Posted on June 16, 2010 - by Kwame

How to Add a Unique Voice to Your Brand: 14 Tips and Ideas to Help You Win

Differentiating your brand from other brands can be a daunting activity these days. This is because of the many other brands that are also out there competing for attention from the same audience you need.

In this article, we will not be looking at the very basics of brand recognition: logo and brand colors. What I’ll be sharing with you are tips that will give your brand a unique image and the unique voice it needs to speak to its audience. I am using the word “unique” because every brand has a voice so if I use just “voice” it will sound too regular. You don’t want a regular brand. That sucks.

When your brand has a unique voice, every message it sends out is heard by its audience; the right audience. Your audience will then send out your message to other people who may already be involved in your brand’s conversations or may be total strangers to your brand.

All-in-all, it is essential to give your brand a voice that can be differentiated from the masses.

Let’s look at the ideas you can use to boost your brand.

1. Use a Powerful USP: I am not going to assume you already know what a USP is, so I’m going to define it. A USP is the abbreviation for Unique Selling Proposition, which is a feature of a product or brand that makes it different from other products or brands it competes with. To form a strong brand, you will need a powerful USP that people will want to put to test. For example, a pizza delivery service may have, “we deliver in 30 minutes” as their USP. If you have a pizza delivery service and you think you can deliver in 20 minutes within a certain radius, use “we deliver in 20 minutes within ‘x’ miles” as your USP. Use USPs that sound better than your competitors’ USPs and you will be one step toward winning.

Caution: Be sure you can guarantee that you can deliver on your USPs promise before you put it out in public. If you don’t do this and you keep on breaking your promises, you will fail fast.

2.Use a Mascot: Mascots are great brand building assets. The Santa Clause we know today was a mascot for a Coca-cola X’mas campaign. The campaign was so successful that the image of the mascot spread across borders and the jolly mascot in the red and white suit is what so many people around the world refer to as Santa Clause or Father Christmas in some countries. It’s a shame so many people don’t know about where the new Santa Clause image (as we know it today) came from. You can also create a mascot that will spread your brand’s voice across borders.

3. Create a Tradition: Start a brand tradition. Some businesses have a freebie day as their tradition. They give out free stuffs only on those days. This gets people to spread the word out to their friends. You can choose to do certain things on certain days; on your brand’s birthday, or on Christmas day or Independence day. It could be a once in a month, once a week or once in a year tradition. It could also be a full day or half day event. Choose a day and do something remarkable on that day. Some ideas: give your biggest discounts on those days, host customer meetups on those days only.

4. Customer Participation: Host online and offline meetups for your customers. Get them involved in competitions. Choose brand evangelists from them. They own your brand on the internet now so give them a chance to be part of it. When you do great things for your customers, they will do greater things for you. Reciprocity, remember?

Below is a video of a Mini Cooper meetup. Mini Cooper owners met to showcase their cars and engage in Mini conversations. Can you imagine the benefits? Watch the video and see what I mean.

5. Staff Participation: You and your staff need to participate in customer meetups, your business’ online communities and industry events. Wear T-shirts with your brand’s identity to events that don’t have a dress code attached to the invitation. If you have a mascot, you can even take it along.

6. Practice Barter: There might be an area in your business that itches constantly. Get another business to scratch that itch so that you scratch theirs. Every business has an itch. If you are great at accounting and awful at marketing, marketing is your itch. There are businesses that also have accounting as their itches but that are great at marketing. If there is a situation like this, you can exchange your “itch scratching” services instead of paying for them. You can then ask the other business to list you as their partner on their website or other places both of you deem suitable.

7. Leverage influence: Do you know of a place where your target market is constantly gathered? Blogs are great examples of where you can find your target audience. Reach out to influential bloggers to publish reviews of your products to their readers for a fee or service exchange (remember barter?). When you reach out to influencers, be succinct and straight to the point; don’t go on and on with your idea in the first message. If they want to know more, they will ask you. You can also choose to write guest posts for them if you don’t want to pay with your time (at least, much of it) or money.

8. Start a cause: If you have the support, start a cause. By support, I don’t necessarily mean money. Having a large customer base is also support. Help people save the environment, help people feed orphans, help people save animals, help people do… et cetera. Put your brand forward. Be genuine; no melodrama accepted please.

9. Watch Your Footsteps: Watch your brand’s activities in order to keep your reputation clean. Your competitors will be watching your footsteps and they may be ready to bring you down. Cover where you step by first making sure it’s the right place to step. Makes sense doesn’t it ? Maybe it doesn’t. Okay, if you step in mud, it will show in your footprints and people will see it. Now it makes more sense .

10. Follow your Mission and Vision: Many businesses with mission and vision statements get side-tracked at some point in time. Some just write their missions and visions and then leave them on the desk to collect dust. They are among the 90% who fail. Want to win? Don’t let your mission and vision statements collect dust. If you don’t like it, re-strategize and change its content.

11. Create a comic: There’s nothing like a good laugh right? Consider hiring someone to create a comic about what your brand or the industry you find yourself in. Make a comic of your brand (or your mascot. That is, if you have one) kicking the ass of your biggest competitor. Make it funny, put it on your site, make it downloadable and encourage people to share it. Have your own ideas? Play with them and get that comic out.

12. Get Free Media Publicity: Getting media publicity is fairly easy. You just have to be worthy to be talked about. Perhaps, you started a cause about the environment and have made some contributions. Great! Request to share your story on the green channel or in the green magazine. Maybe a big industry player was at your event. That is great too. Interview that person and give it to the appropriate media to publish or broadcast for the price of them making reference to your business as the source. Don’t be shy to ask for the credit. If you do something remarkable, work at getting free media publicity.

13. Consider Your Website: On your website, tell people about your traditions and everything about your brand. Get them interested in you. If you communicate your brand’s story with them, they will be easily convinced to get involved with you. Integrate your social profiles on your website so that your audience can engage with you on the social side of the internet.

14. Be Consistent: There has never been an inconsistent brand that won the battle of branding. If you are not consistent with your branding efforts, you send different (very confusing) signals out to your target audience. If you want to win, be consistent with your efforts in all branding areas.

Did you get any ideas from this list? Write them down. Develop a strategy on how you are going to deploy them and take action. Don’t leave your brand’s tongue hanging out like “blahh”. Put it back into its mouth and let it start talking.