Welcome to Day 1 of the Big Brand Challenge
Today we focus on the core of branding—defining who you are. Take a good look at your business. Your customers can’t begin to understand your value proposition unless you know it yourself.
Once you’ve defined who you are you can move on to:
- Day 2 We define what we looked like
- Day 3 We create (or update) your logo
- Day 4 We outline essential marketing materials
- Day 5 We prepare for liftoff!
For Day 1, you’re going to work through answering some key questions. Let’s get started.
Who are you?
Exercise 1:
Write down five words to describe your business.
Why are you doing this?
You can’t be all things to all people. Defining a narrow set of core values is essential to defining your brand. Use words like honest, innovative, traditional, beautiful, affordable, and so on.
- _________________________________
- _________________________________
- _________________________________
- _________________________________
- _________________________________
Exercise 2:
Choose the one word that is most important from your list.
Why are you doing this?
One word is easier to remember than five. Have this word guide your brand—with the other four words to support it.
My one word is: _________________________________
Exercise 3:
Choose your business heroes.
Why are you doing this?
Write down three businesses that you really admire. These don’t have to be in your industry. These should be businesses with key value propositions you want to imitate.
- _________________________________
- _________________________________
- _________________________________
Exercise 4:
Choose a celebrity.
Why are you doing this?
You need to understand how your brand looks, feels, and behaves. Choose a celebrity that embodies your business values.
My celebrity is: _________________________________
Exercise 5:
Choose a body of water.
Why are you doing this?
Define whether you would be a bubbling brook, a still mountain lake, a water fountain, the Trevi fountain. This helps you to understand the personality type of your business and will begin to feed into the types of images you might use to represent you.
My body of water is: _________________________________
Exercise 6:
Create a mood board.
Why are you doing this?
Create a mood board (or do it on Pinterest) with the results of today. Include your words and images and make sure they work together. Do these all make you think of your first word—and hopefully your next four words too. This is a first stab at who you are and what your customers will say about you.
Board: _________________________________
Completing today’s work
Now think about your current brand. If you sent your answers in this worksheet to your customers, your employees, and your partners, would they say it matched with how they perceive you?
Did you successfully complete Day 1? Move on to Day 2!
Prefer to work through it later? Download the 2-page PDF version of Day 1 of the Big Brand Challenge.
Sara Conte is co-founder of Brand Genie, the creator of an affordable, automated brand builder for small businesses. Brand Genie automatically matches small businesses with a recommended brand personality through 12 easy questions. Small businesses can then quickly build a cohesive and well-designed Brand Kit, including a logo, business card, and website.
