How much thought have you given to your branding, and how it shapes the story of your business?
My guest today – Katie Saunders – specialises in helping creatives to clarify their branding.
We discuss how much of ‘you’ to put into the business; how your business has a brand whether you’ve consciously crafted it – or not; how to distil your brand down into a few critical talking points; why you should create a positioning statement – and more!
You can listen to this episode below, or on your fave podcasting app!
Brand your Craft
Does your handmade business have a strong brand identity?
Or are you just treating your creations like commodities – trying to compete on price, and failing to stand out in a crowded marketplace?
Creating a strong, unique brand identity is fundamentally important if you want to make your business stand out from the others in your niche.
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Highlights from this episode:
- Katie worked as an art director for over a decade until she set up her own business helping creative business owners establish their brand. Katie’s business is Pop & Grey.
- Branding shapes the story of what your business is.
- “If you are not intentional about moulding that story than people are going to mould it for you and they may not make your brand what you want it to be.” {Katie} 3:38
- Choosing your brand and palette and fonts are step two in the branding package.
- Use the information you know about your customers to help shape and define your brand
- “If you just build everything based off you, you aren’t taking your customer into consideration at all” {Katie}10:03
- Your entire story is too multifaceted to fit into a brand. Work out who your customer is and what appeals to them then focus in on the aspects of your personality that fits with this.
- Not appealing to everyone can feel scary. By having a clear brand, you can build authentic connections with your community that creates loyalty and leads to sales.
- “Just pick those few parts of your life that intersect with your business and use that as fodder for your marketing.” {Jess} 16:18
- Get started on clarifying your brand with a positioning statement. This is a distilled version of what you do, who you serve and how you’re different and written in a way that sounds like you.
- Everything that comes from you should be cohesive and consistent from your emails to your packaging to the experience of buying from you.
- Jess changed her approach to her thank you email from a standard one paragraph response to a longer explanation about what this purchase means to her. This not only resulted in building stronger relationships with her customers but influenced the way she approached her other communication.
- “You can’t compete on price but what you can do is compete on quality and the story that you are telling” {Jess} 31:36
- “What branding helps you do is rise you above the pricing wars because there is just no comparison between what you’re doing and what these other people are doing” {Katie} 32:14
