 What I want you to know is that your brand is not your logo. Welcome to the We Are Slam Show, where we share marketing agency insights, best practices and ideas to help your business grow. My name is Tyler Kelly, and I am the co-founder of Slam Agency, a full service digital marketing agency based out of St. Louis, Missouri, our East Coast operation in Miami, Florida. And I am super happy to be with you today. Today I wanna talk to you a little bit about, I wanna go back, back, back and talk to you about what is a brand? And as a marketing director, the things that you need to understand when it comes to branding. What makes this powerful experience that people can connect with, that can create movements, that can build momentum? What is this? What is this thing that we call branding? You know, a lot of times a novice will say, well, you know, the brand is, it's what you see. It's the logo, it's the colors, it's the fonts. It's the brand guidelines. It's this visual identity. And you know, this visual identity has come well after you've established what is the actual brand. It's the visual representation of everything that the brand encompasses, right? As a marketing agency owner, I can tell you that your brand is one of your most important assets. And I believe this is something that has tangible value and here's why. A strong brand will increase your market share. It will increase your revenue. It will decrease price sensitivity with your audience, with your marketing. It will give you the benefit of the doubt. A strong brand will do these things. It will increase customer loyalty. It will give you more leverage with your suppliers, with your service providers. It will give you the capacity to mobilize your organization and get people rallying and pursuing a purpose. It will allow you to retain quality employees. And internally, you know, it's something that will give you clarity of vision. It will give you a clear filter by which to make decisions. These are all the things that a brand can do. And so what I want you to know is that your brand is not your logo, okay? When I think of a brand, I think of the promise that you make to your customers and the promise that you can keep with your customers, okay? And then all the names, the symbols, the logos, the colors, the fonts, they are all a way of representing this brand visually and in action, okay? But they all relate back to this promise. So when you think of the word brand, just X that out and replace it with the word promise, okay? What is the promise that you're making to your customers? And if this isn't something that you've necessarily thought of, then today's the day to start thinking about it. So how do I want you to think about it? Well, if you're a marketing director and you're thinking about how do I market my product or service? Or if you're a founder and owner of a company and you're thinking about how do I grow my customer base? Well, there's three things that you need to think about when you think about the promise that you're making to your customers. The first is, what is your organizational purpose? This is a fancy way of saying, why do we exist? Why are we here? Why does it matter to my market? Why does it matter to my customers? What is your purpose? You know, Simon Sinek said that people don't buy what you do, but they buy why you do it. So why are you here? What is the difference that you're trying to make in the world? What is the impact that you're gonna have in the world once you've seen your mission accomplish your vision? What is this impact? That's your purpose, that's your organizational purpose. It starts with your why, your personal why, and then it transforms, it translates into your organizational why. Why do you exist? If you're an owner, you should be able to say this. You should say, okay, this is why we're here. This is why we exist in the world. This is the difference that we're trying to make. If you're a marketing director and you work for a corporation and organization, then you gotta go back. You gotta go back in time and figure out why are we here? What purpose are we serving? What is our organizational purpose? You know, a lot of times, if you're at a corporation, sometimes that mission statement isn't very telling. It's pretty vague. It's just trying to hit all these different, it's trying to check off all these boxes. And it's not necessarily telling you what was that original founder's vision? What was the difference they're trying to make in the world? So you gotta go back. You gotta do some interviews, talk with people, try to figure this out. If the founders are long gone, then maybe it's a matter of, okay, the people that are here, the people that are driving this ship, what's their purpose? How can we be an influence in our world? What is it that we're trying to accomplish? How do we make the world a better place through our product or service? This is your organizational purpose. The number one thing in determining your promise is understanding your organizational purpose. The second thing that you have to think about is your value proposition, okay? I want you to think about these as concentric circles. So the first is your organizational purpose. The second is your value proposition. What is the value that you're bringing to the customer? What is the value that you're bringing to your clients? You know, when we think about value, we always think about benefits. We never think about features. You know, think of an umbrella. An umbrella, you know, it might be made of, might have a nice wood handle and it might be made out of cloth and all of these things. Those are the features. The benefits, the results that I'm going to achieve if I buy your umbrella is that, number one, it's gonna keep me dry. It's not gonna rain on my head. Number two, if I use it in the summertime, then it's gonna shield me from the sun rays, right? So those are the benefits. Those are the results that I get from using that umbrella. So the question is when I think of value proposition for you, something that you should think about is what are the results that my product or service provide? That's your value proposition. And then number three is how am I different from my competition in a way that makes sense to my customers? We call this relevant differentiation. What is it in my market that differentiates me from all the other options available to the same customers? What is it? How am I different? When you think about this, you think about this as the third concentric circle. The third thing that you gotta think about in developing this promise that you can make to customers. The first is your organizational purpose. It's why you exist. The second is what's important to your customers, that value proposition. And the third, the third is how am I differentiating myself in the marketplace? Where these three circles converge, you have the sweet spot. That sweet spot is the beginning of your brand promise. The sweet spot is the promise that you make to your customers in that moment. Organizational purpose, what's important to the customer, the value proposition. And number three, relevant differentiation. Or what am I providing that my competitors aren't providing? These three things together create, in my opinion, the brand promise. And you can articulate this in the way that only my brand can do this for you. Only my brand can provide this relevant, differentiated benefit for my target customer. That's how you articulate your brand promise. And that is the beginning. It's the foundation of everything that comes after it. Your messaging, your voice, your identity, your visual identity. That brand promise is where the foundation starts. And it's what develops a strong brand, a brand that will create movements, that will create momentum, that will bring in customers. You know, most business owners think that their customers choose them because of either like they have the best quality, it's their features, it's their price, it's their customer service. But when you ask your customers why they choose you, it's usually none of these things. And so what's that mean? It means that if you think that your customers choose you for the superior quality or the features or your price or something like that, then you're wrong. And you really have no idea why your customers are choosing to do business with you. The answer to this question, it's all wrapped up in this brand question. It's in this promise. So if you're clueless, if you don't know where to start, ask your customers, okay? Ask your customers why have they selected you? Why are they doing business with you? What do they see that you don't necessarily see? And you might have some insight into this thing that we call the brand promise. And then go back to the drawing board and say to yourself, why is it that we exist? Why are we here? What's the difference that we're trying to make in the world? What's the difference in the value that we're trying to bring to our customers and that we do bring to our customers? Remember the brand promise is a promise that you can keep. So what are those values? What are those results that you bring to your customers? What are those after effects? And then finally, how are you different? These are the questions that you need to be asking. If this all sounds like rocket science to you, trust me, it's not rocket science, but sometimes it's easier to bring somebody in from the outside to help you kind of define these things, articulate them, put them into writing and then inculturate them into the organization. All right? So if you're thinking to yourself, yeah, I really do need help with that and that's something that I could really see a company like SLAM coming in and helping us kind of determine like, what is this strong brand foundation, this promise that we make to our customers and then how does that translate into a visual identity messaging that will make an impact. Do me a favor, go to SLAMagency.com and click on the free consultation button and that will connect you directly to me and if we can help, we'll be the first to let you know. Thank you for tuning in. If you've enjoyed this show, always subscribe, rate and review and leave me a comment, leave me a message. I look forward to hearing from you and how you benefit each week. Thank you for tuning in. I'll see you next week. Thanks for watching. If you like what you just watched, subscribe, then hit that bell. You'll be the first to be notified when new content goes live. After that, you can watch more videos from SLAMagency. 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