Discover Your Brand's Truth

To help your clients reach their target market, it’s important to understand the inherent value and reputation of their brand. If you want to position a brand, you need to find out where it presently sits in consumers' psyches. You need to discover your brand's truth. Below, Marketing Consultant Isabelle Albanese discusses how to correctly identify a brand’s place among its peers.

In plain speak, knowing a brand's truth means discovering the "edges" of a brand — what it is and what it can never be. While there are a handful of well-known examples of brand truths that have evolved, in general your brand truth "is what it is." The sooner you learn it and work with it, the better your marketing messages will become.

We use the exercise below in almost every project we do with clients. It is remarkably simple and straightforward and takes less than 15 minutes. It may be the smartest use of 15 minutes you and your marketing team ever spend.

Brand Truth Discovery Exercise

Question One: What is your brand, and what is it not? This tells right away what the "edges" of the brand are within the category and the limits of consumer acceptance. It also provides a kind of roadmap for where the brand can credibly be taken. For example, when we did this exercise with Dunkin' Donuts, we discovered: It is a simply consistent, quickly delivered, high-quality cup of coffee at a reasonable price. It is not a pretentious, overly expensive latte that is enjoyed over a long period of time.

Question Two: What does your brand stand for, and what does it stand against in the minds of consumers? This begins to get at emotional connections, underpinnings of loyalty, and longstanding beliefs and their origins. This touches on a brand's iconic status, potential toward status or lack thereof. Using the Dunkin' Donuts example again: It stands for the everyday, hardworking man or woman who makes this country tick. It stands against phoniness, fluff, and being idle and self-indulgent.

Question Three: What is your brand an expert in and what does it know nothing about? This tells us the true brand equity as well as inherent lack of credibility. It also begins to get at brand differentiation and elements of ownability. In the case of Dunkin' Donuts: It's an expert in coffee and donuts. It knows nothing about skinny soy lattes.

There are other polarities you can create to find out more about a brand, but with these three sets of information at your fingertips, you can begin to create honest marketing messages that will connect with your customers — because they reflect your brand's truth! When marketers develop credible messages, consumers listen.

Isabelle Albanese is a leading marketing consultant for Fortune 500 companies and the author of “The 4Cs of Truth in Communications: How to Identify, Discuss, Evaluate, and Present Stand-out, Effective Communication.” (Paramount Market Publishing, 2007)