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The CEO’s Guide to Marketing Tip 4: Create a prototype of your brand

by | Oct 11, 2017 | Advice & Tips

What? Create a prototype of my brand? What does that mean? Does it mean create a prototype of our product? Or a prototype of our logo?

No, your brand is not your product or your logo.

Your brand is the definition consumers hold in their minds of your company and its products. And that definition is built in two ways: by what you tell people and by what they experience when they try your product.

Therefore, it makes sense to imagine what that definition would sound like and write it down—a prototype of your brand. The name I use for this prototype is a Brand Statement.

Think of a Brand Statement as the bulls-eye toward which all marketing communications are aimed.

In my book The CEO’s Guide to Marketing, I instruct readers to write their Brand Statement in the voice of a customer by imagining they are sitting in a coffee shop and overhear the two people at the next table talking. One person is explaining your product to the other and gets it exactly right. Their words come out just how you would like to hear them and you are thrilled with their explanation.  

This Brand Statement is a tremendous help to the creative people designing your promotions. It tells writers and graphic designers: This is what I want the promotion to cause our market to think and tell their friends.

If you like this branding tip, you’ll like The CEO’s Guide to Marketing. It’s filled with useful tips and tricks such as this one. And it goes into much greater detail. For instance, it discusses the role Primary Value Points and Positioning play in writing a Brand Statement, and how the Brand Statement is part of a larger document called a Brand Playbook.

I tell people that The CEO’s Guide to Marketing will make them the smartest marketers in the room. And I’m not kidding.  

 

 

Written by Lonny Kocina

Written by Lonny Kocina

Lonny Kocina is the CEO and Founder of Media Relations Agency which has been in business for nearly 35 years. During that time, Kocina also founded and sold two other businesses: Mid America Events and Expos, and Checkerboard Internet Services. Prior to that, Lonny worked as a marketing director for Investment Rarities Inc., a company with sales over 4 billion dollars. Kocina has also been a long time member of Vistage International which is a CEO peer mentoring organization. He was also a volunteer marketing mentor for Junior Achievement and the Carlson School of Business. For fun he has taught Principles of Marketing at the college level, and his recent book, the “CEO’s Guide to Marketing” is an Axiom Business Book silver medal winner as well as an Amazon bestseller. Lonny likes to kid that his third grade teacher may have summed him up best with a note sent home on his report card. “Lonny is a daydreamer and he’s getting worse each day. He complains of a stomach ache a lot and I don’t think he likes school much either.”

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