Partner Plus Brand Basics Session 3 Workbook

A Cisco Partner Plus Resource

Part 3: Bringing YourBrand to Life

BRAnd BAsiCs: Building YouR Business on A PoweRful PRomise And engAging exPeRienCe

Brand Basics Parts 1 and 2 gave you a foundation to build on, explaining what brand is, why it’s valuable, and how to begin developing your own brand strategy. Part 3: Bringing Your Brand to life will help you turn your brand promise into tangible connections with your customers. You’ll learn about brand identity, messaging and tone of voice, as well as how to begin building a brand culture within your company. finally, we’ll give you some tips for effectively activating your brand.

Brand Identity

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Brand Basics Part 3: Bringing Your Brand to Life / A Cisco Partner Plus Resource

As you’ve learned in the previous Brand Basics sections, brand is a complex concept, and arriving at your own brand promise takes time and effort. You may not be there yet, but it’s still worth considering what to do with your brand strategy once you have it. Let’s begin by looking at the most visible manifestation of any brand – the brand identity.

Brand identity consists of five key ingredients: logo, color palette, typography, imagery and graphic elements. We’ll talk about each in more

detail, but it’s important to understand that they all work together to convey an image of your brand. In general, the more consistently you apply these components to your brand communications, the more recognizable your company will be and the more clear an understanding of your promise you will pass along to your customer.

As you will see, brand design is not purely subjective – it is less about what you like than about communicating what your brand is like. Understanding that is the key to understanding strategy-based brand design.

in this seCtion You will leARn:

• whAt ComPonents mAke uP A BRAnd identitY

• the imPoRtAnCe of eACh element of An identitY sYstem

• how to Begin develoPing oR evolving YouR own identitY

BrAnd IdentItY

5


LOGO COLOR

TYPOGRAPHY

ImAGeRY

GRAPHICeLemeNTS

the Five Components of Brand Identity

BRANDIDeNTITY


Most of the logos we admire more often than not are part of a well-designed system.”1

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Logo

If your brand is who you are – what you stand for, what you promise and how you deliver it – then your brand identity is what you look like and how you present yourself. Your logo is the most prominent and recognizable part of that presentation – it is the face of your brand.

Logos come in all shapes and sizes. they usually contain the name of the company and some sort of associated icon or symbol. The best logos express some fundamental aspect of a brand’s positioning – the vision or the promise. It may seem farfetched to think about your logo expressing your strategy, but that’s what good designers do – they understand what you are trying to say through your design brief, and translate it into visual language.

For example, a bold serif font associated with a columned building icon might feel more classic and serious than a playful script font associated with a heart icon.

A logotype in all capital letters might feel more authoritative than one in all lower case, and a bright red logo may appear more active than a dark blue logo. The designer uses all the tools in their toolbox – color, typeface, symbols, etc. – to paint a picture of your brand.

Many logos are stand-alone word marks, meaning they consist only of a type treatment of the company’s name.

Most logos contain both a word mark and an associated symbol that represents some aspect of the brand.

Sometimes a brand becomes so well know that a word mark is no longer needed.

Sometimes, the exception proves the rule. Youth-oriented brands like MtV purposefully use very flexible brand identity systems. This unconventional approach expresses their challenger brand strategies. Freestyle approaches to logo usage are beginning to emerge in more “serious” categories as well – Google is one well-known example. However, this is a high-risk approach to brand identity, and requires either a significant marketing budget or a dedicated customer base to support it.

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Color and Typography

Color is one of the most powerful tools in a designer’s arsenal, and alongside your logo is often the component of your brand that customers are most likely to remember. the right color or colors can communicate a lot about your brand because colors have longstanding associations in our culture.

For example, blue is associated with safety, calmness, security and trust, so insurance and medical companies often use this color in their brands. Red is associated with emotion and action, so it’s often embraced by retail brands and for calls to action across all types of brands. Just think – how many red “Sale!” signs have you seen in your life?

A color’s meaning is not fixed, however, and green is a good example of this. traditionally associated with growth and plenty, for many years green was

used by food brands quite literally and by banks more figuratively. Today, with the rising importance of sustainability and environmental awareness, green is becoming more associated with ecological brands and the corporate responsibility efforts of many companies across categories.

typography – meaning the font or fonts associated with your brand and how they are used – is an often-overlooked area of brand expression. Many designers, and indeed some marketers, harbor a deep interest in this aspect of brand identity. If you are one of these people, or you hire one of these people to work on your brand, you are in for some very entertaining, if esoteric, conversations! due to the level of specialization required to discuss typography in depth, for the purposes of this course we’ll focus on some foundational definitions and basic tips.

Tip: If you are a global organization, consider all of your markets before committing heavily to one color. Colors have different meanings across different cultures. For example, while white traditionally represents transparency and clarity in Western nations, in China white is the color of mourning.

Choose colors that express your strategy. In this example, the bright accent colors used by It solutions provider Presidio represent the bright ideas inherent in their "Practical Thinking" brand promise.

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Definitions

• Serif fonts have small extra strokes at the ends of letters. Times and Garamond are popular serif fonts.

• Sans-serif fonts have cleaner lines, lacking the extra flourishes. Arial and Helvetica are popular sans serif fonts.

• Letter weight refers to how thick the letters are – ranging from extra bold to bold to regular (sometimes called roman) to light and even ultralight.

• Cap height is the height of a capital letter like “C” or the ascender on a lower case letter like “h.”

• X height is the height of a font’s main body, like a lower case “o” or the hump on a lower case “h.”

• Leading refers to the vertical space between multiple lines of type.

• tracking, or kerning, refers to the horizontal space between letters.

Tips

• In general, serif fonts are considered more classical, and sans-serif fonts are considered more contemporary.

• Serif fonts are easier to read in printed material, sans-serif fonts are easier to read in digital material.

• Using all caps for logos or headlines can appear confident or even authoritative; using all lower case generally feels friendlier and more inclusive. If in doubt, using initial caps (like in the title of a book) is a good middle road.

• Script fonts, rendered to look like handwriting, can sometimes be a shortcut to make a design feel more human and relatable. However, most designers will tell you that a good handwriting font is hard to find!

• there are a few fonts that are installed in all computers, often called default fonts. Make sure you choose commonly available default fonts for electronic documents and websites – this is the easiest way to avoid frustrating formatting errors.

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Images don't always need to be literal. Photographs that evoke ideas you want to stand for, like speed, connection and productivity, can also work. Here's an example from the recently redesigned website of It solutions provider Presidio.

imagery

Imagery refers to the pictures you use in your brand identity, whether they are photographs or illustrations. For the purposes of Brand Basics we will focus on photography, as almost all brands today require some form of photography in their brand communications.

there are as many approaches to imagery, and opinions about imagery, as there are brands in the world today. However, here are some things to keep in mind as you consider what type of imagery to use in your communications:

• Product imagery is less important in B2B service industries than in other industries - if you’re just going to be showing the same hardware that your competitors sell, how differentiating or compelling is it?

• Lifestyle imagery - meaning shots of people in their everyday life, usually at work in the context of B2B - can often communicate more than product shots.

• In general, full-color imagery is more engaging than black-and-white imagery.

• Using imagery that depicts the end-customer benefit - for example, confidence, or security - helps put the focus on the higher order value you provide.

• research indicates that social media posts (tweets, etc.) including imagery are much more likely to be viewed than posts with text alone.

Infographics are an increasingly popular way of communicating today, particularly

in the B2B space and the It services category. Infographics are often associated more with individual messages or communications than with the overall brand. However, some brands may want to consider leveraging infographic design at a higher level. IBM is a best-in-class example of using iconography and infographics as the foundation for a brand identity.

Tip: Useful online image banks for small businesses include:

• www.istockphoto.com• www.stockfreeimages.com• www.shutterstock.com

Also, photo-sharing platforms like Flickr and Instagram are increasingly including functionality that allows companies to license individual’s snapshots for business use.

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Graphic Elements

Graphic elements are design elements that are incorporated into your identity system but are not specifically included in your logo. They might include shapes, like rectangles or circles, patterns, like stripes, grids or polka dots, or line styles such as curves or straight key lines. Sometimes your logo or part of your logo can turn into a graphic element – Louis Vuitton’s iconic repeating LV pattern is a well-known example of this.

While graphic elements are different from a logo, they are often derived from visual equities present in a logo. For example, a brand with a soft, flowing logo might also use curved lines and curvy shapes as graphic elements. Conversely, a brand with a blocky, edgy logo might use right angles and squares as graphic elements.

Good things to keep in mind when developing or choosing your graphic elements:

• think about who will be working with your identity and choose an appropriate level of complexity. If a global advertising agency will be handling your communications, you can risk a complex brand identity system with many graphic elements. If you will be doing all of your communications in house, you might be better off with one or two simple elements.

• Consider the media you normally use to communicate, and choose elements that complement or are easily executed in that medium. For example, shapes with gradient fills can be a challenge in digital executions –

consider solid shapes if your brand is communicated mostly online.

• Consider category norms and choose to either leverage them or differentiate from them. For example, patterns of wavy lines representing networks are prevalent in the IT industry. Using that element will help immediately identify the business your brand is in – but at what cost?

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try existing resources

• talk to people in your marketing department – someone on your team may be a designer on the side or going to school for design.

• talk to your agencies – while press release design, web design, advertising design and brand design are all different things, it’s often better to work with an experienced designer than a novice.

• Check your client list – are you providing It services for any clients who might have a design capability? Consider talking to them about a barter arrangement.

Go local

• Check with area arts schools and design programs – you might be able to get the next great logo designer to work on your project for short money.

• Local printers – sometimes print shops have a designer on staff.

• If you do have the budget for an agency, smaller local agencies will often be more affordable and offer you a higher degree of client service.

explore the web

• there are online design resources - sites like logonerds.com, cheaplogodesign.com and logoglo.com - that offer low-cost alternatives to agencies.

• explore Craigslist and other online job forums – there are more independent creative professionals out there than ever before. Connecting with them directly could save you money.

• Crowdsourcing is a relatively new way to approach your brand identity. Sites like 99designs.com will allow you to send out a brief to dozens if not hundreds of designers and pay only for what you use.

Identity Development Tips

expensive designers and agencies are expensive for a reason - they tend to do a good job. However, there are other options, and if you’re smart about what you ask for, you may be able to find some real values. Here are a few tips for developing your identity on a budget.

tone of Voice and Messaging

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As anyone who has ever spoken to a customer service representative knows, brands are much more than just visual. What brands say and how they say it has a dramatic impact on how customers experience the brand. Particularly in the case of smaller B2B service brands, much of your customer’s understanding of your brand will come from touchpoints such as spoken sales presentations, written proposals, your website content, etc.

As we saw in Brand Basics Part 2, your brand promise serves as an organizing

principle for everything you do. Your value proposition focuses that idea on the differentiated benefit you provide your target audience. Your brand personality, messaging strategy and tone of voice are the translation tools that take these strategic components and begin to make them resonate directly with your customers. They should be present in all of your internal communications briefs, and any agency you partner with should be very familiar with them.


• the vAlue of BRAnd PeRsonAlitY And how to develoP YouR own

• how to foCus YouR CommuniCAtions with A messAging stRAtegY

• how to shAPe YouR CommuniCAtions using tone of voiCe

tone of Voice and Messaging

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Brand Personality

Imagine if your company were a person… what type of person would it be? that’s the simplest way to think about brand personality. Would it be honest? Would it be friendly? Would it be helpful?

Brand personality is a useful tool because so much of the language that describes a brand is often strategic. This language begins to sound more creative, which makes it useful for the people who will be translating your brand strategy into marketing materials.

Here are three small group exercises that can help you determine your brand personality:

Celebrity Challenge If your brand was a celebrity, who would it be? You can include characters from books, movies and tV shows if that is helpful. Is your brand more of a Han Solo or a Luke Skywalker? Once you’ve agreed

on an individual, write down at least ten words that describe the character’s personality.

thinking Outside the Box If your brand were a car, what kind of car would it be? Choose one, and write down at least five words that describe that car. now repeat the exercise, asking what kind of animal your brand would be. Between these two questions you should generate at least ten more words.

Word Cloud Arrange all the words you’ve come up with randomly on a page. Feel free to add a few more if you feel anything is missing. Pass copies of the page around, and ask people to circle the 3-5 they think best describe your brand, and cross out the 3-5 that they think least describe your brand. Tally the votes, and you will end up with at least three words for your brand personality.


Worksheet 1: BrAND PersoNALItY

BrAND ProMIse

CeLeBrItY or FAMoUs ChArACter

ADDItIoNAL WorDs

CAr ANIMAL

BrAND PersoNALItY

In Partnership With

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Messaging

A messaging strategy takes your brand promise and makes it relevant and motivating to specific audiences. Consider for a moment – your potential investor has different needs than your potential customer. Customers across different industry verticals are likely to think of you in different ways and each have different needs. Your potential customer thinks of you differently than your current customer does. A messaging strategy gathers all of these factors into a matrix and gives you a foundation for brand communications.

developing your messaging strategy takes work, but it is a fairly straightforward process. Agency partners can help you work through the details, and can add a level of professional polish to critical components. It’s important to remember that a messaging strategy is a guideline and a living document – as your business evolves and as you learn more about your target audiences, your messaging strategy should grow with you.

Different target audiences have different needs, meaning you want to base your communications to them on different expressions of your core strategy.

technicians

Investors and Analysts Customers Across Categories

Customer C-SuiteMedia

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Messaging Strategy

The Messaging Strategy Worksheet contains the framework for what you need to do.

• First, write your Brand Promise and your Value Proposition in the top two boxes. These are not there for show – these are there so you are constantly checking to ensure that your messages ladder up to a single brand idea.

• next, identify your three most important audiences. For example, enterprise Customers, Small Business Customers, and Repeat Customers. You can add more later, but begin with three to keep things manageable.

• In a short sentence, describe how you think they feel about your company today. Look to the interviews you did as part of the exercises contained in Brand Basics Part 2 to inform this section.

• In a short sentence, describe what you want them to think of your

company. What does success with this customer look like?

• Based on your Brand Promise and your Value Proposition, craft a simple message that could help get this target from where they are to where you want them to be. It does not have to be perfect or beautiful – the messaging strategy is a tool to get to brilliant advertising creative, not great creative unto itself.

• Populate the Proof Points section with 2-3 of the most compelling reasons to Believe, which are relevant to this message, from the list you compiled during Brand Basics Part 2.

Once you’ve done all this, you will have an excellent briefing tool for your internal marketing department or agency partners. If you are developing and executing on this messaging strategy internally, it might be worth spending a little extra time on the “What we can say to them…” section, as these messages will likely get out to the world with little additional polish.


Worksheet 2: MessAGING strAteGY

BrAND ProMIse:

VALUe ProPosItIoN:

tArGet 1:

CUrreNt MINDset:

DesIreD MINDset:

ProoF PoINts:

WhAt We CAN sAY to theM:

tArGet 2:

CUrreNt MINDset:

DesIreD MINDset:


ProoF PoINts:

tArGet 3:


CUrreNt MINDset:

DesIreD MINDset:

ProoF PoINts:

In Partnership With

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Tone of Voice

Here’s a good mantra to keep in mind when thinking about tone of voice: how you say something is as important as what you are saying. Consider when you have to pass along bad news to someone in your professional or personal life – you stop and think about how you will deliver your message. The same is true when you need to ask a question and you’re not sure you’ll get the answer you want. And that’s really what sales is all about – asking a question and trying to get to a “yes.”

When it comes to brand, tone of voice is the tool that operationalizes your brand personality. It consists of guidelines, and sometimes examples, that explain to brand communicators how to bring your brand to life through the written and spoken word. You’ll need to agree on your brand personality before you can develop your tone of voice. Once you have 3-5 words that describe your brand personality, here’s a three-step process to turn them into your brand tone of voice.

1. For each of your brand personality words, develop three specific guidelines that apply to speaking or writing. For example, for a personality word like “approachable” you might choose: avoid using technical jargon, it’s okay to use contractions, and never lecture a customer.

2. Look outside of your category for brands that have personalities similar to the one you’ve chosen for your company. For example, if you’re a bold customer advocate, look to Southwest Airlines. If you’re simple, friendly and stylish, look to JetBlue, and if you’re a professional category leader, look to Delta. Examine how they write in advertising and on their website to help develop more ideas for your tone of voice guidelines.

3. Come up with three specific tonal actions you want everyone in your organization to take when communicating your brand. this is a small enough number of things to keep in mind that people will actually

remember and use them. These should be simple but meaningful suggestions, like: always answer the phone with a smile, always open a presentation with a question, and never use the word “no.”

Gather all of these guidelines together and publish them for your brand communicators. Socialize them within your organization. Let people know that your company values and rewards people who bring them to life. If you can, develop a quarterly award for the employee who does the best job of expressing your brand through tone of voice.

remember – your brand personality is your tone of voice. If you’re having a lot of trouble completing the exercises in this section, go back and take a look at the personality words you developed. You might need to make an adjustment.

Tip: In today’s hyper-connected, constantly sharing world, social media magnifies the importance of tone of voice. Make sure the people in your organization who are involved in any way with social media monitoring and engagement understand your tone of voice and what kind of personality you are trying to express to the world. While allowing employees to “be themselves” online can be valuable in terms of building genuine engagement on communities like twitter and Facebook, make sure they know what kind of expression you are encouraging and what kind of expression is simply not allowed.


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Brand Basics Part 3: Bringing you Brand to Life / A Cisco Partner Plus resource

Brand Culture

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throughout the Brand Basics course you’ve seen references to the value of internal branding. This is just another way of saying it’s important to develop a consistent company culture. You probably already have a “certain way of doing things” in your organization. In fact, you probably uncovered some insights in this area and drew on them in the course of your brand development exercises in Part 2 (or you will). Building brand culture

simply means capturing and repeating the parts of your “way of doing things” that are reflective of your brand vision and brand promise, and reshaping the parts that aren’t. In order to begin building a brand culture, you’ll need to understand the process employees go through to internalize brand, how to propel them through this process, and what the desired outcomes are.


• the definition And PuRPose of BRAnd CultuRe

• the fouR stePs in the inteRnAl BRAnd ACtivAtion jouRneY

• how to emBed the BRAnd in YouR PeoPle And theiR ACtions

Brand Culture

what is exciting in terms of corporate brand culture is that unlike product brands its importance is tangible, incontrovertible.”2

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The Internal Brand Journey

Just as your customers need to travel through the marketing funnel in order to become loyal advocates for your brand, your employees need to undertake a journey of their own. The four stages of employee brand activation are Awareness, Understanding, Action and Advocacy.

there is no set timeframe for internal brand activation, and how long it will take depends greatly on the size of the company. However, as a general rule, brand awareness activities should be given 1-3 months to take root, brand understanding efforts will likely take another 1-3 months, and brand action and advocacy initiatives should be ongoing.

Awareness simply means that your people know that brand is valuable, that your organization has a brand, and what your brand promises to customers at the highest level.

Understanding means that employees comprehend the broader aspects of your brand such as your vision, your value proposition, and your brand personality – and that they see how the brand fits with their role in the organization.

Action describes the stage during which employees grasp what they need to actually do, as part of their day-to-day work, to bring the brand to life.

Advocacy indicates the stage at which your people have fully internalized the brand and have become evangelists within your organization, feeding a virtuous cycle of internal brand building.

Awareness Understanding Action Advocacy

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Brand Basics Part 3: Bringing Your Brand to Life / A Cisco Partner Plus ResourceBrand Basics Part 3: Bringing you Brand to Life / A Cisco Partner Plus resource

Activating the Brand Internally

there are three ways to build your brand within the organization – from the top down, from the bottom up, and with targeted communications that hit specific audiences in the middle of your organization. While each method is best used at different stages of the internal brand journey, all three work together to embed your brand with employees.

When you deploy all three types of communication together you’ll get employees who understand the importance of your brand initiative, are consistently reminded of what it means, and have only the detailed information they need to deliver the brand appropriately through their part of the business.

Top-Down Engagement

Bottom-Up Engagement

Deeper Immersion

By segmenting and prioritizing your higher value internal audiences, you can invest in the places that are most critical to delivering the brand.

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top-down communications are messages that come from your company leadership. examples could include emails, blog posts, presentations (live or via web), and personalized communications to high- value team members. The role of top- down communications is to get people’s attention, demonstrate the importance of brand to your company, and indicate that you have executive-level sponsorship to increase compliance.

Bottom-up communications are company- wide messages that any employee would encounter on a daily basis. Examples of bottom-up communications might include posters, email blasts, banners on your company intranet or desk drops. this is not the place to include deep or complex content – it’s a place to quickly and efficiently communicate that change is coming (or remind people that a change has recently arrived) and reinforce at the highest level what that change is.

Top-Down Engagement Deeper Immersion Bottom-Up Engagement

Use through-the-middle communications to train specific groups within your organization on parts of the brand that they are responsible for. Not all audiences need deeper content. Marketing, sales and HR are examples of those who might. Your marketing team needs to be deeply familiar with your brand identity, tone of voice, and any associated guidelines. Your sales team needs to know how to weave the brand promise into their presentations in credible, motivating ways. Deep content can be delivered through meetings, workshops, and guidelines or training collateral.

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Developing Brand Behaviors

One ultimate goal of building a strong brand culture is to drive brand behaviors. Brand behaviors are actions that employees are trained to take, and eventually take on their own, that broadcast and reinforce the brand promise. Achieving this goal can take some effort and, in larger organizations, it requires a budget for employee training. However, it’s worth discussing in brief because the cost of training employees is far less than the cost of most external marketing campaigns, and the effects of brand behaviors can be very compelling for customers.

the best way to develop and train brand behaviors is to start small and think from the customer’s perspective. What actions would be most meaningful to your customers, and are relatively easy for your employees to execute and repeat? examples of basic brand behaviors are scripted phone greetings and pre-written tweets. But there are many more examples of more complex – and effective – brand behaviors, two of which are presented here.

What are one or two ways you could imagine bringing your brand to life through action?

UPS instructs its delivery people to walk briskly and purposefully when they are outside of their trucks. Because strolling might imply laziness or a lack of caring, and running might imply lateness or disorganization, UPS chose a third way that perfectly expresses the competence and confidence that their consumer and business customers rely on.

disney theme parks help families believe in magic by

removing worry. If any child drops a food or drink item – for example, an ice cream cone – employees are instructed to immediately replace the item at no cost and clean up the mess so parents don’t have to. This translates into a magical experience for the entire family, as they remain immersed in the theme park fantasy.


Branding tips and tricks

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As we’ve seen through the three modules of the Brand Basics course, brand can be complicated. It has many different pieces and parts. But brand can also be reassuringly simple. Brand is what you promise, and how you deliver on that promise. For some of you, brand might be most present in a sales presentation. For others, it might be in your logo, or in the print ad you’re running. And for still others, it might be most present in a job posting for your next employee. All of these


• A few BRAnding dos And don’ts

• tiPs foR exPRessing YouR BRAnd in soCiAl mediA

• HOW TO SAVE - AND WHERE TO SPEND - ON BRAND

Branding tips and tricks

touchpoints are a part of your brand, and investing in brand will always pay you dividends.

The following pages offer some tips that will speed you on your journey toward inventing – or reinventing – your brand. We hope that brand believers of all types and levels of experience will find something here that will inform or inspire them in some way.

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DO take brand seriously.

A half-baked or misunderstood brand is worse than no brand at all – invest the time in creating a strategic foundation that is focused, relevant and differentiated.

DO brand internally first, and externally second.

Your employees are primary touchpoints for your brand. Get them on board first so that they can effectively and consistently promote your brand and deliver on your promise.

DO look for inspiration from strong brands.

Look to powerful B2B and even B2C brands and do some research: what do they do right, and how can you learn from them in ways that are relevant to your own brand?

DO create brand guidelines.

Creating even simple brand guidelines will ensure that your brand is represented consistently across all touchpoints, whether you market yourself or use an agency.

DO sweat the small stuff.

Even seemingly insignificant touchpoints can affect the perception of your brand. Think about how your customer service representative answers the phone, or the shirt your technician wears.

5 Branding dOs

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Brand Basics Part 3: Bringing Your Brand to Life / A Cisco Partner Plus resource

DON’T confuse “I like it” with “It’s right for the company.” Let your agreed strategy drive your decisions – not personal taste DON’T be a perfectionist.

When it comes to brand, everyone has an opinion and the process can get bogged down. Remember that sometimes, done is better than perfect. DON’T spend money without clear goals.

Make sure that you set clear, measurable goals against which you can evaluate success. That which gets measured, gets done. DON’T trust your social media strategy to an intern. It can be tempting to consider your Facebook and twitter presence as trivial, when they are in fact anything but. Whoever crafts your social media strategy should be well versed in your brand and your business objectives. DON’T follow the herd. the It services category can seem like a sea of sameness – you’ll need to differentiate if you want to float to the top.

5 Branding dOn’ts

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…social media is a great equalizer: big brands can be outsmarted without making huge investments, and small brands can make big names for themselves.”3

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Share, don’t sell.

Social media is for building connections, not conversion. Setting the wrong expectation will create external disengagement and internal disappointment.

Develop a rhythm.

Build up a following by posting to your social media outlets with some regularity. Consider building up a store of posts you can deploy when needed.

Be personal.

Have an interesting tone – avoid sounding too corporate when using social media. Engage your followers casually, in a way that really lets your brand’s personality shine.

Be useful.

Have interesting content – nobody wants to retweet a list of your product features, but they may be interested in your point of view on a new technology.

Use imagery.

Include images with captions in your tweets and posts to blogs and Facebook – users tend to skip over blocks of text.

5 tips for Getting the Most Out of Social Media

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Keep it simple.

don’t create a brand strategy or identity that is too elaborate and extensive. Complexity equals cost, and besides, one of your primary goals is ensuring that your brand is easy for customers to understand.

Keep it focused.

Choose the specific aspects of your brand that you deem most important, and spend what you can afford there first.

Listen to your customers.

nobody’s opinion matters more than those who exchange money for your products and services – and listening to them is free. Heed their feedback and reactions, and watch out for the common trap of “talking to yourselves” or “believing your own press.”

The web is full of information.

the Internet is awash with blogs and resources for dIY branding. Take advantage of them.

Digital and social are your friends.

These are cost-effective channels through which to reach your target audience.

5 tips for developingYour Brand on aBudget

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A one-day brand workshop.

Hire a consultant to run a workshop with key internal stakeholders so that everyone feels like they were part of the process in developing the brand and establishing its values.

A designer for your logo.

There are options to fit every budget, from branding agencies to websites like 99designs.com or elancer.com that can help you find a freelance designer – remember, this will be the symbol for your brand for years to come!

A basic identity package.

A set of essential professional brand touchpoints like a business card, email signature, letterhead, and presentation template will go a long way toward elevating your business presence.

Templates.

Rather than having an agency design a one-off ad for you, have them create simple templates for a few digital banner ad sizes, a few print ad sizes, and an information sheet. Then you can reuse these by changing the content.

Your website.

Often the first point of contact for your customers – remember you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

5 Areas to Invest in Brand


In Conclusion

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35Conclusion

through the three parts of this Brand Basics course you’ve learned what brand is, why it’s valuable, how to create your own brand promise, and how to express that promise through design, voice and culture. Of course, brand is a big topic, and we would never claim to have covered every inch of it in this quick survey course.

We hope you’ll review the links and suggestions on the Additional resources pages of all three of the Brand Basics workbooks, and that you’ll follow up with a Cisco Partner Plus resource if you’d like to talk more specifically about options for building your brand.

Your brand is a living thing – it already exists, and it’s growing. The question is – is it growing in the direction you want it to?

this CouRse hAs given You the BAsiC tools You need to Begin to CultivAte YouR BRAnd on YouR own, And we hoPe it’s Also exCited A heightened level of inteRest in the PotentiAl of BRAnd to Build YouR Business. BeCAuse BRAnd is vAluABle, BRAnd is PoweRful, And todAY moRe thAn eveR, BRAnd is not oPtionAl.

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Brand on Wikipedia A basic catalog of information on brand, its components and prevalent branding strategies.

Identity Works A blog focusing on corporate brand identities with regular contributions from experienced designers and strategists.

Processed Identity A blog with examples of strong visual identities and tips for how to develop one.

socialmouths A blog with insightful, honest tips and tricks for small businesses looking to leverage social media.

Additional resources

Brand Identity Essentials A book by Kevin Budelmann, Yang Kim and Curt Wozniak that provides a solid foundation for the visual design elements of branding using real-world examples.

Tomorrow Starts Here A site that brings Cisco’s Brand Vision and Brand Promise to life.

Cisco Partner Plus Collected information and resources for Cisco Partner Plus partners.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand

http://www.identityworks.com/

http://www.processedidentity.com/

http://socialmouths.com/blog/

http://brand-identity-essentials.com/

www.cisco.com/web/tomorrow-starts-here/index.html

http://www.cisco.com/web/partners/sell/partner_plus.html

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1 Budelmann, Kevin, Yang Kim, and Curt Wozniak. Brand Identity Essentials: 100 Principles for Designing Logos and Building Brands. Rockport Publishers, 2010. 7.

2 Schroeder, Jonathan E., Miriam Salzer-Mörling, and Søren Askegaard. Brand Culture. London: Routledge, 2006. 35.

3 Zarrella, Dan. The Social Media Marketing Book. Sebastapol, CA: O’Reilly, 2009. 7.

references

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third party company names, trademarks, logos and quotations referenced in these materials are the property of their respective owners and their use does not constitute or imply an endorsement, sponsorship, affiliation, association or approval by the third parties of these materials or with Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates (“Cisco”). The information contained in these materials are the opinions of Publicis BOS Group. Cisco disclaims all warranties as to the accuracies, completeness or adequacy of such information and shall have no liability for omission or inadequacies in such information.

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Publicis Brand Optimization Systems (BOS) Group develops brand strategies for clients and brings them to life through brand identity, employee education and experience design. BOS Group is part of Publicis Worldwide.

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Partner Plus Brand Basics Session 3 Workbook

Technology

social media

social media

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messaging

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brand behaviors

graphic elements