 Hi. Welcome to Branding the Precursor for Design, Copy and Development. My name is Karen Demick, and I'm the founder of Iconosense. How many of you here have thought about a brand for your business? About 50%. How many of you have thought about a brand for your business? Branding is the expression of the essence of a business. It's about expressing that essence in a way that lets people become part of your world. Your products and services need to let your customers actually experience that world when they use them. For instance, when you play with Lego, you feel creative. When you put on your Nike gear, you feel like an athlete or a competitor. When you're reading a Dan Brown novel like The Da Vinci Code, you feel like you're on a quest for the truth. You feel like a rebel when you're riding a Harley. And you feel like you're part of a community when you get into WordPress. That is what I mean by the essence of a business. It's that one thing that is at the heart of every business. That is what branding is about. Branding is a strategy. You use it to express your uniqueness, your point of view, and what you stand for. Branding is not a colour scheme in a logo, consistently placing your logo everywhere that it should go. And it's also not just a consistent look and feel to all the blog posts that you have. Instead, your graphic design needs to support and express your brand. But if you have no brand behind it, nothing your customer can associate with your logo, then it's about as useful as putting a bandaid on a broken leg. So why brand? Well, it helps you attract and keep your ideal clients. It helps your clients feel confident enough to spend money with you. It helps them know what to expect from you. It helps them recognise your work when they see it elsewhere like they're not expecting to, like a guest blog post or an interview on a podcast. And it helps them tell others about you and refer business to you because they know what you stand for and they know what your business is about so they know how to tell others about you. Your brand also helps you stand out in your market and show your uniqueness. It makes design, product development, marketing, hiring and just about everything else about business easier because once you know what fits inside the box that is defined by your brand, you know what doesn't fit inside. So if an opportunity comes along, you can see very quickly whether it fits with your brand and therefore you want to take advantage of it or whether it doesn't fit with your brand and you can let it go. A brand keeps everything consistent so there's no nasty surprises for your clients at the end of the day. You don't need to start from scratch. In fact, it's better if you don't. Instead, you want to use the power of a brand personality to underpin your brand. We've been telling stories for hundreds of years. The ones that stand the test of time are the stories that have characters with a single overriding personality trait. For example, the fairy godmother is the magician. Prince Charming is the hero or warrior. Robin Hood is the rebel. Sherlock Holmes the detective or seeker. Yoda is the sage. We call these traits brand personalities because they exist in everyone's subconscious in our books and movies in every part of our culture. There are 14 different brand personalities. They provide a guiding box that you can define your unique brand within. They help your brand stay on track and they allow your customers to appeal to your customers at the subconscious level because they've been hearing about these traits since they were children in all their stories. The 14 brand personalities are the magician, the regular guy girl, the sage, the rebel, the ruler, the innocent, the seeker, the lover, the caregiver, the warrior, the jester, preserver, creator and explorer. I will give you the download link for the slides at the end. Or, highly successful brands have a single brand personality behind them, whether it's a business brand or a personal brand. For example, Nike or a warrior brand, Apple, an innocent brand, Lego, creator, Virgin, jester brand, Harley Davidson, a rebel brand, Whole Foods, an innocent brand. And on the personal side, Dan Brown, who wrote the Da Vinci Code, Seeker brand, Malcolm Gladwell, a sage brand, Dan Araleigh, another sage brand, Gary Vaynerchuk, a warrior brand, Seth Godin, a creator brand, Jay Leno, a jester brand. As you can see, we've got multiple different brands here, all with the same brand personality, yet you'd never mistake one for the other because they've used this brand personality as a guiding box that they then defined their unique brand within. So what we're going to do is have a really in-depth look, a single brand that follows the regular guy girl brand personality. Now this brand is something that every single person in this room knows. WordPress. So what we're going to do is look at the characteristics for a regular guy girl brand, and then we're going to look at what it isn't, so you know where the boundaries for a regular guy girl brand lie. Regular guy girl brands, it's all about community, connection, inclusiveness. It's about fitting in with everyone and being comfortable. It's the guy or girl next door, one big, friendly, welcoming family. They're accessible, approachable, humble, and this comes across in a really big way when you talk to some of the highly successful entrepreneurs in the WordPress space. Regular guy girls are normal, commonplace and mainstream. They're personal, everyday joes who are genuinely down to earth. They're often uniform and they conform to a standard. It's similar to things you know which makes it very easy to use. It's shareable and excels with strength and collaboration. Think open source. There's an attitude of helping the little guy. If I can do it, you can do it because the underlying premises, we're all the same. Did you recognize WordPress and those characteristics? Let's have a look at Miami's code of conduct, which I'm sure you've all read. Our community should be truly open to everyone. Friendly, safe, welcoming environment for all. Being a good WordPress citizen and here's how you do it. Increase open source citizenship. Ensure our community is welcoming, friendly, and encourages all participants to contribute. Be considerate, respectful, collaborative. Can you see those regular guy girl characteristics coming across in those statements? Another regular guy girl brand you may or may not have heard of, Smart Passive Income from Pat Flynn. It's very community driven. He makes a big point of saying how he's just like you and that's why you should listen to him, instead of stressing how successful he is like others in his market do. He has pictures of his family all over his website and he says they're the reason he does what he does. He quite often says, just like you, I have a family. His content's very easy to understand, whatever level you're at. It's very accessible and it comes in just about every format you can possibly imagine. In his main podcast he tries to convey that he's a normal, everyday down to earth kind of guy. He has a unique comment about him in every intro so you feel like you get to know him just a little better with every episode. When he goes to a conference he goes out and he meets people and talks to them instead of locking himself away with the other speakers. Another regular guy you might have heard of, Gap Clothing. They opened in 1969 to be the store for jeans-loving Americans. Their stated mission is to be the world's favourite for American style, i.e. the look of the community. They're the norm for jeans and a t-shirt and their ads like this one tend to feature groups of people all dressed either the same or in a very similar way. Even popular culture sees Gap Clothing as a regular guy-girl brand. In an episode of Third Rock from the Sun, when they're all trying to fit in with us humans, they all go to Gap by white sneakers, blue jeans, white t-shirts and sweaters just so they can look normal. So what isn't regular guy-girl so you know where the boundaries lie? It isn't exclusive, it isn't intellectually challenging and you're thinking end-user here. It isn't complicated, inaccessible, secretive, expensive, competitive. What would happen if wordpress went against or wordcamps went against their regular guy-girl brand? Well I was at a word camp recently and somebody suggested promotion techniques for some of the sponsors. What they suggested was that a sponsor could reserve the first three or four rows of every session just for their clients. How would that make you feel? To me it would be unwordpress-like and I'd probably make a point of actually avoiding that sponsor. So what does it mean for a regular guy-girl, if you have a regular guy-girl brand, what does it mean when it comes to design? Well you want to go for a boxed theme because that shows inclusiveness and the idea of sticking within the boundaries. A dark website background shows that anyone not within your website is left in the dark rather than being within the community and as you can see Pat Flynn does this really well. You want to use blocky features for the site, nothing delicate, intricate or complex, keep it normal. Solid colours rather than patterns or anything fussy. You want welcoming, friendly smiles so anytime you have pictures keep them with smiles on, keep the body language open, welcoming and inclusive. You want colours that are friendly and welcoming so red screens, blues, yellows, anything you see in your everyday locality and again remember this will differ from country to country so bear that in mind with your clients. You want lots of personal pictures and you want to have majority of pictures with more than one person in them to show that group and community aspects to it. You want to keep things normal, normal and approachable and none of the bells and whistles and nothing too fancy. So what about logos? Well the whole point of regular guy girl is to show that inclusive feel so give the logo a defined boundary. As you can see wordpress has a circle around it, gap has a box around it, smart passive income is on a licence tax so it essentially has a box around it and because he's normal like you and me and oops he forgot that bit he pinned them on later. So what about development? We'll have a welcome page instead of a start here page, show that welcoming. Keep the navigation simple, the site structure and the site functionality simple make it easy to use, easy to follow more so than most other brand personalities. You want to avoid the latest bells and whistles, it's not about being the latest thing, it's about being normal. You want to include comments so that people can chat and you want to include social links for the same reason. Preferably have both because regular guy girl brand is about that community so make it accessible. You also want to keep everything handicap accessible because you don't want to exclude anyone because that again goes against the brand. So look up the A11y standards, there was a really good talk on this at wordpress tamper if you want to look it up on wordpress.tv. So how about products and services? Well again you want to have that connection so have your products and services connect people. So have a forum for your plug-in business instead of just a ticketing system. Facilitate sharing so make sure you have a free version of your plug-in they can share on the repo. You want to include all of your customers so if you're doing a live event like this, a word camp and you're live streaming it, make sure you include those on the live stream. What about sales and marketing? Well you motivate customers to buy a regular guy girl brand by stressing their need to fit in. Tell them about the new friends they'll make. Show them how your product or service will help them look after their family. You want to show a huge amount of social proof and this is the brand personality where that's the most important because people want to fit in and be like others so they need to know what other people are doing. So you have to show that social proof. You want to highlight the community building aspects like a forum. Gamification is a great way to retain customers with a regular guy girl brand. The way to implement that is to do karma points. So if they help someone in your forum or they refer you business, give them karma points. So what do you need to avoid with a regular guy girl brand? You need to avoid exclusive offers and yes I mean the word exclusive. You want to avoid elite groups, premium offerings, secret underground events, complicated sales processes with lots of options, keep it simple. Gamification with competition like leaderboards. So what happens when you break a brand? You're essentially saying to your customer that no, we don't stand for what you thought we stood for. You're wrong and that breaks the trust and we all know trust comes before a sale. In 2010 Gap broke their regular guy girl brand with a redesigned logo. The response was unanimously negative, plastered all the way across the net. And people just told them what they thought of it in no uncertain terms. It got so bad that people were submitting their own logo redesigns. Parody sites were coming up with joke designs and after six days Gap caved and brought the old logo back. While this event clearly took people by surprise especially with just how intense the debate was, if you look at it from a regular guy girl branding point of view you can easily see exactly what went wrong. The logo as you can see here went from having a box around the gap to Gap being outside of the box which shows that fitting in wasn't important to them anymore. The box went from a solid colour to a diagonal gradient making it more complicated. And the box went from being nice and big to very small that shows that being included isn't important and is significantly less important to Gap. Interestingly enough six years down the line their new logo now looks like this. First having a basic understanding of what drives a regular guy girl brand could have prevented this. Now obviously with the business of size of yours, mine and even probably our clients the outcry isn't going to be anywhere near as bad but the result of the business is still the same. It's still that loss of trust which will result in loss of sales. As with any personality, shadow aspects appear in a dark side. For the regular guy girl and you need to watch out for these, the dark side for a regular guy girl centres around abuse. Now the dark side is the one thing that will cause bad publicity for a brand and it will ultimately also be the downfall of a brand's culture. So with the regular guy girl you get victims who are willing to be abused just to stay in the community instead of being excluded. You get the lynch mobs and the bullies who are outing and abusing people who don't like toe the company line or fit in with the community to find values and then you get prostitutes who are turning a blind eye to the abuse or joining the lynch mob. So how does this relate to the WordPress community? Well I'm going to put this out here to you. Do you see it in an ad community? And if so, what can we do to stop it? Some food for thought. Like with every point of view there are pros and cons. It's what makes for lively discussion. It's what creates fanatics and diehards like us here spending our weekend at a word camp. As freelancers every single person in this room makes money from a business either their own or their agencies. So why are we so against paid themes and plugins as a community? Well let's look at it from a regular guy girl point of view. What do we call those paid themes and plugins? Premium. Maybe if we hadn't called it that and we called it something else we would have avoided at least some of the turmoil around paid themes and plugins. So in summary as you've seen branding isn't about a logo and graphic design it's about expressing that essence of the business. All the best brands have a single brand personality behind them and it is a critical component to the success of a brand because it helps with the customer experience, the business decisions, the marketing and sales tactics and it gives you a guide for design and development. So how many of you are now wondering if you should perhaps have a brand for your business? Any questions? Oh and I was going to give you the slides. I'm afraid I don't have it on here. The slides are at Iconocents.com and then forward slash WCMIA hyphen 2016 hyphen slides. Start again. The website name Iconocents.com is up there and then slash WCMIA word camp Miami and hyphen 2016 hyphen slides. Okay so when it comes to a business do you want to figure out the brand personality before you name the business? I would say yes that's one of the first things I think of because you especially freelance business it's got to reflect off you so there's some brand personalities you may not be able to pull off because it's not part of your personality and there's some that fit you better. So you need to examine that and then you need to examine what are your clients looking for? Do they want knowledge? Do they want a community? Do they want to feel like they're achieving something? All that sort of stuff. Pull all of that information in. Come up with a brand personality and then start working out names that fit with that brand personality because you want everything to tie in. Everything has to tie in with that branding to keep that message consistent. So how do you find more resources on the other different personality types? Well I have a quiz on my website that goes into a little bit about each of the different brand personalities so you could have a look there. Anyone else? Well Apple is an innocent and when you think about an innocent brand it's fresh, vibrant, you think child and then Apple is pretty much a perfect representation of that.