what they do as compared to a well-entrenched consumer brand that spends millions, maybe even billions, of dollars are year on marketing? 

It’s a long question, I know, and it sometimes didn’t end well. So instead, I began asking, “How did you get connected with them, and how do you feel about the plan they’ve laid out for you?”

This question tends to stimulate a more interesting discussion!

Are Learning Branding and Developing Experiences Converging?

Branding is not a static exercise. It evolves as your business does, so set-it and forget it isn’t an option. The myriad interactions and touch-points a person has with your business all add up to the experience of your brand. 

The author Maya Angelou once wrote, “They won’t remember what you said, or what you did, but they’ll always remember how you made them feel.”

So before you hire that local agency that’s won all those awards (Many are paid for, BTW), look inside the four walls of your business. Remember that learning branding, begins with you and how you make people feel as they interact with your business.

What’s a Way to Get Started Learning Branding?

What you do doesn’t have to be expensive. I think “thoughtful” is a better word to describe building a brand identity for your business. I believe a great first step is an audit of how your current clients feel about your brand. You can do this easily with internal and external surveys.

Laura Ries wrote an interesting book called, “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.” Ms. Ries is the daughter of Jack Ries who wrote the classic, “22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.” I don’t agree with Ms. Ries’ take on selling, but this is a good book to help with learning branding basics.

I wrote a story about why I like the Ritz-Carlton so much, and how they create experiences. Hold the eye-roll here, I realize The Ritz is in a class of its own, but you might learn a lot that you can use in your business from this terrific organization.

We’ll go into this much more over time on this site; so please bookmark this page and stop back often.