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Branding The CattLeLogos Method™© CattLeLogos® The Complete FAQ |
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What is my brand?
Your brand is the external expression of your business strategy as conveyed in every action of a company. It becomes the company�s "personality" in the marketplace — its reputation for how well it delivers against what it promises.
What is a brand platform?
A Brand Platform is a set of guidelines that govern all aspects of the Brand: visual, semantic, perceptual, and implementation. It defines how you want to be perceived — emotionally and logically — by your potential customers.
Which employees need to know about the brand platform?
All of them. The actions of every employee can impact the reputation of your brand.
Why should a small company brand?
A strong brand can contribute to your ability to create new clients and grow revenue. A start-up or young company with a clear brand strategy looks like a bigger, more professional, and more established organization.
What is the CattLeLogos Method?
The CattLeLogos Method uses a five step method to take a brand from Vision to Value. These steps are:
Why use the CattLeLogos Method
The CattLeLogos Method assists you to build good brand management practices in to your corporate DNA, i.e. your business process. It helps you implement the ABC's of branding — making sure your vision, image, messages and means are
A — appropriate for you market, B — believable by your customers, and C — consistently delivered.
What is it important to have a brand vision?
A Brand Vision establishes a set of core values with clarity of purpose. The Brand Vision when communicated throughout an organization will align your business process, employee behavior,
and communication vehicles to deliver the type of products and services in a way that support your Brand Platform.
How do we evaluate our brand�s visual image?
Collect a set of all your published materials — documents, forms, presentations, brochures, ads, labels, etc. — and lay them out on a table. Do they all look like they came from the same company? Or are they each have a different look?
What messages are most important to communicate?
Unless you want to be in a commodity market, you need to be able to differentiate your offering from the rest of the market. You need to make your message stand out from the noise. Maybe you really do have a better mouse trap — is that clear from your messages?
What are the "Means"?
The means include all the ways in which you convey your image and communicate your message. Far beyond a logo, they include documents, proposals and faxes; presentations including specific content and style of delivery
as well as format; advertising; trade shows; web site implementation; phone interactions; customer support to name few.
What is CattLeLogo's background?
Jean and Jane are both former executives whose experiences include both creative and engineering processes. Jane was managing a technology group whose engineers had created their own brochure for a new product.
The brochure did not adhere to any brand guidelines. Jean as corporate brand manager realized every group was doing this because brand strategy hadn�t been communicated to employees.
Jean and Jane met up and used Jane�s product as test case for developing the needed process and guidelines for managers like Jane to market their products while protecting the company brand.
Why did you write AbuLLard�s ABC�s of Branding?
The ABC�s came up in a very early conversation between us as we were talking about the business concept. We discovered that by reducing brand concepts to basics and using a humorous approach, people who normally thought branding was only the responsibility of marketing or just a logo really got the message.
After one of our seminars, we had a senior VP of operations tell us the he finally understood why following good branding practices were critical for an organizations success.
In addition to the questions here, I've answered an additional 25 branding questions in AbuLLard's Branding FAQ. It's free and you can ask for it here.
