Are you a brand builder or business leader in need of some inspiration? 🧐
If you are looking for an intense brain blast around the value of brand thinking then this is a podcast episode for you.
A few weeks ago I sat down with the wonderful Danielle Clarke, the host of "Build Better Brands", who interviewed me on the importance of branding to modern businesses. Together we cover some juicy subjects such as:
How to define a brand with my big brand questions framework
The value brand strategy brings to a business - especially in alignment.
The importance of truth and authenticity
How you can go about branding using workshops and agile strategy
Fancy a listen? 🎧 Jump in here:
The blurb:
On this episode of Build Better Brands, Danielle Clarke is joined by Matt Davies, a Level C certified brand strategist who runs his own consultancy business, helping businesses globally understand the importance of branding.
Key takeways:
What used to really upset me was that the reality of what I was being asked to do for other companies didn’t match the internal culture, intentions and customer experience of the company. That led me to figuring out how to join the dots between what we put out and the reality of things, what the customer asked for and what the designers created.
Branding has an identity crisis. The average person might think a brand is the logo, perhaps fonts and colour palettes as well. That would mean that if we created the world’s best logo, we’d have created the world’s best brand, but that’s not how it works. The brand is way bigger than that – it’s the meaning that people attach to you and your products/services that you offer. Ultimately, they control it, not you.
To define a brand I ask four simple questions: 1) Why do you exist beyond making money? 2) Who do you exist to serve? 3) How do you show up for them and why should they care? 4) What is your offer and proposition at a high level? Once you have the high level answers to those you then need to drive those through your organisation and operationalise that thinking.
The challenge is alignment. The first bit of the process is to define the meaning you want people to attach to you, you do that by listening to your staff, your customers – most importantly, the marketplace with trend research and analysis and listening to the ambitions of the leaders. All that gives you a sense of mismatches and where things aren’t working out. Then you’ve got to define it with the leaders because they make the calls, your job as a brand consultant is to give them the reality and hold a mirror up to them. The next step is getting the employees in line with the message and finally you need to operationalise it within the organisation, getting the culture around the message both inside and outside.
