Brand Values – What Does Your Business Stand For?

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 12:50 pm

This is a bit off the topic, but I believe in a holistic approach to technology and business and one of the most important aspects of your business is how it is perceived and what is stands for.

The message of my company Busara is currently very muddled; if you go to the home page of our website you will see it says that we do digital, web, branding and print. If someone asks me what Busara does I cannot articulate it and this shows itself in the messaging of our website and printed collateral. Looking at the business from a detached point of view, the messaging is very confused and this is the case with a lot of small companies that have grown very fast; they have not had the time to decide what the company stands for. Larger companies have people or even whole departments dedicated to promoting, developing and communicating brand values.

Rationale

So today we had a workshop with Alison Down who is an Executive Coach specialising in brand engagement and has worked in many iconic companies including Apple. She came in to help us distil what Busara does and what our brand values are to help us communicate to clients. The session lasted about four hours and in that time we got feedback from our clients and colleagues to see what their external view of the present brand values are.

Busara has recently gone through a major transformation where by myself and the creative director Kin are now major shareholders in the business. This means that Busara has gone from 100% sole ownership to more of a partnership with multiple owners. As such this is a chance for us to really take the bull by the horns and put our stamp on the values, vision and direction of the company. We all want to create something we are proud of and that will flourish for years to come.

Step 1: About Us

The first step before we even considered the brand was to find out about ourselves. A company reflects its owner’s personality, aspirations and dreams. Through a series of questions we found out what makes us tick when we are in the zone. Alison asked us to recount a time when we worked at our best, when we really enjoyed ourselves and what brought out the best in us.

The result was the image on the right which showed our top three or four characteristics for each of us A (is me Arif) and K (is Kin). This was very interesting as myself and Kin have always worked so well together and the that was reflected in the cross over and complimenting of our best skills.

Step 2: What Busara Does Well

Now that had established what made us tick we moved on to what Busara currently does well. This gave us an idea of what strengths we should be highlighting and shouting about to clients.

We went through some of our case studies looking at successful projects, we analysed what people remember about us, we looked at the strengths of the team and also their individual strengths. We looked at our existing collateral to see if there was any phrases that we liked that highlighted what we are good at.

Step 3: Big Buckets

Then we wanted to find the big areas that we wanted to focus on from our strengths. These big buckets highlight the main three or four areas that we want to hang our hat on. They were very raw and not very refined but we were slowly honing in on what we are.

We ended up with the following buckets:

Strategic/ lateral thinking
Exceptional design
Beautifully crafted technology solutions
Credible experience with big brands
Solving client problems with creative solutions

Step 4: Elevator Pitch

Then after a short break we each had a go at writing a mission statement based on the big buckets listed about. We did it very quickly myself and Kin had about two or three minutes to write something very raw.

I came up with:

“Busara is a digital creative agency that delivers exceptional design with beautifully craft technology. We have expertise working with big brands solving problems with creative ideas.”

Kin wrote:

“Busara are creative thinkers who solve client problems. Our credible expertise is backed up with the exceptional work we do with big brands.”

Conclusion

At the end of the session we then tried to combine our elevator pitches and ran into real problems. The reason is that myself and Kin have different visions for the business I see the company as a digital, technology company and Kin really enjoys the print and branding side of the business. This session was a very healthy way of finding out that we are pulling in different directions, this must be resolved before we can really move forward and grow. We spent about half an hour chatting and finally came to the conclusion that we cannot distil the vision of the company until we are both agreed on the direction we want to go. We are going to have another session with Alison in a week’s time to find some common group for moving forward.

Personally I really enjoyed the session and got a huge amount our of working in such a structured way with Alison, she brought a lot of experience to the meeting and acted as an independent facilitator when there were details to iron out.

I must stress that I am not a marketing expert and do not have a large amount of experience in this but as a business owner it is one area that I am really going to concentrate on, on a daily basis. Marketing, brand, culture, messaging and communication are the life blood of new and repeat business, they also help create a guiding vision for the people who work for you and build a culture where people enjoy themselves everyday.

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