Branding

It’s never too early to begin thinking about brands and branding. A brand is simply that public perception with which potential (or current!) customers or readers identify you.

• A brand can be a name: “Colton of JackColton.com” (interview with Colton coming soon!)
• A brand can be an approach: “The total management quality guy”
• A brand can be a trademarked identifier: “The Telephone Doctor”
• A brand can be an attribute: “The hundred thousand dollar blogger“

Brands can be many things, but the objective of all the techniques is that they establish your particular value in the eyes of the customer or the reader: reliable, experienced, relevant, consistent, and so forth. Think of the great brands… Coca Cola, Levis, Nike, Kleenex. They evoke confidence and quality. And these brand owners are also consistently reinforcing and protecting their brand.

The moral of all this is that a brand is what you make it, and that brand can be you, your services, your attributes, or any combination of those factors.

The brand I’m currently working on is one I fondly refer to as “Chris Bloczynski”. Some people might think that my name makes a terrible brand, but I beleive that it’s strong in its recognizability (although thoroughly unspellable
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Stay tuned for a series I’m developing on branding. The title of the next post in the series? “Ten techniques to making your brand memorable.”