How to build a brand through subtraction.

As a small company or a freelancer it can be tough to build a brand from the ground up.

Yes, you can create a logo and a tagline within just a few days. But a brand is a lot more than simply a cool logo and a snappy tagline.

And, no, you can’t build a brand within just a few days, a few weeks or a few months even.

Your brand will grow and develop through a combination of your own efforts, and the ways in which your customers see and respond to you. You brand is as much a function of customer reaction as it is a creation of your own making.

For example, if you sell a great product, but your customer service is horrible, that horrible customer service will become part of your brand.

You take the first step in creating your brand through design and writing. After that, once it’s out there in the wild, your brand will evolve. It will get some support from some customers, and take some hits from others. Your job is to both develop your brand, and to protect it.

When it comes to developing a brand, a lot of freelancers and small businesses think in terms of addition. They add more content, they express their brand through new channels, and across different media.

For example, one might add a YouTube channel, start pushing out images with Instagram, or write a ton of new posts that support the brand and its underlying message and promise.

But what most marketers don’t think about is supporting and building their brand by the process of subtraction.

When you add new information to grow a brand, you are taking a guess. You are guessing and hoping that the additions you make will have a positive impact. But you don’t know for sure because, like I said, your brand is in large part influenced by customer responses. And you don’t know how your customers will respond. That’s in the future, and unknown.

But when you subtract information to support your brand you can be much more certain about what you are doing, because you are dealing with the present, which you know, not the future, which you don’t know.

To start with, you might want to do an audit of all your existing content and identify pages and other content that doesn’t support your brand as clearly as it should, is attracting negative comments, or simply isn’t being read.

When you eliminate content that is off-message, confusing, or simply not supporting your brand and its promise, the remaining content becomes stronger and your brand becomes clearer.

Few people strengthen their brand by subtraction because it feels counterintuitive. People feel that building something has to happen through a process of creation, not elimination.

But this isn’t true.

When asked how he could carve a sculpture as remarkable as “David” out of stone, Michelangelo is reported to have said, “It’s simple. I just remove everything that is not David.”

You can build and protect your brand in the same way.

Just remove everything that isn’t your brand.

 

About the author: Nick Usborne is an online writer, copywriter, author and coach. Read more…

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