Brand Me Baby!

Branding has surfaced as a topic on a few blogs I have visited recently and I could’t help but think about possession. When a company brands a product, that means the company owns the product, but what happens when the brand is a common term? For instance the term “writer”. Obviously this term/word is public property. It is not enough to say “I am a writer” because we need to clarify what kind of writer we are. As writers, we brand ourselves and our businesses individually. In other words, we create a product. What is your product?

My product is words. How do I brand words? They are free (individually) for the taking, abusing, training, creating and brilliance. Therefore, we strive to create a (logo) trademark that will enhance our brand, so when readers are surfing around, our most creative, brilliant, blog will jump out and grab them by the mouse. We only have about ten seconds to do that.

Recently I checked my rating and considering that there are millions of blogs, I think a rating of 494,392 is not bad. It’s not in the top 10 for sure, but it’s not in the millions either. I was encouraged. There is no where to go but up.

Mike Wagner did a great post on branding and came up with some thought provoking ideas. My favorite is that the customer (our readers) own the significance of our brand. In other words, what our brand means to the customer is most important.

"Wise brand owners know they might own the original ideas, vision and
meaning of their brand, but the significance is something customers
own."

We give birth to our brands from our collective life experiences. I like what Mike says about it.

A brand in this sense is much deeper than just what is manifested. It’s the sum of all the cultural and knowledge-based memory archives of a company with a dose of communications and constant awareness of the future — of work and relationships.

Write it down,

Karma