Marketing Q&A: How Do I Move My Brand Beyond ME?

I get marketing questions through my e-newsletter, the Roundup, and occasionally my response gets to involved to fit in the short space of that email. This one's a good one, so I'm posting it here instead.


I have great products, but my brand is very caught up in me - my background, my sense of aesthetics, and my story. At some point someone else will have to do some selling. So, how do I build my brand as a separate entity from me?

Every (smart) business owner struggles with this as we begin to grow. Service businesses in particular may struggle with this because the service provider is often seen as the product being sold. And many owners play into this by defining themselves by their business. Even if they do recognize it, they often remain paralyzed with the fear of shifting the company towards a depersonalized, profit-driven approach, rather than the values-driven approach they started with.

The key to branding, though, is not to jettison the owner’s value system, but to align it with the needs and wants of the marketplace. As you're realizing, it's not enough to know who you are and what you want for your company—you also need to meet the marketplace on its own terms. This is especially true in economic times like these, when the marketplace can be exceptionally finicky.

Companies who define themselves by their owners, then, have a hard time; it's very difficult to align you as a person with the marketplace, which is about me as a consumer. Most small businesses that brand themselves as their owner find success only inasmuch as they happen to meet people who share the owner's values, personality, and aesthetics. This is an exceedingly inefficient approach that doesn’t scale up very well as the business grows. Typically, owners using this approach max out such a limited market and the business plateaus.

So, in practical terms, what does an owner do to create a brand that can stand on its own, apart from the owner? Having gone through this process with a nonprofit client earlier this year, I can tell you the most effective way to do this is to allow your personal values to inform the brand, rather than define it.

The process starts with a whole mess of research:

• Current brand audit: Take stock of your company, your products or services, the benefits and value you bring to your consumers, etc.
• Current customer audit: Identify and organize your current customer base by as many variables as possible. This includes identifying how your current customers perceive your company.
• Market research and competitive research: You can’t operate in a bubble, so you need to know what everyone around you is doing.

Now, this initial research is the part that most business owners skip. Don’t. The information you gather holds the key to your self-sufficient brand. Gathering it is, of course, a lot of work. Parsing it into a cohesive brand that accurately and effectively reflects all of the truths you’ve discovered is not just a challenge, it’s an art form (there’s a reason smart businesses outsource this to people like yours truly). But as I said earlier: it’s not enough to know what you want out of your business. You have to align those values, along with everything else about your company, with the realities of the marketplace. When done well, the results are an incredibly strong brand that resonates with consumers regardless of whether or not you’re delivering the message personally.