On Friday I told the story of my recent hardware meltdown. For this reason I’ve delayed the fifth element of the circuit questionnaire, in the hope I can recover the draft. So, this post is the first in a new series about branding and asks: why you do what you do.
You may have followed my overview of the five elements of marketing found in the circuit questionnaire:
- You / Your Brand
- Products / Services
- Proposition
- Problem
- Market (to follow)
Now we’re returning to the beginning and will explore each element in more detail, several weeks more detail.
Why am I doing this?
Marketing is not just for selling things. I never worked in the private sector until relatively late in life but when I started to study marketing, I found it familiar. As a seasoned campaigner, starting with the environmental movement in the early seventies, before university, through the peace movement in the late seventies and then as a community development worker and member of the Green Party, I have used marketing techniques for most of my life. I didn’t think of them in that way.
Marketing is not an activity that goes back the 1950s, with the start of commercial television; modern marketing probably started in the late nineteenth century, with consumer culture. But really it goes way back to classical times and the study of rhetoric. What is rhetoric? It is the art of persuasion, whether in speech or writing.
The key to persuasion is building a relationship. So, when I leafleted on the streets against cruise missiles in the late seventies, if I entered into a conversation, the important thing was not only the information I had but also the way I presented myself.
Your Brand is You
Your brand is not so much the thing that you sell as that aspect of you or your business people trust. You might have the best product in the world but if you are not trusted, no-one will buy. So, whatever you sell, you need to have a compelling story that explains why you do what you do.
People never buy what you’re selling, they buy why you’re selling it. You need a story and it needs to be a personal story. People will relate to what motivates you. Whatever it is that motivates you is likely to motivate others. It won’t motivate everyone and so your task is to find those who motivated by your story.
Why I Do What I Do
Here are my answers to the question: Why do you do what you do? I do what I do because …
- I have spent my life working in communities and looking back it’s frustrating
- we’ve thrown millions at our communities to little effect
- I’ve seen brilliant projects close and leave nothing behind
- few know how to regenerate local economies let alone understand the problem
- the voluntary sector neglects local economies
- this leads to disadvantaged communities with few prospects of development
- caused by grant dependency
- caused by dependency on public sector and estrangement of local businesses
- injustice is at the root of this and we need to find fairer ways of running our economy
Your Response
Now, this may or may not appeal to you. If it does, sign up to my e-book, details below. It is free and you will also receive a weekly update of my blog posts, so you can follow what I’m doing. Apart from five introductory emails, I rarely send broadcast emails and so I will not clutter your inbox with loads of unwanted emails.
If it doesn’t appeal to you, why are you still reading? Maybe because you’re following what I’m saying about branding and you’re not distracted by my particular brand. That’s good. You can perhaps see you don’t need to agree with me. Your brand might be opposite of mine. If you think you can sell it, good luck with that. I’m using my business as a worked example throughout these posts. If you find the posts helpful, then you don’t need to be sympathetic to my brand. So, please consider signing up below. You don’t have to read the e-book and you will receive a weekly reminder about these posts and the other topics on my blog.
That’ll do for today. Next time I’ll explore why I do what I do in more depth.
