Are you creating the right brand experience: brand fingerprints will be handy
Your small business brand is one of the most powerful tools in your armoury as a business owner, if you use it well. Your brand is there, front and centre of customer experience, and you need to spend a bit of time designing that experience so that it works for your customers and for your business. Because leaving that experience to chance can be a risky business, can leave customers confused as to what your business is all about, or even worse, leave them disgruntled and running for the hills (and when I say hills, I mean your competitors).
Your brand touches your audience at so many points. There are those initial touches, such as at networking, a Google search that leads them to your website, or a shared LinkedIn post that reaches new people. Then there are the multitude of following and often repeated touches like following your business on Insta, opening your packaging, or receiving an invoice. All these interactions need to be purposeful, well designed and most importantly, on-brand. Because every touch leaves an impression. A fingerprint, if you will (go with me on this, I will be wringing every last ounce out of this analogy in this blog).
So, let’s get down to business. How do you make sure your brand fingerprints are leaving the right impression?
Let’s assume you have five brand fingerprints on your brand hand (I did warn you).
Each one will leave a different impression. Together, these impressions make up a unique experience that is YOUR brand experience. Distinctly yours. Distinct enough that they could only belong to your brand.
We can start to design these impressions by tapping into your brand story elements, and use a set of questions to help us define each brand fingerprint. I use the term audience here, meaning anyone who comes into contact with your brand – be they prospects, customers or just fans. Each question focuses on the touchpoint between your brand and the audience: this is where your brand comes to life and can create the magic in the hearts and minds of the audience.
1. What do you want your audience to experience?
Do you want the overall experience of interacting with your brand to be educational? Inspiring? To feel like an adventure? Or to feel like they are in safe hands? Look at your brand values, the attitudes in your business and the promises you make to your audience. These make up your brand experience. So for my business, I might identify ‘fresh perspectives’ as the key brand experience.
2. What do you want your audience to understand?
What is the one belief you want to communicate and want your audience to leave with after the interaction with you? Do you want your audience to understand that you work with purpose-led businesses? That you use a certain methodology? That you want to disrupt the way your industry works? For the Allotment, I might pinpoint ‘great ideas grow businesses’ as my brand understanding, as that is our fundamental belief.
3. What do you want your audience to think?
What thought do you want in the minds of your audience after the interaction? This could be linked to your mission, so that your audience have a clear thought about what you are striving to achieve as a business. I want my audience to be thinking about putting ideas at the heart of their business.
4. What do you want your audience to feel?
What emotional response do you want any interaction with your brand to provoke in your audience? Do you want them to feel excited or reassured, challenged or secure? I aim for my audience to feel as if they can be more creative in growing their business.
5. What do you want your audience to remember?
We would like our audience to be so wowed by our brand experience that they remember every single element of it. But that is not always going to happen. So what single impression do you want to make in the hearts or minds of your audience? What is the most important impression you want to leave? One brand fingerprint that is perhaps more significant than the rest. This could be one of the fingerprints above, or something else that summarises what you want your brand experience to be. Too sum up the Business Allotment’s experience, I would say something like: The Allotment is the place where businesses grow creatively.
“Brand is defined by those who experience it.”
Making the right brand impressions
Now you have your brand fingerprints, make a list of the most common interaction points your audience has with your brand. There will be many, many touchpoints, so work on the most common five or ten in your business, such as your website, your Facebook page, emails, networking and invoices.
Make a grid with the touchpoints down the side and the brand fingerprints across the top. Ask for each touchpoint:
1. How to we make this touchpoint give a flavour of the overall experience we want to impart?
2. How do we help the audience understand our core belief at this touchpoint?
3. How do we leave our audience with a key thought about our mission?
4. How can we help the audience feel what we want them to at this interaction?
5. How can we help our audience remember the one most important thing?
Touchpoints such as your website and social media are perfect for ensuring you are leaving the right impression with your audience - you have the space and time to tell the story of your brand and leave the right impressions. You may not be able to create all five impressions on every single brand touch point – such as an invoice (which is why number 5 is so important).
But it is not difficult to weave in at least one or two. I worked with a client who retailed amazing, colourful bags, and she wanted her customers to always be left feeling happy. So she printed full colour, eye-popping images on the back of her invoices and always included a little joke at the bottom. That was a brand interaction worth remembering for her audience.
Mr B’s Emporium, an independent book retailer, sends out books to subscribers in the most beautiful layered packaging, along with a postcard asking for the customer’s opinion on the book. The impression left? That they understand that tactility is a fundamental part of the book lovers’ experience, that they are all about quality, and that unwrapping your book is a surprise and a little adventure, just like when you open the cover of a new book.
Think about how the small businesses around you create great brand impressions. How can they inspire you to create similar experiences for your audience?
If you can nail your brand fingerprints (pardon the pun), you can create consistent experiences for your audience that are distinctly yours. Get creative about how to leave your impressions and there will be one emotion that your audience are guaranteed to be: impressed.