Brand Identity Breakthrough E-Book

Gregory Diehl

• Herausgeber: Identity Publications
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Does your business have a story to tell? It should! From the moment you first opened your doors, you began crafting it. With every new product you release, you carve out an even more unique niche in your industry. This all builds up to one thing—brand identity. Does yours stand out from the crowd?  With a decade of experience studying businesses across the world, Diehl has unlocked the key to creating innovative brand identities and distinct business stories. In Brand Identity Breakthrough, you and your small business will learn how to develop a strong brand identity by combining your personality and values with the functionality of your products, becoming an irreplaceable brand and company.  Whether you lead a growing company, or are just starting out, Brand Identity Breakthrough will give you a smarter way to think about product development flow, branding, brand mapping strategy, and business model generation. With proven, and well-organized logic, it will set you on the path to selling more—and at higher prices—giving the customers exactly what they want and sending your profits through the roof.  In Brand Identity Breakthrough, you will learn… •How to incorporate a unique selling proposition into your branding •The best methods for selling products to customers as a small business •How to use business storytelling to sell products in both physical and online marketplaces

Leseprobe

Brand Identity Breakthrough

HOW TO CRAFT YOUR COMPANY’S UNIQUE STORY TO MAKE YOUR PRODUCTS IRRESISTIBLE

By Gregory V. Diehl

Foreword by Alex Miranda

Also by Gregory V. Diehl:

Travel As Transformation: Conquer The Limits of Culture to Discover Your Own Identity

Copyright © 2016 by Gregory V. Diehl.

All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying or recording, storing in or sharing via any information storage and retrieval system, or transmitting via email, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses allowed by copyright law.       

While all attempts have been made to verify the information provided in this publication, neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretations of the subject matter herein. This book is for entertainment purposes only. The views expressed are those of the author alone, and should not be taken as expert instruction or commands. The reader is responsible for his or her own actions. Adherence to all applicable laws and regulations, including international, federal, state and local governing professional licensing, business practices, advertising, and all other aspects of doing business in the US, Canada or any other jurisdiction is the sole responsibility of the purchaser or reader. Neither the author nor the publisher assume any responsibility or liability whatsoever on the behalf of the purchaser, reader or user of these materials.       

Any perceived slight of any individual or organization is purely unintentional.

Third Edition, January 2017

Gregory V. Diehl

www.GregoryDiehl.net

Brand Identity Breakthrough

www.BrandIdentityBreakthrough.com

IdentityPublications

www.IdentityPublications.com

To inquire about getting your own book or course produced, published, or promoted, please send an email to:

[email protected]

Ordering Information:

Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others at the web address above.

Study Guide

Go to www.brandidentitybreakthrough.com/free to download the Brand Identity Breakthrough study guide and introduction to the online course.

Dedicated to Shola Abidoye and the team at Convertport – who through their incredulous actions inadvertently set me on the path of authorship. She allowed me to demonstrate to the world that there is no bad situation that cannot be made good through the filter of a purposeful mind.

Table of Contents

Brand Identity Breakthrough

Also by Gregory V. Diehl:

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Section I: Why Identity Matters

Introduction to Why Identity Matters

Chapter 1: Can You Tell a Good Story?

Chapter 2: When Good Ideas Fail

Chapter 3: Why You Don’t See Your Own Value

Chapter 4: Why Others Don’t See Your Value

Section II: Creating Your Brand Identity

Introduction to Creating Your Brand Identity

Chapter 5: Uncovering Your Core Values

Chapter 6: Developing a Unique Selling Proposition

Chapter 7: Crafting Your Personality Profile

Chapter 8: Knowing Your Target Audience

Section III: Telling Your Story to the World

Introduction to Telling Your Story to the World

Chapter 9: How to Sell Who You Are

Chapter 10: How to Speak with Clarity, Authority, and Authenticity

Chapter 11: How to Display Your Character through Writing

Chapter 12: How to Educate Your Audience

Section IV: Brand Identity Case Studies

Introduction to Brand Identity Case Studies

Case Study # 1 Unifying Brand Meaning Across Every Domain

Case Study # 2: Pre-Seeding a Two-Sided Marketplace for Launch

Case Study # 3: Turning a Charity Project into a Profitable Movement

Case Study # 4: Skyrocketing a Personal Brand through Narrative Focus

Case Study # 5: Embracing Personality in a Technical Niche

Section V: Resources for Prospective Entrepreneurs

Introduction to Resources for Prospective Entrepreneurs

Appendix 1: Entrepreneurial Terms Defined

Appendix 2: 50 Useful Starting Questions for New Entrepreneurs

Appendix 3: Making Money Online

Want More?

About the Author

Acknowledgements

FOREWORD

By Alex Miranda

What if I told you that you didn’t have to spend 10 years in the mountains of the Himalayas to find out your purpose in life?

What if there was a formula for finding the ONE THING you were born to accomplish in your time here on Earth as an entrepreneur?

This has been the search I’ve been on since 2008. And when I met Gregory Diehl in 2014, I found someone else that had also discovered the secret, and we’re now on the same mission in life: to help others find their identity.

I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was six years old and never really stopped. Like most of us, it started with selling some candy or lemonade, then transitioned to manual labor, like washing cars or mowing lawns. As we grow older we find more creative ways of making money. From playing music on the corner for cash to (illegally) selling pirated CDs or other substances, we entrepreneurs find a way to move forward in our pursuit of… well… what?

That’s what I love about this book. I’m confident that the readers of this book will fully understand WHY they are even doing what they are doing, and then be able to translate that into a business with purpose.

Gregory and I met because I own a branding agency called Creative Complex. We’ve helped so many passionate entrepreneurs bring their visions to life by providing branding services (logos, websites, slogans, etc.). One part of a brand is their key messaging to the world. Gregory and I have partnered on many projects where I tap into his gift, which is to help people. We meet with the client at the beginning of a project, complete a brand analysis, and craft a USP (Gregory will explain later) that will help the company tell the world exactly what they do, who they serve, and why they’re doing it.

But Gregory wasn’t around at the beginning of my company. I started the firm in 2005 with a couple of friends. We turned our living room into a digital agency. This is when MySpace was becoming all the rage and the nightclubs in Miami were wanting to capitalize on it. We provided logos, websites, flyers, and of course, custom MySpace pages to the nightlife industry. Imagine three 20-something-year-olds owning an agency that, one year later, was headquartered on Miami Beach’s famous Washington Ave and 14th Street, across from Mansion Nightclub.

But after five years and a whole lot of liquor, I was getting tired of the nightlife. The clients weren’t great, the clubs would rarely last more than one year, the people came and went, and something inside of me was seeking a new direction for my personal life and my agency.

Up until that point in my life, I wasn’t really aware that there was something out there greater than me. I was an entrepreneur making it on my own. Isn’t that the point of entrepreneurialism, to make something for yourself?

That year I would have a radical change in my life: I started going back to church.

Since that day of transformation, I’ve found my own purpose and become a student of how God works within me and my business. I began to see everything in my branding agency as something I was doing because God needed it to exist. I left the nightlife 100%, never to collect another check from a club. I began to see my clients from a perspective of purpose, and asked myself questions like: “What does God want this person to do in business?” My clients started to range from lawyers to churches. I got so involved in helping my own church to build their identity that I authored the book Guide to Perfect Church Identity Branding to teach other churches what they need to know about amazing branding.

Needless to say, I’m passionate about finding one’s purpose. I’m passionate about identity branding, and I’m excited that a piece of work like this has come out to help entrepreneurs connect to what they were born to do.

I’ve sat down with thousands of entrepreneurs since the doors of my business opened. Everyone would come to me for logos and websites, so naturally, I’m the first guy that gets the call when a business is starting. And after helping people come up with their brands over and over, I’ve come to discover many of the same principles that you’ll learn in this book: the best brands are the ones that know what they were born to do in this world.

The Bible verse I found the most direction in was Jeremiah 29:11 - “For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

In my own life, I found that God had left clues for me, and he wanted me to know EXACTLY what those plans were. He wasn’t dangling a carrot or hiding Easter eggs for me to go on a hunt. The clues were sitting right there, waiting for me to discover.

Maybe you’re where I was in 2008, stuck in a business that wasn’t really giving you meaning and significance. You know you were meant for so much more, but struggle to know what it is.

Or maybe you are doing something you love, but you can’t seem to catch any momentum. You’re living paycheck to paycheck, sometimes unable to pay yourself because the employees need to be paid first. You’re in debt, your relationships are suffering, and you just want to quit and go back to a cushy nine-to-five situation like the rest of your “happy” friends.

Still, others of you have already committed entrepreneurial suicide and had to shut the business down. You’re knocked down, and you don’t know if you can get back up from this one. There was a fire inside, but the candle is long burnt out and the hopes of rekindling the relationship diminish each day.

Can I share with you something?

Wherever you find yourself in this spectrum, you need to know that life didn’t bring you this far to just kill the dream.

Your second wind is coming! This is your due season! How do I know? Because you’re holding this book.

In this book, Brand Identity Breakthrough, Gregory will teach you the practical steps to finding exactly what your purpose is in the business world and how to let your perfect target audience know that you’re there to serve them.

Never before has there been a time in history where knowing your identity is of such great importance. The modern paradigm of separating work life from personal life and higher purpose leaves a mind that is divided between what I do at home, what I do at work, and what I do in the world. We’re being forced to live three lives, so it’s no wonder we can’t nail down this entrepreneur thing.

I believe the best breakthrough in this book will come when you read and discover that if you let everything else go and stay true to exactly who you were created to be, the customers will magnetically come to you and you won’t need to struggle with marketing. You’ll begin to operate from a state of unconscious competence, a place where you are in line with your true identity and your business for answering what you are called to do.

See, I believe that to be “called” to something means that there’s a caller out there who wants you to succeed, has a purpose for you and your business, and it’s your duty, responsibility, and obligation to respond to that and conquer what’s yours. Every day you don’t is another day of feeling frustrated and angry at your current situation.

Gregory and I share the same beliefs about the importance of knowing who you are and your mission in life, and it’s why I was asked to write the foreword to this book. We both believe that your exact brand identity is already inside you waiting to be discovered so you too can break through to new levels of joy and existence. We both also believe that we are in a position to be messengers of that calling over your life, and we have a special gift of being able to sit with ANYONE, even non-entrepreneurs, and help them see what they were purposed to do with some simple questions. We’re living a life of purpose and on a mission to provide that value to others that are ready to respond.

This book will rock you to your core identity and wake you up into an existence worth living. And when you do find it, you’ll never look back. I thank God every day for his calling over my life. I hope that Gregory’s message will be taken across the entire globe, and I’m grateful to be a part of this journey with you, the reader, and the author.

Here to see your visions come to life.

Alex Miranda, B.S. Cornell University

Author, Guide to Perfect Church Identity Branding

PREFACE

Many business owners and entrepreneurs today don’t understand the essence of what it is that makes their ideas amazing. They lack both a narrative and deeper meaning to their business. They obsess over the most visible components of their brand, but ignore character and core values. Without these things, they will never reach the market appeal and penetration their products and services are capable of.

I wrote Brand Identity Breakthrough to help current and prospective business owners to craft valuable identities, and tell their story to the world. From day one, until long into the future, these strategies will continue to maximize your impact on the market. A comprehensive brand identity will save you countless missteps along the path to success. It can be the linchpin to marketplace dominance.

Any business or independent entrepreneur has the potential to stand out distinctly from their competition. If you personalize your approach, you can eliminate the side-by-side comparison buyers who intuitively make with other businesses in your industry, and occupy a category all your own. You won’t just be the best at what you do – you will be the only one who does what you do.

This book is a journey of personal discovery and value creation. Prepare to be asked difficult questions and discover real answers about who you are and what you are trying to accomplish in the world. Prepare to innovate unique solutions for your customers’ biggest problems. Prepare to show off the personality and philosophical values that will separate you from the crowd.

Set aside, for a moment, what you think you know will make your business successful. You are on your way to a compelling new identity that will forever change how your business operates in the world.

Entrepreneurs Learning to Tell Their Story

To you, the appeal of your product or service is obvious. But your audience doesn’t share your feelings. Why don’t other people understand your message? Why don’t they see the same benefits that are so obvious to you? Talking about what you do can be more difficult than actually doing it, especially if nobody taught you how to focus on the most pressing concerns of your audience. Brand Identity Breakthrough will give you the skills to talk about your idea in the most compelling way possible.

Startups Who Need a Fresh New Message

Where do you turn when your startup’s former strategies stop working? If you don’t know why your customers like working with you, you won’t know how to optimize your approach. You won’t know which actions are moving you closer to or further away from your goals. Brand Identity Breakthrough will teach you how to identify what makes your business valuable in the eyes of your audience and turn it into the consistent focal point of all your outreach.

Established Businesses Looking to Rebrand

Bigger goals will require your company to embrace a change in marketing focus. Maybe you’ve reached a point where your original messaging strategy cannot take you any further. It’s time to move the goal posts, and expand horizons. Is there a new vertical that you could easily break into if you knew how to reframe your value propositions or personality? Brand Identity Breakthrough will teach you how to present your company in line with your higher ambitions.

It is my earnest desire to help you to become the kind of person you always knew you could be, in business and in life.

Gregory V. Diehl

Author and Coach

www.gregorydiehl.net

INTRODUCTION

Imagine that you are aboard a plane that has crashed on an unpopulated tropical island. You are the sole survivor. As you survey your surroundings and scavenge what you can from the plane wreckage, you find limited supplies to aid you in your survival in this unknown environment: a book of matches, a blanket, a pocket knife, packaged meals, and enough material to establish a basic shelter.

Considering how much worse things could have been, you’d be very lucky to start your life of survival in these relatively comfortable conditions. You don’t have to put out any fires just yet or tend to any other time-sensitive emergencies. You have the luxury of taking some time to assess your surroundings and think critically about what to do next. Eventually, though, you will need to make a fundamental choice. This choice will determine everything that happens to you from that moment on. It is the choice to play things safe and minimize the potential for loss or to take strategic risks and maximize the potential for improvement.

Are you going to go out there and figure out how to hunt? Or are you just going to sit in your camp and hope somebody rescues you before you run out of supplies? Are you going to learn through trial and error how to fashion a spear so that you can hunt the wild boar? Will you discover how to collect rainwater and seek out sources for hydration? Are you going to experiment with building a stronger shelter to withstand the changing weather?

Or, will you play it safe and hide away, rationing whatever dwindling supplies you have in the hopes of lasting as long as possible until some outside force intervenes and saves you from this ugly situation? Do you see yourself a victim of circumstance, who can only be rescued by someone else with greater fortune? The longer you delay in making this fundamental choice, the more opportunities you will waste.

The daily reality for entrepreneurs is like that survival scenario on the island. You are forced to sink or swim, either to make the most of what you have to work with in your environment or refuse to take action for fear of making your situation worse. The life of your business depends on the actions you take right now.

At times, it can feel like you are grasping at every straw for meager results, and that you will always have to struggle to get by. If you persist for long enough and learn from your actions, you will eventually become a master of your environment. You will know without hesitation how hard to throw that spear at just the right angle to catch your dinner every night. Your identity will fundamentally change in response to the demands of the context you are in. You will not remain the same person you were before landing on the island if you embrace the process of adaptation.

The man who waits for rescue may indeed be lucky enough to be rescued. There is still a chance that he will live to see the future, but he will do so without having changed himself at all. He will have no new skills, knowledge, or character development. On the other hand, the man who masters his environment, even if rescued and returned to his earlier environment, will come away a forever changed individual who is ready to adapt once again and master any other environments life puts him in. He is capable of performing many functions and holding onto many identities, seamlessly shifting as the situation calls for it.

Maybe you already think that you have a pretty good handle on the business environment you’ve had to work with so far. Maybe your present level of information and abilities has been enough to sustain your personal brand or small business until now. But circumstances never stay the same for long. To thrive for any length of time, an entrepreneur, must be adaptable to the new environments he will eventually find himself in. If nothing ever changes, it simply means he is not growing. In the end, we are all either growing or dying.

Your brand identity is a product of your own development as an entrepreneur. Are you willing to become the kind of person who works towards mastery of his environment? Or are you just going to sit and wait for circumstances to change in your favor? What defines a master of identity is his level of comfort in situations of the unknown. He may not know what he is going to do, but he knows down to his bones that he is damn well capable of figuring it out. An entrepreneur is able to make order from chaos, and spontaneously improve his situation by changing himself.

What if you don’t know whether or not you have the natural personality of an entrepreneur? If you’re coming from a traditional salaried employee position, you might not be used to existing in this way. It’s natural to feel overwhelmed at the idea of being completely responsible for your own success in business. However, the fact that you are now reading this book speaks volumes more about what kind of potential resides within you, regardless of your past experience.

Many people spend their lives never seeing the furthest extent of their potential because they never made the choice to break away from the mold that conventional society crafted for them. There are certainly jobs that do require you to adapt, and discover, and change yourself regularly, but most exist within the context of a larger plan that is decided for you by people higher up in the company than yourself.

This book is meant to guide you along the transitional journey from where you are to where you want to be. The only real way to know your limits is just to keep testing yourself. I hope you take that to heart as you read the following chapters and begin to think about how better narrative, communication, and identification could launch both your personal life and your brand to new places if you are willing to adapt and thrive (not just survive) in the untamed wilderness that awaits you.

My Unconventional Path

For certain types of people, the conventional path will never be a viable option. Even in early childhood, I knew there was something I didn’t like about the way that most of the adults around me had structured their lives. I couldn’t understand how the majority of them could be happy spending their time working in jobs that had nothing to do with their passions, and which barely paid more than enough to cover their basic living expenses. I felt like it was the accepted social norm to give up on dreams, adventure, and curiosity so that we could better fit into the hole others had already carved out for us. I knew there had to be other ways to exist.

It wouldn’t be until I was a little older that I would finally have the power to explore my innate curiosity about the many possible ways a human could live on this planet. On my 18th birthday, I moved out of my parents’ house in southern California and lived comfortably in an oversized Ford Econoline van, finishing high school and supporting myself through freelance guitar lessons and other independent means in San Diego.

The lifestyle experiment didn’t end there. The level of freedom I experienced during that initial unguided adventure couldn’t possibly compare to the perspective that I gained from international travel after high school. I built my profession as I traveled, which forced me to become adaptable and resourceful. It was difficult at times, but my desire to live and make money on my own terms kept me on my chosen path until I could become financially comfortable.

A multicultural lifestyle also showed me that the world was not how I had been told it was supposed to have been. I experienced extreme cognitive dissonance for years as I continued to experience things that contradicted my previous worldview.

Traveling the world on my own terms taught me that human beings make decisions based not on the reality of things, but on the stories that fill their heads about how things are. I’d been told that Latin America was a wholly dangerous and unstable place. Instead, I found some of the nicest and most functioning communities on earth. I learned, as well, that stories could be used to alter and manipulate the mentality of people for a specific purpose quite easily.

As part of my global journey, I worked as an educator in countries like China, Thailand, Iraq, Italy, and different parts of Latin America. Having this kind of direct exposure to the developing children of so many societies gave me a unique outlook on the many ways in which people are conditioned to think from a very early age. Volunteering in Ghana with the Africa Youth Peace Call Liberty and Entrepreneurship Camp, I helped the young adults and teens who attended to learn to see the world through the eyes of an entrepreneur. This meant not just creating value, but learning to communicate it to a world that would be very unforgiving of foreign appearances.

The stigmas they will face in future, as young entrepreneurs rising out of poverty into a worldwide marketplace, are the same stigmas you will face as you introduce any new product, service, or proposition of value to people who think they already know what they want. Communication is the bridge that breaks down the default barrier others hold towards new ideas, and all that occurs as a function of your compelling brand identity. Education removes the resistance to new ideas that is inherent to each of us.

Shortly after I started my travels, I met a man in his seventies named John A. Pugsley, or Jack to those who knew him. Jack was a very influential writer on free market economics and his most famous titles included The Alpha Strategy: The Ultimate Plan of Financial Self-Defense and Common Sense Economics: Your Guide to Financial Independence in the Age of Inflation. At the time, I felt lost about the role I was going to play in the global human civilization I was gradually becoming more aware of. He was kind enough to spend much of his time mentoring me in the subjects that he understood would help me to make sense of my life.

John Pugsley passed away only two years after I met him, but during those couple of years, I learned a lot through his writings and the time we spent together discussing how large-scale human society did not have to exist as the random chaos I perceived it to be. It was all part of an elaborate order called the marketplace. This was the first functional filter through which I could make sense of the world of exchange. I realized then that an entrepreneur was someone who created new processes for producing value, and could convince people to make beneficial decisions they hadn’t previously known were possible.

Before this pivotal paradigm shift, I had been struggling to understand how the human race could ever progress from its present state of political and economic adolescence. Despite my newfound perspective on human culture, I didn’t know what to do with my life, or what it meant to play an important role in the human world. I know now that every intentional human action is performed in the pursuit of happiness, or in the avoidance of unhappiness. We are all trying to make our own lives better. Everyone else is simultaneously doing the same thing in their own lives the best way they know how.

We all have different ideas about what happiness is and the best way to acquire it. That's where we run into conflict, and it is only with respect to the larger system of free market exchange that a solution to that conflict becomes obvious. You begin to see the human race, and every way we interact, as a system of mutual happiness pursuit, irrespective of our subjective variations on happiness. It doesn’t matter if what you want is completely different than what I want, so long as there is a way for us to interact where we are both getting closer to our respective goals.

When you understand such a simple concept, you will see that money is just a vehicle through which people exchange happiness, and that businesses provide a method for people to do this in a tailored and systematic way.

The Focus of This Book

If the role of a business is to be a system of trading one form of value for something of higher value, what implication does this hold for business owners today? How ought they best to go about communicating both the value they offer and their potential to help their audience achieve higher states of happiness than before? The burden falls on entrepreneurs to analyze the value propositions of their business, embodied in each of the products and services they offer.

In the same way, business owners must also identify what type of person is going to see that specific value because no two people ever evaluate things in exactly the same way. Once you understand these elements, you have to be able to talk about what you do in a way that attracts the right people, and makes them think your business can bring them happiness in a way that no other business can.

The skills I gained in education and sales have enabled me to teach entrepreneurs what they can do to communicate with their audience more effectively and, in time, rebuild their entire brand identity from the ground up. It was the experience of helping dozens of businesses from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds and industry niches that inspired me to share what I have learned in this book.

This book has faced some obstacles on its path to publication, but each has taught me valuable lessons about clarifying my own message. I spent countless hours writing in cafes, on planes, and in the back of taxis in more than a dozen countries over the last year to bring this text before you today. Initially, I even hired a woman to help me create the manuscript and reach bestseller status on Amazon. She ended up wasting nine months of my time and $5,000 of my money, with ultimately no book and little else to show for it.

Rather than let that setback stop me from succeeding, I used those negative emotions to galvanize my ambitions for what I wanted the book to be. The realization that it was entirely up to me to make it a success put me back into the “island survival” mentality I had come to know so well on my travels. It was time to adapt or die, and the book you are now reading is the result of my efforts.

Throughout history, the best minds with the most valuable inventions have failed because they could not get others to see the worth of their work. It is a fallacy to think that merely making a great product is enough. The saleability of that product is at least as important, and often ignored by the technically minded. The principles of this book are meant for the creators of products and services that deliver genuine value to some group of people. I never advocate tricking others into doing something that is not actually in their best interests. Ethical selling is about enabling others to make more informed choices from better options for pursuing their own happiness.

Whether you are a solo practitioner, part of a small team, or a member of something larger, somewhere within the many interesting facts, features, and people that make up your business is a profound story to tell, which will forever change how the world interacts with your brand. You can learn to look at your own company in the same way that an outsider with no previous exposure does.

You won’t find any foolproof formula to follow here to get instant success. Instead, you will find a series of principles that make up how consumers view products and the people behind them. You will be given a new framework with which to examine your own business and your plans for introducing your idea to the world. So slow down, philosophize, introspect, and ask yourself the difficult questions which will lead to meaningful answers. You will make something new out of both yourself and your business.

Now you are ready for greatness, both personally and in business.

SECTION I

Why Identity Matters