Branding
Before we get into it, I have an announcement! This edition is brought to you by my friend Aditi and her amazing candle brand, ADITI®. She was kind enough to offer subscribers of my newsletter 15% off their first order!
Claim your 15% here, use ‘CATCHALL’ at checkout, and get some awesome candles.
Hello hello,
This one’s a doozy. Branding!
Building a brand is actually incredibly easy. It’s almost instantaneous. How do people perceive you? That’s your brand. How do they perceive your product? That’s the product’s brand (and by proxy, the company brand). It’s all about perception. Even if you spend 0 active minutes trying to cultivate a brand, people will still have perceptions of what you are doing and that helps create your brand.
Building a quality brand that helps your business is difficult. It takes time, research, and close attention to detail. You can’t just wake up one morning, have a perfect cup of Stumptown coffee (pls sponsor me), and “turn on” your brand. There are many things at play which you can control and develop over time. And I’ll cover a few in this edition.
Want to see something very true yet very upsetting?
Elements of a Brand
Let’s break down what a brand is and what it’s made of. There are dozens of things I could include here and I want to focus on a few of the core elements to get you started.
Identity
At its core, the brand identity is how people perceive the brand. I’ll often describe a brand as “what people say about your company once you leave room.” And that could a be a lot of different things - quality of product, approachability, how you talk to people, visuals and graphics (more on this in a sec).
The identity is the culmination of all of these things.
Pro tip: Your brand is how your customer views your company, now how you view the company. You may view your brand a specific way and if your customer is not in alignment, that could create problems. It’s up to marketing to manage those perceptions and do what is best for the customer.
Marketers often fall into the trap of marketing to themselves. So don’t do that.
And that brings us to…
Audience
Marketers need to market to people. Specific people, fact. If your brand is targeting everyone then you are targeting no one.
For most companies, there are often 2-4 personas you can bucket your customers into. And your brand will need to speak with those people across a variety of channels covering a lot of different topics related to your product and business.
Understanding your audience takes a lot of work and the job is never done. But by putting your audience first, you can tweak your brand to best fit what your customers expect.
Value Proposition
A brand’s value proposition should encompass 3 things:
What your customer needs and cares about
What your company does really well
What your competition does really well and how you’re different
Visual Identity
Next is visual identity. What is it? It’s everything visual associated with the brand. Visual brand assets include:
Logo
Brand Style Guide
Color Palette
Font
Imagery
Here’s an awesome explanation of what visual identity is compared to the overall brand identity (99designs).
Visual identity has an intrinsic relationship with brand identity.
On the one hand, brand identity is a holistic expression of everything that makes the brand what it is. It includes visual identity along with non-visual elements such as a brand voice, copy editing guides, a mission statement, core values, etc.
At the same time, visual identity is a distinct discipline that involves a different thought process and approach from brand identity as a whole. Though there is overlap, there are usually different professions involved in each. Brand identity is overseen by marketers, and visual identity involves designers and creative directors.
In short, brand identity describes who a brand is on the inside whereas visual identity expresses who a brand is on the outside.
Let’s play a game. See how many brand names you can get from the image below.
How many did you get right? I got all of them except:
2nd row, 2nd from left
3rd row, 1st on right
4th row, 2nd from right
Help me and reply to this with the answers please lol
Personal Branding (w/ my friend Aditi)
Personal branding is a little extra complex because it’s all about your favorite topic: you.
It’s easy to overthink personal branding. “How do I act online? What voice should I take on? What kind of content should I put out that is best for my audience? Should I be funny? Serious? Sad? Please someone give me the answer!”
Alright alright, jeez, I’ll help you. Actually, Jack has a good response:
While this is challenging for many people, your personal brand should be who you are at the end of the day. I hate using the word “authentic” in marketing speak but it is very true in this context.
At first, you may see low engagement on posts that you believe are true to yourself. And that’s okay! In time, the people who actually get value will show up and find their new favorite person to follow.
And there really is no greater extent to personal branding than legally trademarking your own name. And that’s what my friend, Aditi Ramesh, has done. She has an amazing candle brand (I’ve bought quite a few of these), is a very talented marketer, and overall wonderful human being.
I asked Aditi (the human, not the brand...but is there a difference??) a few q’s to learn more:
What made you want to go full-on personal branding by trademarking your own name?
The feeling that I can truly be an operator of my own life and have agency and control over my actions and outcomes has been a dream for as long as I can remember. And I think in my own way, I've longed for ownership and am constantly questioning 'WHO IS ADITI?’ along the way. Initially, trademarking the name of my brand was a means to an end but after linking up with my trusted designers Shrishti and Anagha (from Chennai, India) designing and developing the brand was truly a journey of self exploration and internal reflection... one that I did not expect.
What was the trademarking process like? Any challenges you didn't expect?
I was encouraged by Kelly Anne Parker, Director of Corporate Gifting at Urbanstems to immediately get two things as soon as I told her about my venture in summer of 2020: Insurance and Trademark. She convinced me within a 20 minute zoom call that these two things were absolutely crucial if I wanted to explore building this brand and be taken seriously. She was right! First thing you need to do is get yourself a trustworthy, kick-ass Trademark Attorney. Mine ran a search to see if there were existing trademarks for the CLASS I was applying for. CLASS's are basically designations per vertical/industry. After the search came back clean, there were two payments made (one for the search and one for the application). I also had to provide proof of sales & my brand assets. The main thing that surprised me was the amount of time that a trademark takes to get registered. I started my trademark application one year before I got the official R! ®®®®®®®®
If you were to create a Venn diagram of the human Aditi and candle brand ADITI®, what qualities would each of the 3 areas have?
Haha, great question. First off -- We are all an orchestra full of ADITI's ready to play the instrument at hand for the audience present. Meaning, I believe we are all multiple in nature. Nor am I JUST a candle-maker, or JUST an AdTech Partner Manager or JUST a daughter... I am ALL of these things and so much more.
(A note from Connor: I saw this tweet from Aditi awhile back and so appreciated that it now has a home in the About page of this newsletter.)
One of the first questions that Shristhi and Anagha asked me when we started the branding process was... 'Describe Aditi in 3 words...'
I picked Earthy, Quirky and Skillful.
Earthy represented the account manager - the girl who does the day job , the adtech partnerships gal who is hustling for q4 budgets - she's good with people.
She might also be the same version of Aditi that gets on IG lives and tweets about candles.
Quirky represents my childhood personality. The version of Aditi that exists with friends, the one who has unfiltered feedback in good faith and knows how to make a solid joke.
She's got a quick wit and loves Fall Out Boy, Mr. Brightside by The Killers, The Black Eyed Peas (Fergie specifically). She’s a troublemaker. :) She also really likes business development, strategy and making a quick buck!
Skillful Aditi is the Maker. She's the one who is in the candle lab hustling.
She's exclusively represented in the fast timelapse content that is seen on shopaditi.com's socials. She loves to study burn time and has watched candles melt for 1000+ hours. She is a candlemaker and an ideator.
They all work together, of course. It all goes back to that orchestra. :)
The takeaway? We all have different wants and needs, we just need to listen to each one of our parts and have them work together, prioritize and execute.
It gets easier, trust me.
I hope you enjoyed Aditi’s responses as much as I did. She’s also a natural educator and is sharing her brand logo deck as well as her brand statement and other copy around identity.
I’ll be back next week for another edition.
Some questions for you:
Does this cadence work? Would bi-monthly be better?
Are there people you know that would enjoy this?
Reply to this email if you have an answer to any of these.
See ya next week.
-Connor
Additional Branding Resources and Specialists
Brianne Fleming is one of the friendliest people I've met on the internet. If you love pop culture and are interested in branding, check out her site and her podcast.
Dave Gerhardt is a fantastic follow and super knowledgeable on B2B branding.
How to build a big brand on a small budget - Google Slides. (Creative Business Company)
5 steps to build a small business brand (Everyone Hates Marketers)
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