This semester i have tried to challenge myself more with english. I use english nearly every day, mainly in social media. But i have noticed that my professional vocabulary is lacking. Therefore I´ve been practicing my professional phrases and speaking more, even if it is sometimes really uncomfortable. Recently we held a training session for international guests from Czech rebublic and Germany. We got really good feedback and the whole group was really excited. These kind of situations often remind me why it is so important to seek discomfort. Recently i started to read ”Branding in five and a half steps”, by Michael Johnson (2016). Reading this specific book was really out of my comfort zone (nearly 300 pages of discomfort). Writing and speaking in english is fine for me, but reading is still pretty slow. i have an okay grasp about branding, but i am eager to learn more.  Also i am starting a pretty big project with a brand called Lovent. We are helping to develope this clothing brand for the better. So we are basically doing a whole business overhaul in collaboration with our customer.

Step 0: Introduction

You encounter branding everywhere. Companies and organizations have carefully constructed brands that stir up emotions in us. You can´t get away from branding, even if you wanted to. Johnson (2016) shows trough out different examples  what branding can do if it is done right.  Even our beloved cultural icons have gone through re-branding, for example Santa claus. That red and white colored re-branding is something  we still see today, eventhough that specific coca-cola campaing was launched in th 1930s. It is a great example of re-branding done right.

Can great branding guarantee success?

Branding does not directly guarantee success. You might have a cool logo and a fantastic strategy. The most important part is that you stand behind your words. How can my company put things into action? You also need to have a good customer understanding, if you want to succeed (M. Johnson, 2016.)  Building a brand from the ground up is never an easy process. The project that was mentioned earlier alredy has some kind of brand, but is is not coherent at all. During next year the goal is to reach new customer groups and hopefully double their revenue. I onder to do that some serious re-branding is needed.

Step 1: Investigate

Firstly you need to understand where your brand stands in a market. If this step is dismissed you can´t grow. Or you might grow but in the wrong direction. Do you truly know what your customers are longing for? Do you know what your competitors are doing? Where does your existing brand stand in the market?

Where to start the investigation?

• Ask the right questions. For example if you are doing an inquiry for your customers, you need to know what you are looking for.
• Start with why. Why are you doing what your doing?
• Use different tools to deepen your understanding. For instance swot and a simple target market analysis can be really helpful.
• What are your brand/company core beliefs? How does this transcribe into your actions?
• Map out where you stand in the market. What are the components that make you stand out/don´t make you stand out.

Often many companies during this step might undercover that they do not really know where they stand. A company might have a imbalance between how they feel about itself and how it is seen externally (M. Johnson 2016).  Lovent is a brand mainly focused on athletic clothing. Customers during the recent years have mainly been gymnastic sport clubs. It is a pretty secure customer group, but we truly don´t have any understanding how they see our brand. This step is something that we need to go trough very throughly. We want to make everything bigger and better, but it is sometimes really hard to know where to start. Johnson (2016) also states how dissatisfaction can drive a company for the better. Dissatisfaction is the key for innovation and being creative. For example your customers might be unhappy with your products, this drives you to search for the key problems, that need to be solved.

Step 2: Strategy and narrative

Strategy and narrative glues everything together. How to narrate your brands story is a key part to understand in order to succeed. Johnson (2016) states how hard it van be to understand the difference between brand essence and brand positioning. Essence often includes the things that your brand makes your customer feel. This is when values mean the most and you attact behaviours and outcomes to them. When we talk about positioning values work as check points, but identity is far more important. When defining brand identity often mission and vision are talked about, but often they do not transcribe into action well enough. The statements need to be grounded in the day-to-day of what a brand should stand for.

With Lovent we have already briefly discussed what we really want to achieve. But our why is not clear enough yet. We do not have a proper roof concept yeat. I think we have the right motives and building components of a brand. Few weeks back we were building a proper picth, so we could convience the customer about our ideas. Lovent comes from the words love and movement. These words don´t really work in finnish, but we did not want to change the name,  We were trying really hard to come up with a statement that would be the starting point of our narrative.  This is when we came up with ”lempeästi liikkuen”. I became a starting point for our verbal basis and all the things that we want to achieve with this brand.

How to get started with strategy and narrative

• Your WHY nees to be in the centre of everything
• The 6 key questions a brand models/strategy needs to answer;
• Why are we here?
• Who are we for?
• What we do and how we do it?
• What do we value the most?
• What is our personality ?
• What makes  us different?
• Your target audience needs to be really clear
• Strategy and narrative go hand in hand

Step 2.5: Bridging the gap

This step is probably the most important one. Strategy has a direct effect on the design process. But sometimes design part might promt new ideas. Building a brand is never linear this is why you need to know how your narrative and design work together (Johnson, 2016).

Step 3: starting desing work

This is probably the step that is often assosiated with ”branding”. This is the part where ideas, colors, verbal and visual brand identity come together.

How to do it

• Start with a brief. What, when and who are you trying to reach? What are the key parts of your communication to the customer
• Collect together as many diverse ideas as possible
• aligning your design choices with strategic choices
• Dare to be creative enough

Step 4 Implement + Step 5 engage or revive

After the whole design and strategy process you need to know how to put things into action. You might have a really killer idea, but it is not implemented constantly. Building a brand manual is a great example of how you can build guidlines for this process. Engage or revive – Make sure your ideas are embedded into your company. This is vital for the development of your brand.  For example this means that you involving all your employees in the process of your brand building. In conclusion this book gave me a lot to think about. The first two step will really hel pus get started with Lovent. I will most definetly come back to this book again.