The Importance of Defining Your Brand as an Entrepreneur

Your brand is a lot more than your logo and the colours and images you use in your social media content and on your website. But when you ask a lot of entrepreneurs to define their brand, they’ll tell you things like “It’s light, airy, effortless.” Those are great words to describe a dress or your home decor, but your brand? Not so much!

As an entrepreneur, you need to get a lot more specific about defining your brand. 

What is a brand?

Before we talk more about the importance of defining your brand, let’s start with this great definition of branding from Seth Godin:

“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. If the consumer (whether it’s a business, a buyer, a voter or a donor) doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that consumer.”

You see? A brand is a lot more than your logo and your brand colours. (Not that those things don’t matter—but they’re not everything)

The Importance of Defining Your Brand

Now you know what a brand is, but let’s talk more about defining your own brand. When you do this, it puts you in the driver’s seat of your brand. Rather than leaving things like how your brand makes consumers feel or the values it represents up to chance, you can actively choose these things. 

But in order to take control of your brand, you first need to know what kind of brand you want to be. And that’s where defining your brand comes in!

How to Define Your Brand

There’s a reason many entrepreneurs take part in what’s known as “branding exercises.” The beautiful thing about these exercises is they can be done at any point in your entrepreneurial journey. Even if your business has been around for years, if you’ve never actively defined your brand, the time is now. 

As you define your brand, you’ll gain clarity about your business, your customers, and your values. This clarity and clear vision of how you want to represent your business and make customers feel will help guide your marketing messages, customer interactions, and virtually every other part of your business.

There are all kinds of branding exercises out there (see a list of ten of them here). But for now, I’ll leave you with one that involves developing a brand persona. This exercise involves giving your brand a personality, and getting really specific about the kind of person your brand would be.

Here’s what you do: 

• Find a picture of a person who personifies your ideal brand
• Give this person a name, and age, an occupation
• Write down as many facts about them as possible, with your brand values in mind
• Cover any particular struggles or roadblocks your person/brand experiences

With this brand persona, you can use it to help guide your business decisions and how your brand exists in this world. When it comes to making tough decisions, you can ask yourself how your brand persona would react in that situation. Keeping in mind, this brand persona is the ideal personification of your brand.

But that’s just one branding exercise! Find one that excites you and give it a try. Can’t wait to hear what you come up with.