Kibbe on Marketing: Ironing out Your Branding

I had the great pleasure of attending a brand development workshop at Savvy Workshop, a printing and marketing firm in Manchester, N.H., on Oct. 14. The attendees ranged from relative newbies like me looking to learn some basics to longtime pros wanting to raise the bar. I want share with you three pieces of information I learned at the workshop.

What is Branding?

Presenters Laurie Peyser and Lisa Adamaitis of Savvy Workshop, along with owner Lisa Landry, said branding is a bit amorphous. They said branding is “love” -  “the way a company makes you feel, the perceived value and the loyalty it instills in you.”

To me, that means branding is the persona of the company. Not only is it what you see (e.g. logo, tagline, etc.), it’s what you don’t see – namely, the corporate culture that inspires employees to continue the message.

The Savvy pros said one of the keys to building a brand is conveying your company’s “distinctive,” “valued” and “tablestakes” attributes. Briefly, this means the values that your company wishes to communicate, the values that build brand loyalty with customers, and the values that those customers are asking from you.

For me, I’m hoping as you read these blogs you’ll get my experience and integrity wrapped up in my passion for writing. In fact, I’m testing out taglines of “Writing is Our Passion” and “Why Write When You Don’t Have To?” or even “Creativity To Go.” (Send me an email and let me know what you think.)

Consistency

One of the biggest signs of both good and bad branding is consistency. Everything from the colors used in the logo to the font used on company stationery – not to mention how employees act during downtime on a business trip – must remain unified and must reflect the image the company is trying to portray.

I’ll use fonts for a basic example. There’s an old but good rule-of-thumb from the media world that says you should never have more than three different fonts in any of your communications. Personally, I think two is plenty if they are distinctive from each other. It might seem obvious, but using the same font face or two in all your company communications is essential to basic branding. With the myriad of fonts available you might be tempted to play around with them (how fun is it to have “Jokerman” with “Chiller?”) but don’t. Rather play to your heart’s content BEFORE you hang your shingle out there.

I know at some point I’ll have to match up the font on the business card with the brochure for the boutique writing consultancy I’m creating. Things have grown like wildfire in the last few months, leading to the cards having been made well before the brochure. That and I’m stuck with a box of cards I’m not yet ready to throw away.

Here’s another tip from the newspaper world – choose a typeface that has several minor variations – bold, condensed, italic, etc. That way you’ll look consistent but have some play.

Continuous improvement

Another concept Savvy brought up was the idea of branding always being a work in progress. That’s not to say a company is changing their branding frequently, quite the contrary. It means continually testing the current brand to see if the message received is the one you mean to send.

Times change and your company changes. Is it time for your branding to change to match your current and future direction? What are your customers saying about your company? Are all these concepts working concert with one another?

Take Savvy itself. Landry said the firm’s original focus was largely on short-run printing. Over the past few years, however, the company has evolved to offer a much more comprehensive menu of services that includes marketing, Web design and, yes, brand development. Hence, the firm evolved from Savvy Printing to Savvy Workshop to give a better sense of the services under the Savvy umbrella.

The workshop concluded with a hands-on exercise to come up with some branding basics for a terrific nonprofit, Girls At Work, www.girlswork.org, which seeks to empower at-risk girls and women through the use of power tools. Founded by Elaine Hamel, a contractor, this is a wonderful and worthy organization that deserves your attention.

For more about this branding workshop and other information, visit Savvy Workshop at www.SavvyWorkshop.com.


Cindy Kibbe, an editor for a New England business publication for nearly a decade, can be reached at cindykibbe@comcast.net.