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Aligning Core Company Elements With Your Brand Personality

Lesson 2.1: Finding Alignment

By aligning your brand and the company's core values, vision, and mission, a brand can establish lasting relationships with your target audience, foster brand loyalty, and achieve sustainable growth.

  1. Consistency

  2. Clarity

  3. Differentiation

  4. Employee Connection

Please reference our syllabus here. You can find the brand audit template here.

Consistency

When a brand is aligned with the company's purpose, vision, and mission, it ensures consistency in messaging and actions. This consistency helps build trust and credibility among customers and stakeholders. By consistently delivering a cohesive message, the brand establishes a reliable reputation, reinforcing its authenticity and reliability.

This is why you often see brands dilute their potential when they slap in buzzwords like AI or zero trust. Are these elements really aligned with your company's vision and purpose? Will anyone even care about these hot terms in 5 years? Unlikely.

Clarity

Brand alignment helps clarify the brand's identity and purpose. It communicates a clear message about what the brand stands for and what it aims to achieve. This clarity not only helps customers understand your brand's values and offerings but also enables them to connect with the brand on a deeper emotional level. By clearly defining its purpose and values, a brand can effectively resonate with its target audience and establish a strong brand personality. This is where you can start to humanize the brand if you so choose.

Keep in mind that your audience and their norms and expectations play a big role here. If you are targeting startups and mid-market companies, you can absolutely be more bold and have fun. If you are going after highly regulated spaces, enterprise-level hospital systems, and the federal government, you may not be able to get away with that approach outwardly, but there is often still room for it when done strategically.

Differentiation

Aligning the brand with the company's purpose, vision, and mission sets it apart from competitors. Our space is both incredibly small, but ever-growing. VC dollars enable the category cold war, and while we tend to see 2-3 companies go head-to-head, there are often up to a dozen or more right on their heels.

That means your customers are bombarded with numerous options, and a brand that is authentically aligned with its core values and mission stands out.

Example:

XDR

Not just XDR, but also:

SOAR

Not just SOAR, but the OG:

SIEM

Having a unique brand identity that resonates with customers will also help them differentiate your brand from competitors. By positioning the brand as distinct and memorable, you can attract and retain customers in a highly competitive landscape.

Now, keep in mind that while the sales cycle for an SMB may be just a week or up to a month, and the brand you’ve built may be overlooked because they are fully focused on solving an urgent challenge, it absolutely will help with relationship-build and retention post sale/agreement. So don’t discount the value of a strong brand strategy today just because conversions move quickly. It’s also important to note that these conversions happen through word of mouth or ad campaigns, and only one of these is financially viable in the future. AKA organic vs paid.

Further, if your company's purpose and vision have already created room for differentiation, your job will be that much easier. Instead of pure market saturation, reduce the TAM to a specific industry (healthcare, financial, etc.). If not, there is no surprise here, as it often takes a mature leadership team to strategically choose to go after market segments first vs verticalization later down the road.

Employee Engagement

Brand alignment creates a friendly and welcoming environment where employees feel a strong sense of purpose and direction. When employees understand and align with the company's purpose, vision, and mission, they are more likely to be excited, motivated, and dedicated to delivering on the brand promise. This also means you’ve created an atmosphere where they extend your brand, are comfortable sharing major company events, and will proudly wear all that swag our teams like to create.

By integrating the brand's values into the workplace culture, employees experience a sense of connection to the brand. This, in turn, results in improved productivity, exceptional customer service, and a positive brand image. Besides customers, there is no greater advocate for a brand than your team.

I can’t tell you how many times I see requests for advice on how to develop internal communications plans or internal influencer programs simply because there is a misalignment or lack of comms around how their work connects to brand campaigns. Alignment here will naturally create these connections, so you won’t have to beg them to like every post on LinkedIn.

Read on to module 2.2 - Audience Analysis

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