I’m about to teach you how to define your very own brand attributes. This branding exercise is as simple as it gets. Just make a list of adjectives you’d like your audience to use when talking about your brand. But let’s be honest, if you were good with words, you’d be writing spicy romance novels or churning out rap albums right now.
I know your brand is “good” and “beautiful”, just like you, buttercup—Love you! But we want our audience to recognize our brand, our team to identify with it, our partners to get it, and everyone to share a common language when they talk about it. That means we need to dig a little deeper. My friend and design legend Jose Caballer taught me how to do it efficiently while having fun.
By the end of this exercise, you will have found the perfect words to describe your brand personality, and as a bonus, watch a brand statement magically emerge from the word cloud and use it immediately to communicate the essence of your brand to your team and partners.
We start with a brainstorming session. Quantity over quality. We will have time to refine and prioritize our list later. The first goal is to come up with as many adjectives as we can to describe our brand in relation to six aspects:
- Culture: How would your community describe you?
- Customers: How would you describe your Customers?
- Voice: How do you sound to others?
- Feeling: How do people feel after interacting with you?
- Impact: What tangible impact do you deliver? How do people and systems change after interacting with you?
- Edge: What makes you radically different?
The exercise should be aspirational, so use positive words and adjectives.
The most important thing is to be as specific as you can—if it’s ‘good’, explain how it is good. Is it healthy, or is it sustainable? If it’s ‘simple’, how is it simple? Is it frictionless or focused? Besides that, everything goes: bananas, kick-ass, drip, fire, lit—You get the gist.
Facilitators, buckle up – this exercise is fast-paced and requires you to stay light on your feet. Help others break down big concepts into more granular and specific definitions, and be prepared to break ties later in the prioritization phase. It’s vital that no debates ensue, or you risk going on forever, and going overtime is the number one facilitation sin. Remember what we learned from Ted’s sad facilitation story (or go read it again if you need to) and, before you begin, remind everyone of the principles and rules of ideative efficacy.
Here’s how to do it:
- For a few minutes, participants brainstorm words for the culture category. The facilitator writes all words on the whiteboard as they come up.
- Repeat for each category. Brainstorm words to describe your customers, voice, feeling, impact, and edge.
- Spend a few minutes with the team to narrow down the top five words from the lists you’ve created.
- Finally, take a few minutes to identify the most important word in each category from your shortlist.
Now you have six attributes that clearly and comprehensively describe your brand personality. Your core team came up with them collaboratively, so you know they’re authentic as they were in your brand’s DNA before you even realized it.
Include them in your brand guidelines (we’ll discuss brand guidelines later) and share them widely to foster a sense of purpose and ownership. Use them to align your language and messaging that will make your brand more relatable, appealing, and easier to recognize and remember.
Your brand attributes are a major piece of your brand positioning puzzle, but we’re not done here yet.
Create your prototype brand statement
Fill the template below with the brand attributes you defined:
[Your Brand] provides [Product/Service/Category] to [Customers] customers in a [Culture] way with a [Voice] voice. Helping them feel [Feeling] and [Impact].
Here’s a great example from one of my clients:
Traackr (brand) provides the most complete and flexible end-to-end influencer marketing platform (category) to savvy (customers) customers in an insightful (Culture) way with a vibrant (voice) voice. Helping them feel empowered (feeling) and earn more love from their audiences (impact).
It may not win a Pulitzer, but with a few simple tweaks, you can improve specificity and flow. For example, replace “customers” with a catch-all definition of your customer segments from the persona exercise and replace connector words in the template to better suit your brand attributes.
If you’ve been paying attention, you might have noticed that the impact in my client’s example (Earning more love from their audiences) is not a single word nor an adjective. This is completely fine. In hindsight, we could have used the adjectives ‘Beloved’, ‘Engaging’, or ‘Heart-winning’, but I couldn’t come up with them on the spot to help the team. That’s fine; you don’t want to waste precious time on formalities while brainstorming, because you need to finish on time and capture every idea without inadvertently giving more importance to one over the other. Also, you want to be specific, which means capturing exactly what the team means, if that takes a short sentence rather than a single word, go for it. You can always, and should, refine later.
This brand statement will guide you as you develop more refined and official language for your name and tagline (if you don’t already have them, we’ll discuss creating them soon), your brand style guide, and all your brand collaterals and marketing materials. Start using it immediately with your extended team. You’ll find it especially useful when talking to your creative partners.
You’re welcome.