Brand Building with Jasmine Designs

So I have just jumped off a Localised Virtual Meetup and I. AM. BUZZING!

For those of you who missed it, today I spoke to a virtual room full of Localised members about the importance of branding, touchpoints and branding consistency. I’ve transcribed the first 5 minutes below, but to check out the full video, or view the freebie downloads, head to the end of this article.

Brand building basics today, I’m going to be covering what is a brand, what makes a consistent brand, what are touch points and how to build consistency into your brand. Now your brand is more than just your logo. Your brand can be your brandmark. Plus the colours that you use, the fonts that you use, the tone of voice; whether it’s a more casual laid back, fun, loving kind of way of communicating with your customers or whether it’s quite professional and clean cut. Your brand story, so where you came from and what makes you you, what makes you different and what makes you unique to your customers? Other things like icons, illustrations, the way that you have your style of photography, your ethos and morals, as well as your frequency of engagement. How often you post on social media, what social media you do and don’t post on, these all make up your brand.

A collection of all of these elements is the silent ambassador of your brand. So it makes it recognizable, familiar, and trustworthy. So take a second. Think about the people you choose to have in your social circles or the longterm staff that you choose to have help you run your business right through to the regular takeaway pizza place or pasta place that you have, that you order from consistently. You do these things and you choose to have these people around you because you recognize them. I would like to hope so, especially if they’re family, they are familiar to you and you have had, you have trust in them, which has been built up over consistency over time. So you keep going back to that regular pizza place because they do the best pepperoni that you have ever had. And every time that you’ve tried something else, you’ve just been disappointed.

So brand consistency is the glue that helps put you back into context, but realistically, why does context matter? Have you ever lost anything and retrace your steps to find it, think keys, think that really good pen, you know, the one that actually works because all of the other ones don’t for some reason. Or try to remember the words of a song by humming them, you’re trying to get to the chorus, but you got to get through the whole verse, or you’re trying to remember the key word that’s going to re-remind you so you can find it on Spotify. Or maybe you’ve been making word associations to remember someone’s name. This happens because we tend to forget things when we’re removing them from the original context. And this is what we call context dependent memory.

Now I know you’re sitting there thinking she’s talked about brand and now we’re going into like psychology. Bear with me. Stick with me. We got this. The reason why you want to be sitting in context memory. You want your brand to sit in that process of re-remembering “okay, I need to have a gardener come in and look after my garden. Well, I remember that there was that ad that has kind of implanted itself in my memory because it’s in a contextual sense.” So if you want to become recognized and remembered in order to earn your customers trust, you must show up in a way that’s consistent. So you can be put back into context.

This can be achieved by creating consistency in your brand. This is going back to the start saying about all of your brand; consistent in your brand colors, consistent in the tone of voice consistent in the way you show up. They say consistency is key, and that the key will unlock the links between your brand and the needs of your customers by placing your brand consistently in situations where your brand is relevant.

So let’s go back to the landscaping idea. If you have a landscaping business, you’d want to be putting really beautiful visuals of gardens that you’ve done either up on Instagram or even on Pinterest, so that they are in a situation where your ideal customer is going to be taking that information and storing it in a contextually based pattern. It takes time and repetition for customers to go from being aware that you exist to remembering, trusting, and considering you, and eventually hopefully becoming a fan, which means that they’re going to come back, not only themselves, but shout your name from the roof tops to other people because they go “Oh, I know someone who does gardening here, here’s their Instagram”. So this is where touch points come in.

This Expert Article has a word limit, so if you want to keep learning, head to the link below and start about 5 mins in!

Wanna check out the video? https://youtu.be/38LaE2Vd5rI
Here for the freebies? Here is my slide deck and downloadables in PDF and Word.

Jasmine Designs
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