Josh Dougherty is a brand strategist, speaker, and the founder and CEO of A Brave New, a Seattle-based agency that builds bold & memorable healthcare brands. Over the last 15 years, he’s worked with clients to develop unique brands and accelerate business growth using human-centered strategies and smart execution.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- The basics about brand drivers
- We’ll do a deep dive into four specific brand drivers
- Essence
- Promise
- Core attributes
- Brand positioning statement
- For each of these brand drivers Josh explores:
- What the brand driver is
- Why the brand driver is important
- How it looks in a real-world example
- How to get started creating the brand driver for your organization
Additional Resources:
Transcript
Josh Dougherty:
Welcome to A Brave New Podcast. This is a show about branding and marketing. But more than that, it's an exploration of what it takes to create brands that will be remembered and how marketing can be a catalyst for those brands’ success. I'm Josh Dougherty, your host. Let's dive in.
Hello and welcome to another episode of A Brave New Podcast. Today, I'm going to talk a little bit about branding fundamentals. We, recently, on the A Brave New Blog, completed a blog series on this, and I want to just spend a little bit of time today and in a future podcast walking through each of the brand drivers that we consider key parts of the core strategy at the center of your brand. And today, I want to share a bit about each of the brand drivers and why they matter. So as we listen to this episode from a high level, I'm hoping you'll walk away with a few things.
The first thing I hope you'll walk away with is a renewed conviction that focusing on what makes your organization unique is important and that the memory you leave behind with your customers is just as important as that mission or vision that you have as an org. I also want to give you some practical examples of how this looks in real life and some guidance on how to start developing your own brand drivers.
So by way of background, before we dive in, I want to talk a little bit about what brand drivers are. These are the core elements of a brand strategy from our perspective at A Brave New. And there are six things that are included in the brand drivers.
The first, well, really seven components actually, the first is essence. This is that core connecting thread that runs through everything you do. Key concepts for someone like Harley-Davidson, this is something like freedom. For someone like Simpler and a healthcare example, because that's the industry we're often working in, it's this idea of making things simpler, and that's pretty straightforward, but it's a rare opportunity where a name and what they do match up.
The second item is a promise. A promise is that promise you can make to your customers every time you interact with them.
Then we think of core attributes, core attributes being, in shorthand, the unique way that you live out your essence. It's usually four or five adjectives.
And then we have a brand positioning statement that pulls all those things together into a specific positioning and talks about what people you serve, who your audience is, what your category is, and what you offer to that audience. We'll dive into that a little bit deeper as we go through.
Then you have your brand personality, the unique way that you show up in a personality way, like how a person shows up.
The benefit ladder, which talks about the emotions you want to evoke in engagements with people.
And then finally, a decision-making filter, which is a tool to help you make decisions to ensure that everything you're doing stays on brand.
Now, these are loosely based on the integrated branding model, and I will include a link in the show notes to a blog post that we have about that and walks through the integrated branding framework. Obviously, as we've worked over the years, we've evolved this framework a little bit, but it can be helpful to see how this all fits together.
And on today's post, I'm not going to tackle all seven of these items, or on today's podcast. Rather, I'm going to talk about four. And so, we're going to spend some time discussing essence and promise, what they are, where they're important, then core attributes, and then finally the brand positioning statement. And we'll save for a future podcast tackling things like personality, benefit ladder, and decision-making filter.
So let's dive into the essence and promise first, speaking about brand essence to begin with, and here's a little bit about what it is. When we talk with someone about a brand essence, I say that it's the connecting thread that runs through everything that the company does. And this is the main “memory” that a company wants to leave with their customers every time they interact with them. As I mentioned in the intro, it's the core concept behind the brand.
So for Disney, it's magic. For Harley-Davidson, it's freedom. For Huntsman Cancer Institute, and the organization that we've worked with in the past, it's this idea of it being all about the details or down to the last detail.
And then, if we think about brand promise, which is very intimately related with the brand essence, the brand promise is the promise that a company, a business, makes and keeps in every interaction with its customers. So you can think about this as the thing that customers can always expect from a company and the thing that they depend on the company to deliver regardless of the importance of interaction, regardless of the size of the transaction.
So with some definitions out of the way—brand essence, again, being that connecting thread, the core memory you want to leave behind, and brand promise being the promise you make in every interaction and fulfill on in every interaction with customers—let's talk about what a strong essence or promise is.
The first question I like to ask as we're developing a brand to determine whether an essence or promise is strong is first, is it grounded in reality and in aspiration? Now, let's unpack what that means a little bit. For us, that means that a brand should both be grounded in who you are today and where you're going.
It should probably be about 50% true to who you are today. So if someone looked at you and said, "Oh yeah, they're promising this thing," that they could say, "Oh yeah, that's true, they're fulfilling on it," but it should also be pushing you forward, making you a better organization, making you a more focused organization. So it should be 50% focused in the future as well. And if you can't, the pitfalls of if your brand is too focused on today's reality, it won't grow with you, it won't push you further, it won't get you to where you need to go. If it's too aspirational, it won't be believable to people, so they won't maybe be able to grasp onto it or if they don't believe it, it may lead to a lack of trust in your brand.
So, the second element of a strong essence and promise is asking the question of whether it's applicable across your entire business. Now, if we think about that applicability across the entire business, what that means is we want to make sure that this brand will work for all of your product lines that you're developing, especially if you're a startup. I was talking to someone who's working in a startup today, a healthcare startup, and we were talking about, as you think about the core idea behind your brand, you need to have a midterm or a long-term view of this. So you need to look at maybe three years, five years down the road. Now, all of this is hypothetical and guessing, but we need to understand that as you may be launching with one product or one service, but over time you're going to add three, four, or five in. You need to make sure that whatever you're choosing for that brand essence and for that brand promise is going to fit with future products and services.
So it shouldn't be super focused on really what you do, which is what your mission, your vision, and your product strategy is focused on. It should be focused on the unique way that you do something.
The other thing I like to think about when I'm thinking about whether it's applicable across your entire business is asking the question of whether your essence not only works with your marketing or your website or how you're showing up in video, different things like that, but also can we make this brand essence and this promise applicable to how you're designing your accounting processes? Or say we're designing a hiring process, can we make our brand essence be infused throughout that as well? We want this to be something that extends beyond just the overall marketing strategy because brand isn't about marketing. It's a core business strategy, and so we need to make sure that it's infused into each and every business process as well.
The final thing, or the third question I would ask, not the final question, to determine if you have a strong essence or promise, is this idea of is it enduring. Now, some people may disagree or agree about this, but I believe that a brand essence and promise should have a 10- to 20-year lifespan. It should be able to evolve as your business evolves, stay true as the rest of your business evolves, maybe even as your products change. Your brand promise stays the same.
You think about, we talked about Disney before, and this idea of family magic, they have evolved in what ways they're delivering their services. They have theme parks, they have movies, they have shows, they have product lines. And as this evolves, the same essence has stayed true throughout. So we need to think about “will this essence be true for us in 20 years if our products have completely changed or if the healthcare industry has completely changed and transformed?”
And if you can answer yes, then it's probably going to be enduring, and this might be a strong candidate for your essence and your promise.
And then the final thing that I want to ask about as I'm thinking about whether an essence or promise is strong for an organization is whether it can be lived out a hundred percent. Can you live it a hundred percent? Do you get a hundred percent behind this concept or are you kind of meh, meh, sold on it, but not a hundred percent sure about that? If you can't answer in the affirmative, then you probably haven't landed on your essence. Because this essence is like the core piece of your DNA, the core thing, the unique memory at the center of your brand, the thing that you want everyone to remember about you. So if you can't own it and you don't feel excited about it, it probably is not a good essence, and it’s probably time to go back to the drawing board.
So we've talked about what brand essence is, what a brand promise is, and then we've evaluated four questions that you can ask to determine whether your essence and promise are strong. One, is it grounded in reality and is it aspirational? Two, is it applicable across your entire business? Three, is it enduring? And four, can you live it a hundred percent?
Now, that's the why or the what of an essence and promise. Let's talk about why it's important and to hear, I'm going to refer back to one of the great branding minds, really one of the people that I look to as an expert in this field, it's Marty Neumeier. He wrote the book Zag, and he has a couple of things that, I think three quotes that really explain why essence and promise are so important today, especially in an industry like healthcare where there's a lot of competition, there are a lot of people doing similar things, and there's a sea of sameness that exists.
So first quote, he said that, "Today's real competition doesn't come from other companies, but from the extreme clutter of the marketplace." Now, this is true in almost every industry, but in an industry where like healthcare, where everything looks and can feel the same, people are using different shades of blue all the time, there's a lot of similarity going on in this industry. Your competition isn't coming from other companies, but it's coming from the amount of noise that exists as someone's looking for a solution. This can be true both from a B2B perspective, if you're in healthcare technology and you're selling products to hospitals, you may look the same to everyone. But it also can be true in a B2C perspective if a hospital system or a provider group is trying to appeal to new patients, everyone looks the same, sounds the same, has the same approach.
So the real competition doesn't come from other companies, but from the extreme clutter in the marketplace and I think, the preconceived notions that that creates in buyers’ minds, whether it be patients, other companies, referrers, all sorts of audiences. So we need a good brand essence and promise that is unique, that is memorable, that is bold, so that we can rise above that extreme clutter.
The second quote is this, "That the human mind deals with clutter the best way it can by blocking out most of it. What's left is the stuff that seems most useful and interesting or gets labeled and stored in mental boxes." Let me read that again for you. "The mind deals with clutter the best way it can by blocking out most of it. What's left, is the stuff that seems most useful or interesting or gets labeled and stored in mental boxes." So you hear what he's saying there.
This is a key concept. Clutter leads to the mind not being able to focus on everything and it throws out most of the stuff. So if you don't have a unique essence and brand that you're representing or living out, having the best marketing, having the best sales doesn't even really matter because people, they're just going to toss your ideas to the wayside because you don't stand out. We need to craft something unique from an essence and promise perspective, unique enough that someone when they're searching for a solution says, "Oh, that's interesting, that's different," and decides to actually process what it is you're saying and store your brand, “the memory” of your brand in their mind so that then, when they reach a purchase decision, they're going to come back and look at you.
So, final quote from Marty, which I think is powerful is this, "Customer loyalty is not a program. It starts with companies being loyal to customers, not the other way around, and only becomes mutual when customers feel they've earned the loyalty they're receiving from the company."
This is a quote that talks about why a brand promise is essential. No customer, whether you work in a context trying to attract patients or you're trying to sell to other healthcare organizations or sell a healthcare solution, B2B, B2C, regardless, no customer owes you their loyalty. You have to earn it by following through on your brand promise over time. And oftentimes this requires 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 interactions that are consistent, that are delightful, that are memorable. And that follow through will eventually earn you your customer's trust, which will safeguard the future of your business. So we need to think about that repetition.
So that's why brand essence and promise are important. There's a bunch of clutter. Because of the clutter, people throw most of the concepts, the companies they see, out, they don't even think about them, process them. They drop them by the wayside. And customer loyalty has to be earned, it isn't something to be expected.
So I want to look at an example of brand essence, and I'm going to go to something tangentially related to healthcare in that they probably do work with a lot of healthcare organizations. But I want to talk about Salesforce because I think their brand is nice. Now, this is my approximation of what their brand strategy or brand essence is, and so don't consider that this is real. But I think I've looked at how they represent their brand and their branding pages on their site and pulled these out. The first, their essence, is this idea of bridge building or connecting things together, making sure everything's working together seamlessly so data can flow, so that people can make smarter decisions, have insights. And their brand promise is helping our customers make their customers happier.
So you see that Salesforce at its essence is saying, "We are all about building connections and bridges between customers, between teams, between operations, with the goal of helping our customers be as amazing as they can be so that their customers can be happy." And this is so powerful. You can see if you were saying like, "Okay, this is who we are, and we want to make every decision this way," it would be a pretty powerful way for decisions to be made.
So after we talked about that example, we've talked about why this is important, what a brand essence is, I want to share an approach for how you can get started crafting an essence and a promise if you haven't done this already, or if you need to jump back in and get started again. And really, the way I would recommend doing that is by doing a really quick and simple exercise. It's five questions, and I like to call this exercise the What Are You Really Selling Exercise, because at the end of the day, we all have products and services we're selling, but we're selling something intangible behind those products and services that makes someone buy it at a price premium, buy it with loyalty, and continue coming back.
So here are the five questions I would ask to understand what you're really selling. First, what emotions have my customers expressed after doing business with me? The things that they said that triggered them to make a purchase. Second, what emotions do I want them to experience? And then third, what unique benefits do they receive that connect them very solidly with me? The fourth question, what is it that my buyer needs most from me? And then the fifth question, how do people look at themselves differently when they use my product or service? Do they feel smarter? Do they feel more empowered? What is it that makes them feel differently?
Now, as you ask these questions and as you write down the answers to them, you're going to find that there are some themes coming out. Maybe customers are buying trust from you. Maybe they're buying reliability of your service, maybe they're buying something different, something that makes them feel bold or more thoughtful.
But regardless of what this is, look at the themes through the questions that you've asked and think about this: is this the essence, the unique thing at the center of our brand, the unique thing that we do different than anyone else? If so, it might be the foundation for your essence and for your promise. I'll repeat those questions that I talked about again here. So the five questions to determine what you are really selling, what's the key idea that you're really selling to customers are:
- What emotions have my customers expressed after doing business with me?
- What emotions do I want them to experience?
- What unique benefits do they receive that connect them very solidly with me?
- What is it that my buyer needs most from me?
- How do people look at themselves differently when they use my product or service?
Okay, so there we go. That's essence and promise. This is where you should start when you're working on your brand.
These are the most important concepts to get because understanding that essence and knowing how to infuse it throughout your whole organization will allow you to leave a specific memory in your customer's minds that's going to, at the end of the day, make them be loyal to you because they know who you are and what they're going to get from you on a consistent basis.
Now, if we stop at our brand, at essence, and don't go any further, we're missing out on some opportunities and we haven't really defined the unique way we're going to live out that essence. So we need to give ourselves some more guidance about that. And the tool that we use at A Brave New when we're crafting brand drivers is core attributes. Now, core attributes are three to five attributes that explain the way you live out your essence as an organization. You can think of these as the foundational character attributes of your business. And we believe that when combined with your essence, these attributes really are the core elements of differentiation. So let's unpack this for a little more clarity.
I want you to imagine that your company's brand essence was building better. Now, it's entirely possible that there are other companies in your category that have a very similar brand essence, right? Building better. It doesn't seem like that unique of a concept on its own. I mean, hopefully this isn't the case. Hopefully you're the only one with this essence, but it's possible that someone might have said, "Yeah, we're about building better as well. This is what we do. This is what people are buying from us. They're buying a chance to build better." And if that's the case, true differentiation comes when you start to build the core attributes and layer them on top of this brand essence.
So look at what happens if you combine building better with the following core attributes. We build better by winning together, by not cutting corners, by making others the hero, by embedding in each community, by showing our down-to-earth expertise. All of a sudden, you get this sense that this brand isn't just about building better, which is a little bit of an abstract concept, but it's about building together as a team.
It's about building better locally. It's about building better by not being the hero out front building, but by being a catalyst that makes other heroes in the community. It's about building better by having quality, about building better by showcasing their abilities, not being shy about how smart they are, about what they do, but also being grounded about it so that they can talk to normal people about what they're doing.
And I hope from this little explanation, you can start to see how core attributes can make a brand essence come alive, make its expression truly unique. So as we think of this, I'll repeat back the brand essence that we were talking about, just to give you a little bit more picture and to help you maybe envision this a little more. The first is this idea, the essence we were talking about is building better.
And if we think about the core attributes that make this truly a unique essence, it's this idea that we build better by winning together. We build better by not cutting corners. We build better by making others the hero. We build better by being embedded in each community, and we build better by having down-to-earth expertise. You can see how, combined together, the essence and these attributes create uniqueness. It's in the combination of everything that we find uniqueness, because nothing is really truly new under the sun today in 2024.
So how do you know if your core attributes are any good? Again, I have three questions that I like to ask to figure out if the core attributes are good. The first is this, will this core attribute stretch you to be the best while also feeling completely natural? This is a little bit of that same idea of does it fit you now and does it fit you in the future?
But if your core attributes all feel like that pair of jeans that you put on that you love that is almost worn out but fits perfectly, that might not be the best core attribute. It needs to stretch you.
The next question I ask is, does it have applicability in more than just marketing and messaging? So, is this core attribute true throughout our whole organization?
And then finally, the question that maybe isn't as similar as the ones we asked about essence is, does this core attribute offer an interesting juxtaposition or contradiction to your other attributes? The best brands have a juxtaposition between each other. Everything doesn't fit together seamlessly, but maybe there are some harder or more bold core attributes. And maybe there are some more, how do I say, not as bold, but more comfortable attributes, but they should be pushing against each other. So let's talk about why these core attributes are important.
I think I talked about this a little bit again, but I'll re-emphasize the fact that the core attributes add an extra layer of uniqueness to the brand essence. And the reality is that there is nothing new under the sun, like I said, when it comes to branding. So the differentiation comes in the unique and beautiful pairing that happens by pushing these multiple concepts together into a cohesive hole.
There are three other things I haven't talked about that I think also make core attributes helpful. The first is that they provide practical guidance for how to live out the brand. So essence is really a high-level concept and with the core attributes, we start to ladder down into reality to say, "Okay, here's a specific way that we can live out the brand in our day to day."
The other thing is that core attributes can double as company values. Some people often say, "Well, we already have values as a company. Do we need core attributes too?" And my encouragement would be maybe not, but I think your core attributes should be your company values, not vice versa.
And then finally, core attributes add depth and facets to the brand. So they start to make it look more multidimensional, not just one dimension. And so, if you're liking what you're hearing, you're thinking, "We have a brand essence. We know what our promise is, but we need to develop core attributes to really bring it to life,"
I would encourage you to get started by doing a card sort. So in the card sorting exercise we do as an organization, we start out with a deck of about 200 adjectives. And so you'd have to make that adjective deck or you can probably search and Google online for one.
But what we do is we take these adjectives and we get everyone together in person on a table, and we ask them first to take all 200 adjective cards and sort the entire deck into three categories. And at this point, we're not letting people discard any cards yet. We're putting each card in the deck into the following categories, who we're not, who we are, and who we want to be. And this isn't about judgment, so make sure that you put the negative and the positive cards in the who we are bucket. There are going to be some things you don't like about who you are, and we want to be realistic and not idealized in the view we're taking. So we're going to take all 200 cards, all 200 adjectives, and sort them into who we're not (these are things that we aren't, both good and bad), who we are (things we are, both good and bad), and who we want to be (things we aspire to be, but we're not yet).
So that's the first step. It usually takes 15 minutes or so. And then the second step is to take 15 more minutes and we want to remove all the cards that were put in the who we're not pile, we aren't going to consider them anymore.
And then we're also going to take a look at the who we are pile and cull out all those cards that made us cringe at the beginning of the process. Like, "Ooh, we're kind of stodgy," but we put it in who we are because we are kind of stodgy. You can now take stodgy out and discard it because you don't want to be that anymore. So discard those attributes.
And once you've discarded all the negative cards that you don't want to be anymore, you can snap a photo for posterity to see, here are the things that we are that are good that we want to continue to be.
And then the third step is to sort all the remaining cards. So we're going to put together all those cards that you just took and said, "This is who we are and who we want to continue to be," and take all the cards out of the ”who we want to be” pile as well and sort them together into five to six free-form categories. There's no real rhyme or reason, we're just looking for connections. And you'll see some themes come out as you're putting them together, as you're combining cards into six categories, say. And then once you have six categories, you're going to have six categories with a bunch of cards in each category. And you may have come up with a mental model of saying, "This is about how we show up in relationships, this is how we go about doing our business, et cetera," and that's great. But then I want you to choose a top card for each category. And once you have all those top cards, you can see that you have six key attributes to talk about who you are.
And those might be the basis or at least the jumping off point for developing your core attributes. So that's how I get started thinking about your core attributes. Happy to talk about that with you more if you ever want to reach out and talk about how to go about that process.
The final piece we're going to talk about here is today is we've talked about brand essence and promise. We've talked about core attributes. Now I want to share about a positioning statement. A positioning statement has its origins way back in the late 1960s. The first people to really talk about this were Jack Trout and Al Rice who introduced the concepts of product positioning, and while positioning was originally a marketing activity, today, positioning statements are used to bring clarity to the brand level of an organization for both products and companies.
So a high-quality positioning statement brings together all of the moving pieces, if you will, from the brand drivers, and explains them in a single statement. And we use a formula for that statement. So it's as follows, we'll include a link to a blog post about this in the show notes in case you can't follow along because it's a little bit complicated.
But a classic positioning statement says for, blank, which is an audience, your company is the blank. Blank is the descriptive adjective category that provides functional, symbolic, or experiential benefits because of its reasons to believe. So for a specific audience, your company is the blank category that provides functional, symbolic, or experiential benefits because of its reasons to believe.
A quick example from the healthcare side of things, I made one up for the company, OpenLoop, and here's what theirs is:
For companies and clinicians seeking to provide digital health solutions (that's their audience), OpenLoop (which is the company) is the premium white label (the descriptive adjective)for virtual care solutions (that's their category) that provide easy-to-implement and streamlined virtual care (those are their functional, symbolic, and experiential benefits), because of its end-to-end telehealth platform with built-in privacy and compliance (reasons to believe).
See how it centers everything? Let me read it without talking about the categories. For companies and clinicians seeking to provide digital health solutions, OpenLoop is the premium white label for virtual care solutions that provide easy-to-implement and streamlined virtual care because of its end-to-end telehealth platform with built-in privacy and compliance.
So let's talk about what this positioning statement I did for OpenLoop, if they were working with me as a client. They are not a client, for full transparency, just using them as an example from the healthcare space. It defines who their core audience is, which here we've said is companies and clinicians looking for digital health solutions. It talks about how your brand wants to be thought of in the market and what category you work in. So they want to be thought of as a premium white label solution, and they want to be seen as in the virtual care solution or virtual care vertical I should say.
It talks about the core benefits you provide, which I say they say are easy-to-implement and streamlined virtual care. And then it talks about why someone should believe you can actually deliver on those benefits because they have an end-to-end telehealth platform that has built-in privacy and compliance. So here, you all of a sudden see everything's wrapped up in a nice bow. And we would never use this statement publicly, but it's a good way to keep us focused on what is the core of who we are and what we do, who we're targeting, et cetera.
So let's talk about why this statement is valuable and I think it is extremely, extremely valuable so if anyone says, "Oh, we don't really a need positioning statement," let's not listen to that. This has been acknowledged to be a key way to focus in on our unique value that we provide as a company.
There's three main reasons that I think it's important. First, the positioning statement clarifies whether there's alignment between all aspects of the brand drivers. So it helps us to see if everything works together. It helps us to think clearly about how everything comes together to define a differentiated position that will win over other competitors. It also provides each and every employee in your organization with a simple and easy-to-understand statement that explains who your audience is and what you're all about. This drives alignment across the entire team, marketing, communication efforts, and product development—across everything really.
And then the final thing it does is it allows you to have repetition. Alignment brings repetition because we need to ensure that your customers remember who you are, what you're about, why you're unique. And to do that, your entire team has to be on the same page, which the positioning statement allows you to be so that they can repeat the same thing back to customers over and over again.
Because at the end of the day, we've got to say the same thing 7 to 10 times. We talked about maybe it takes 18 months to 3 years to successfully implement a brand and start hearing back from customers the things that you've been saying to them. So having this positioning statement that centers us all around the core aspects of the brand, who we're going after, et cetera, allows us to then be very focused as we work on rolling this out so people can start, I think, remembering us as we want them to remember us.
And now let's talk about how to get started with a positioning statement. I think the first thing to do is do some competitive analysis. I encourage you to review your competitors' positioning and understand what everyone is saying and where gaps may exist.
Or you might choose your top 5 competitors, say maybe even 10, and try writing positioning statements for each of them based on what you can see off their website, off their publicly facing materials, et cetera, and then do some analysis. Compare them, see where there are holes, where you might be able to build some bridges, where you might be able to exploit some gaps in the market to stand out.
Then you need to focus. You need to have some conversations about who your primary audience is. I think this is a classic thing that people struggle with. They try to appeal to numerous primary audiences, and that's not really what any of us should be doing. We need to know who we're talking to. Then spend some time drafting the positioning statement.
And then, finally, you want to pressure test it with stakeholders throughout your company, and try it on for size. Start using it to guide your work, make sure it fits, and then revise, and then make sure it fits again and then revise again. And by doing this, you're going to walk away with a statement that you can use to help keep you on track for everything that you're doing.
So today, we talked about four main elements of the brand or of your brand drivers, the four fundamentals of branding that I think are key if you're going to compete in the healthcare space or in any space really in 2024, headed into 2025—as tools like inbound have decreased in their effectiveness, as sales is harder and harder, our brand is really the most important asset that we have to invest in. And so we talked about your essence, that unique thread, that core memory in your brand, the promise, the thing you promise and fulfill on every time you interact with your customers. We talked about the core identity attributes, which are the unique ways that you live out your brand. And then we talked about the positioning statement that brings all those things together in a single statement so that you can keep your team in alignment. Why does this all matter, you might ask?
Well, it's because at the end of the day, a brand, your brand, is probably the core contributor to the long-term value of the company, especially if you have competition. I tell clients that your company is only as important as the memory it leaves in your customer's mind and that defining that unique memory is the best way to safeguard the future of your company and achieve three things, alignment, category definition, and freedom for price competition. I think we all want those things. And investing in your brand, especially investing in developing out your brand essence and promise, your core identity attributes, and your brand positioning statement are one of the best ways to start defining out that unique memory so that you can stand out and safeguard the future of your company. And with that, I want to wrap this up.
We'll be back in the future to talk about other branding fundamentals and really to continue the conversation about how we build strong healthcare brands and strong brands overall in 2024 and onwards. Have a great day.
Thanks for listening to this episode of A Brave New Podcast. Go to abravenew.com for more resources and advice on all things brand and marketing. If you enjoyed this episode, show us some love by subscribing, rating, and reviewing A Brave New Podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts. A Brave New Podcast is created by A Brave New, a brand and marketing agency in Seattle, Washington. Our producer is Rob Gregerson of Lugato Productions.
