Brands do not go stale. They can’t. A brand is made of non-organics — belief and purpose. A brand can evolve, but it can’t go stale.

You could put your brand in a far corner of an unused room and leave it there for a year, and guess what? When you open the door, dust it off and polish it, your brand will be just as fresh as the day it was born. Why? Because a brand cannot go stale if it was created with integrity and truth.

The process of branding, or brand development, is all about getting inside your company’s core values and giving a visual and verbal dialog to them.

If you begin to see perceptions of your brand that are inconsistent with your values, start listening to your own dialog or that of your employees. Your brand starts within and works its way out to your audience, so if perceptions seem to be skewed, simple adjustments to your company’s dialog can steer your brand back on course.

People can go stale. Employees might lose their passion or belief in the company. Outside distractions (also called ‘life’) may pull you away from your business passion. People lose their belief, or sometimes they never understood the brand. It’s part of the natural ebb and flow of being human.

The cool thing is, people can learn, revive and reinvest themselves, and your brand will be there fully intact and ready to bust out the moves to make your company shine. All it takes is a little inspiration, focus, purpose — all the things that make a brand strong.

Ultimately, your people (or yourself if you’re a soloist) give life to your brand. Keep them informed, involved, and inspired, and your brand will remain the fresh, valuable, driving influence that fuels your marketing.

This is an established vendor who has been in business for many years, but he has long struggled in defining his niche, which makes hiring him difficult. After all, if he doesn’t know his specialty, how can I know which work ideally suits him?

A student marketing plan is unlikely to help a struggling business all that much, and it’s not because they’re students. It’s because you know deep down that students are inexperienced, and inexperience breeds doubt. Where there’s doubt, there’s lack of action. In other words, it’s easy to blow off a plan if you don’t trust the people who developed it. Worse, however, is that fact that if you doubt your own identity, you are going to be lacking in clarity of purpose.

It is nearly impossible to develop a good marketing plan if you are lacking clarity of purpose (something deeper than ‘make more money’). Any marketing plan is virtually useless if you don’t know yourself well enough to confidently state who you are and what you do. That’s precisely what the process of brand development provides: clarity of self and purpose, so that you can present yourself and your offerings without flinching – ever.

Developing a marketing plan before your brand is very much a case of putting the cart before the horse. Having students develop that marketing plan is sure to see your horse running smack into the cart, breaking its nose and very probably a leg. People put horses down for breaking a leg.

Coincidentally, people close businesses for lack of clarity, which results in not knowing your niche, lacking a strong brand identity, not trusting your marketing plan (thus not using it), and not connecting with your target audience – all of which either keeps you in the dark or forces business closure due to lack of sales.

Branding is hard work, but it pays off in spades when you use an experienced professional. When branding is done right, the results of the work provide so much clarity that your marketing can become nearly fail-proof.

If you are lost or floundering and don’t know which way to go with your marketing, take a step back, and get an honest account of your brand. Get your brand and identity straight, then work with a pro to devise a marketing plan you can actually put into action.

Bellevue City Hall. Feb. 26, 8:00 – 10:00 a.m. Registration opens at 7:30 a.m.

So why mention it?

Well, it goes like this: Design or advertising without strategy is essentially nothing more than art. Art is wonderful stuff, but it has little practical application or value in marketing communications. Strategy, on the other hand, allows your company to exceed expectations in its marketing efforts.

As my awesome great aunt CeCe once wrote to me in a care package over 20 years ago:
Art is great
and work is neat
But everybody’s
got to eat.

What makes art a valuable part of your marketing? Strategy.

What is design and advertising’s best friend? Strategy.

What’s the number one thing clients try to avoid in their marketing? Come on, take a guess — Why it’s Strategy!

Strategy makes it easier for you to eat, so why do people run, kick and scream to avoid it? Why? Well, first off, making art is a heckuva lot easier. Strategy punches holes in weak concepts. It forces you to take your marketing seriously. Probably its worst offense is appearing to take the fun out of art. But honestly, strategy is incredibly fun. You may need to adjust your idea of fun, but as a benefit, you also get to raise your aspirations to an all-time high.

Strategy at its best
Let’s take a look at Lance Armstrong’s record seven Tour de France titles. People say that his dominance wasn’t fun. He turned winning the Tour into a science, methodically attacking absolutely every aspect of the race, from weighing out each meal on a scale, to his training, attack strategies, playing off the media to gain advantages, and surrounding himself with some of the sport’s top riders as lieutenants. After he did all that (and more), he rode his heart out to claim the victories.

Now, Mr. Armstrong has been gifted with exceptional physiology, and many claim that’s why he wins. While this may be true, it is advantageous for people to think that way. When you discard something great to prove you are not worthy, you are in fact employing a kill-strategy to avoid doing the one thing that can help you succeed. Why do that? It’s easier.

If you need proof to accept this, take a look at Armstrong’s competitors. During his reign as Tour champion, he released a book with his coach and even had a tv program detailing his training methods and life. What did his competitors and other people say then? Impossible. No one can train that hard and be so self-disciplined. Why would they say that? Simple, it’s easier.

What it takes
Everyone knows that it takes hard work to succeed. It takes a few other things too, such as calculated risk-taking, preparation, dedication, self-discipline, and strategy.

Big businesses have a sometimes not-so-obvious advantage here because they have the larger budgets and people to examine concepts from more angles. And sometimes, they do it. Those are the companies that live, thrive and dominate a market.

Small businesses, on the other hand, rarely have the people or organizational structure to even think about strategy. They are usually too close to their work to have the objectivity needed to succeed. The result is marketing that often falls on its face. Oddly, they are ok with that because it justifies not putting in the key efforts it takes to succeed. Of course, it also gives business owners justification to not budget for strong marketing efforts.

People get to go home early, there’s less to manage, less to spend, less outsider involvement, less less, less. And less profits.

Why would anyone sabotage their own business like that? Well, honestly, it’s easier to make just enough money to be profitable than it is to be wildly profitable. It’s not nearly as much fun though.

Strategy is so much fun!
In spite of Lance Armstrong’s methodical approach to winning the Tour de France, I would be willing to place a level bet that he was having fun. And so was everyone around him. Were there hard times and tough moments? Of course. Everyone had to rise to the occasion, with the benefit being greater success for nearly anyone willing to work alongside him.

It’s the same for business. When you get a high response to a measured effort, you feel awesome. Big smiles abound, everyone feels happy, and you increase profits.

Where there’s a leader there is success, and people will follow. If you own a business, you’re a leader, whether you like it or not. If you share your plan with your employees, they will follow you. The more detail you provide, the more personally invested they become. (If you fail to show a clear vision, you have a higher turnover rate.)

Now, apply purpose, vision, and strategy to your branding and marketing, and what have you got? You have the means to develop strategic plans for success. You have an identity that your employees can relate to. You have a brand that people can believe in. You have marketing that is wildly successful. You have increased sales.

First things first
It doesn’t work the other way around. You cannot show people a business that doesn’t believe in itself, and expect them to believe in you. You cannot passively market to prospective clients, and turn them into believers.

It has to start from within. You believe in yourself, and others will believe in you. Your employees believe in the company, and your prospective customers believe in what you are selling. You market to them with strategy, they buy, and you exceed your sales goals.

Do you think Lance Armstrong’s lieutenants, staff, and entourage went into his first Tour de France thinking he would win seven of them? Nope. But they came to believe in him. He built a following by first believing in himself, then he strategically attacked the race he wanted to dominate. And it worked.

What are you trying to win?
Lance Armstrong used strategy to make an art of winning the Tour de France. Whether you’re trying to win more clients, repeat business, a warmer feeling in your heart, or the front spot in the water cooler line, you can do the same.

It should be.

I can already hear people saying, “I’m a consultant. I don’t want to be sexy, I want to be professional, knowledgeable. I want to command respect.” I’ve worked with corporations who said they didn’t want to be sexy because they had to be professional. In the right context, your knowledge and professionalism are sexy. They command respect because to the right people they are sexy, especially when your identity makes them so.

What is sexy, really? It’s what turns us on, what stimulates emotional connections. ‘Sexy’ is defined differently by each person. What is sexy to you and me, or your neighbor, friend or really anyone is likely very different.

Brands are sexy. They appeal to the various senses, values, and intricacies of our personalities. I’m not just talking about what appeals to us in a romantic or animalistic sense. Rather, I’m referring to the unique aspects of our personalities. One of a brand’s primary functions is to appeal to those unique intricacies.

It’s not all about curves and six-pack abs. Sexy can mean intelligent design, utilitarian functionality, freaking awesome ease-of-use, slick surfaces, or a smooth delivery. It can mean strength of character, clear purpose, infectious desire, or inherent trust. Sexy brands can take your breath away or fill up your soul.

Brands do all of these things because they appeal to our unique core desires while filling a need. What is at the very center of our basic needs? Desire and survival instinct. Well-crafted brands appeal to these basics, and the basics can be applied to nearly anything.

When your brand is sexy, your employees take greater interest and invest their own identities in it. When your employees are invested, it comes across in their commitment and their communication. A sexy brand turns on employees’ imaginations. It ignites their motivation, so they can fuel their innate desire to give their best efforts towards achieving your vision of your company.

How is your brand sexy?