In business, you hear people discuss building a brand and the trade-off between working in vs. working on a brand. Working in the brand is doing the actual work your company does to serve customers. Working on the brand describes time invested to develop the brand and grow it.
I think there is a valuable alternative that lives between the two: working with your brand.
By that, I mean doing work in your brand in deliberate and strategic ways to push into new situations and applications that create fresh development.
Building a Brand by Working With It
For me, working with our brand routinely yields tremendous learnings and results. Some recent examples:
- Creating a mini-brochure for a client, we reimagined and shortened the overview of what Brainzooming does. It also prompted developing a brand description with more details on how our background and development allow us to serve so many different types of clients.
- Delivering a creative leadership presentation in a new, Idea Magnets-based format provided an opportunity to see what worked and didn't. This led to fine-tuning the workshop before putting it in front of a larger audience.
- Delivering the Idea Magnets workshop the next time prompted a client to ask for much the same content represented the next day, except built around a culture change message. This prompted a better understanding of how Idea Magnets transitions between individuals, departments, and entire organizations.
- Building a PowerPoint template using our new logo suggested several tweaks we need to make before expanding the change in our look.
Those are just a few examples.
The Questions for You
How much time are your spending working with YOUR brand? How are you approaching it strategically to ensure the time yields a string of new developments for building a brand that continues to grow? – Mike Brown
