It’s not your logo or your colors or your font. Those things are your brand IMAGE, but they aren’t your brand.
Your brand is an idea…a feeling…an experience.
To quote David Ogilvy: brand is “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it’s advertised.”
Think about that: intangible – attributes – reputation.
What you think your brand is doesn’t matter. What matters is what your audience thinks it is.
And all of us good little marketers nod our heads in agreement with the above. Yet we consistently talk about brand and act in ways that indicate that what we really believe is that brand is something *we* determine and *we* control and that *we* can change from anything to anything at will.
And that’s just wrong.
You can’t control your brand directly.
What you can do is act consistently in a way that supports the thoughts, images, and most importantly, emotions and experiences you want to be.
What can you do today to find out what your audience really thinks of you? What’s one action you can take to help move that perception into closer alignment with what you’d like it to be?