If you've ever been part of a new company or involved in a rebranding process, you almost certainly know how easy it can be to get lost in all the options. The reason is simple: a branding/rebranding is all about answering the question "who do we want to be?" and there are a near infinite number of possibilities for how to address that. What Jon Taffer reminds us is that we can dream big with our head in the clouds when we are creating our branding, but we ultimately have to keep our feet on the ground because our "brand message" doesn't mean anything if our customers don't see it, understand it, and believe it. They are ultimately the people the decide if the way we have branded our company is accurate or not, not us.
Try asking yourself these straightforward questions to evaluate how well your branding is working:
- What am I/what is our company trying to say with our branding?
- Is there a very small number of clear messages our branding is trying to get across about us or there so many they may be confusing or muddled?
- How are we backing up these claims on a regular basis? What policies/procedures/standards are in place to ensure this?
- How are we measuring our customers' opinions of us? Are we asking them questions that tease out how they feel about our branding? (for example, asking them on a survey to check the boxes next to words that could describe our company to see which align with our official branding?
- How well do we think our performance or our products "live up to" our branding?
- And most importantly, how well do our customers think our performance or our products "live up to" our branding?
