30 Seconds To a Better Brand
I just took a 30-second branding quiz. While silly, mocking and in poor taste (in other words, don't try this at work), a piece of its advice was useful: it would help me immensely to have my personal brand, or better yet, my avatar, blown-up in a video game. Especially if that were the goal of the game. Editors everywhere would ask me to write about that and pay very high word rates, I'm sure.
More seriously, it was 30 worthwhile seconds if you:
- Feel like your branding experts are stuffy and wish you could say so;
- Hope to inspire some anarchic re-thinking of your brand strategy;
- Want to see a reasonably effective use of automated humor to push a product.
Your brand should be repositioned as a category standard. Your attributes are enviable, yet exemplary; fast, yet slow; discovered, yet unkown. There's a comprehensive branding strategy waiting just for you, but it will cost the salaries of a few hundred of your middle managers. They'll understand.It then goes on to make a pitch for a book on branding.Your brand strategy should be to provide multi-layer experience opportunities at various customer touchpoints to maximize the essence of your unique value proposition. Buzz marketing is the way to go, especially if you can get college students to associate your brand with 11:24 pm.
Stay true to your brand convictions. Red says 'look at me,' so use it exclusively, even if it means placing red text on a red background. Make your CEO start a blog and post something every 10 minutes. If you have trucks, convert them to run on cologne. Pay to get your product blown up in a video game.