How To Gain Brand Clarity

Brand clarity is critical to building your organization’s reputation and attracting your Ideal Target so you can grow profitably. 

Earlier in the year, Amy presented about this topic at the Champions Summit at Northern Kentucky University. The topics discussed included:

• What are the key elements that contribute to brand clarity?
• What are some strategies or best practices that businesses can use to achieve brand clarity?
• How do you measure brand clarity?

Key Elements of Brand Clarity

The elements that make up brand clarity include:

1. Why Your Brand Exists – what your brand is doing for the world
2. Ideal Target – the people you most want to serve
3. Promise – what you promise to do for your Ideal Target every day
4. Secret Sauce – the blend (hence, the sauce) of 3 key differentiators that work together to make you different

Strategies to Achieve Brand Clarity

Once you have defined why your brand exists, who you serve, what your brand promises to do every day, and what makes you different, then you need to put it into action.

The first thing you need to do is ‘put it on paper’ and share it with your organization. You can’t just share it one time. Because your people are core to your brand, you need them to understand what the brand is and how they can bring it to life. It will take time and many repetitions before it takes hold.

You probably already know you need to consistently communicate your brand to the market. But how do you do this? Use the documents you created as the foundation for all your external communications. Don’t just put the documents in a folder. Use them to continually review your communications. For example, do your website and/or your social channels communicate your brand clearly? What about your sales team or call center? Are their messages aligned with the brand?

For marketing channels, you can conduct a simple audit by comparing the communications side-by-side with the brand documents. You can follow a similar approach for sales teams and call centers by interviewing individuals in these functions and comparing their answers to the brand documents. Alert – don’t expect individuals to be perfect at this, and use the information as feedback regarding how well you have communicated internally and how much people believe it.

How to Measure Brand Clarity

There is not a single or simple way to measure brand clarity. On the other hand, measuring brand clarity consistently over time will keep you more in-tune with your customers and the market.

Here are some ways to measure brand clarity:

1. Conduct qualitative research by asking customers questions on what benefits they experience by working with your organization and why they chose you over competition. Ask the same questions of each person and document their answers. Ask a variety of customers so you can compare responses. 
2. Depending on your industry or market, you might have access to third-party research reports that have perception information about you and/or your competition.  
3. If it’s a critical issue for you, you can conduct a market-wide quantitative study that gains feedback from a variety of organizations (both customers and non-customers). These are usually run by a third-party research firm. 

Regardless of how you measure your brand’s clarity, it’s important to measure consistently over time. It takes a long time for brand perceptions to shift, so you will need to be patient!