Three Steps to Decluttering Your Brand

 
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Here we are at the beginning of the year/decade - the perfect time to consider how we can impact the projection of our businesses.

If you find yourself at a point where there are too many things to keep track of, and your vision feels “clouded” - you are definitely not alone.

Most of the brands that I work with are going through growing pains, and usually struggling with lack of clarity, inconsistent messaging, confusion among internal team members, and often find themselves lost.

My primary role is to tame the chaos and bring clarity across the board. Often, this means “re-building” the business and brand - utilizing the existing elements in order to retain the unique DNA of the business.

Here is the simple three-step framework that I use across almost every strategic initiative.

Step One: Gather & Examine

I won’t go into detail here about this process, but it’s important to remember that the longer the business has been around, the more “iterations” of everything exist. This might be mission statements, objectives, presentations, packaging, your website, etc - whatever pertains to the task at hand. Sometimes is defined, and other times it can be all-encompassing. These all hold clues about your brand/company’s perspective.

Step Two: Conscious Prioritization

As a follow up from step one, where we’ve examined any and all elements, we tackle the “mountain” by putting everything through a rigorous prioritization test. What thiscriteria looks like is highly subjective and will differ from brand to brand. But keep this in mind - identifying your objective is super important - because without being clear about the end goal, you may find yourself focusing on the wrong elements.

Step Three: Distillation

This is an extremely crucial step, but also a risky one, that can put your brand or business at risk of loosing the unique attributes that help differentiate you from the competition. Remember you can’t keep everything or make everything “important”. As an example, when I work with clients, I ask them to identify up to TWO objectives - one primary and one secondary. Having 10 objectives would be like running a race with ten goal lines to run towards. Similarly, select carefully - conscious prioritization often comes into play even in this phase.

Lastly, this three-step process can be applied to bringing clarity for a wide range of strategic needs.

  • Product pipeline

  • Sales strategy

  • Marketing plan

  • Product assortment

  • Brand strategy

If you have any comments or questions, I’d love to hear from you!

 
c okubo