Whatever the process you undertake for your community – from Web development to branding to market analysis to business recruitment to marketing in general – the planning stage should be long enough to point you in the right direction and short enough to keep the momentum going into the implementation phase.
Plans are only as good as their implementation, and we’ve seen far too many plans sit in drawers idle… a waste.
The preservation of your community and business lays in the hands of the preservers… you. Your community or business stands for something, embodies something. It is something special. It holds a sense of place.
Your community or business BRAND is a reputation, not a logo.
With that in mind, the first step to preserving your community’s or business’ brand is to preserve your reputation.
What is your reputation? What experience do you sell? What do people believe, think, feel about you, your community, your business? How do you make sure they keep believing, thinking or feeling that?
If you don’t know, how will you preserve it?
Once you have defined the nature of your reputation, also known as your defined experience, then you can create physical symbols – a bank, so to speak – that will embody and safely hold your reputation, your experience, your brand. These concrete visual symbols will carry the weight of your consistent, well-defined and well-preserved brand and be the beacon that will shine your reputation – your brand – into your world. Your world is your target customer – old customers and prospective customers, your community of supporters and preservationists…
When you get the definition nailed down, the visual brand should have three parts:
- Logo
- Color scheme
- Domain name
Slogans are optional. And sometimes used to excess, in my opinion. A great slogan is good. A bad slogan is harmful. No slogan backed by a great reputation and experience is the best.
It does come full circle, doesn’t it? A brand is just a reputation. It is the preservation of who you are as a community or business. With a well-defined reputation, you can create a physical, visual brand – or a logo, color scheme and domain name combo that embodies your reputation. And once you have this physical embodiment, you must continue to preserve your brand – your reputation – by continuously upholding, even enriching, your experience and allowing your supporters to help you in the business of preservation. Brand preservation is a community effort and the community is larger than your city limits.
What do you think? How has your branding experience worked? Has the planning led to great implementation? Tell us your stories so we can all learn.
