Why Your Brand Needs a Beating Heart
Cat Archer Underwood, founder of Coho Digital talks to us about the wonderful world of branding and why it's so important in business.
Your brand serves you best when it has a beating heart. What do I mean by that? I mean when it carries life inside of it that your audience can feel & connect with.
When they believe you, but more than that, they believe in you.
Entrepreneurial life
Do you ever feel as though you have all of this bubbling, fireball, impatient, buzzing style energy inside you that sort of tumbles out as a myriad of new ideas, messages, products or even entire new businesses!?
Many business owners are multi-passionate by nature. We struggle to quiet our minds & we struggle sometimes to pursue the things that will serve us best in our businesses, because there are just so many things going on.
For example, have you ever tweaked the same paragraph of copy on your website at least ten times? Or spent far too long in Canva for just one Instagram post? Or started a dozen things at once only to finish a grand total of none!?
This is where Brand Strategy can help.
A different perspective
I have a strong belief that truth is the centre of everything that feels amazing to us.
When you truly connect with someone - laugh so much you have stomach ache, or hit it off instantly & feel like you’ve known each other for years - I bet it’s because you’re being exactly as you are; no pretences, no judgements, no fear of being judged. And it’s liberating, right?
What if Brand is the same idea? What if Brands were truthful extensions of what makes us unique, incredible, relatable, entrepreneurs (...aka humans)?
Even if you are a big business with a large infrastructure & board of directors, if your brand is built upwards & outwards from what’s real, it can connect you to the world in a way that feels truthful & amazing.
And we all know people buy from you when they feel good about it; when they know, like you & trust you. Brand Strategy is the process to land on these truths.
Your core message
Simon Sinek talks a lot about finding your ‘why’ & building outwards from there. He cites Nelson Mandela & Apple as brilliant case studies.
With Apple, he sets out all of the products that you might not associate with a computer company, but you buy them because you believe in the brand; you believe the brand is going to do something good for you.
It’s this type of belief that I want for YOUR brand & it all starts with that core, truthful message.
A tip on finding your why
Start with the bigger picture & work down from there. For example, let’s say you’re a health coach, your ‘big picture why’ is because you believe lives are enriched by good health.
But this is probably the same as lots of other health coaches. So move it along a notch to add in another layer of detail. What do you feel is the best way to achieve it? Why is it so important?
Preach much?
If there’s something you just LOVE to rant about, that gets you passionate, excited & all-together on your soap-box, this often holds clues on what drives you to do what you do.
Summary
Through all the chaos, ideas & creating that is business ownership, it can be easy to spend a lot of time in the what & how of it all. And that’s great - it has a place - but it’s pretty changeable; which means you may spend lots of time tweaking copy, changing your mind about colour & altering your message.
When you have a strong core to your brand, aka a beating heart, it not only breathes life into it; it makes life so much easier for you, because you have complete confidence in your message so day-to-day you make faster, confident decisions that you stick with.
To refine your own brand strategy, Cat is running a one-day intensive workshop in Winchester, created especially for entrepreneurs ready to master their brand. It’s on 15th June at Hotel du Vin & includes time afterwards for champagne & networking.
To find out more about Cat and the world of branding, head over to her website or follow her on Instagram