Let’s Play the Newly Wed Game with Your Brand!

Let me first lead off with this question, what if your brand were your partner? Kind of a weird question, right? But what I want to get at is, would you two still be madly in love, or has the spark faded a little bit since you started your business? Today we’re diving into a fun and introspective exercise. We are going to be playing the Newlywed Game with your brand.

Let’s see how well you really know the heart of your business. For those of you who don’t know what the Newlywed Game is, I will be the first one to admit that I’ve never actually watched an episode of the old game show, the Newlywed Game. But I’m going to kind of give you a synopsis of what I do know. Essentially, it is a game show host that is asking a bunch of newlywed couples all of these different questions about their partner and the goal is to see how well they know their partner that they just married. There are different rounds that have like different themes of questions. So that’s exactly what we’re going to be doing today. I’m going to see how well you know your brand.

As I go through each round, I want you to answer the questions that I pose to you and we will see how deeply connected you are with your brand. Or we might find out where your brand needs a little bit of extra love. Let’s dive right in to round one of the Newlywed Game with your brand.

Round One: Getting Back to the Basics

Question 1: What is your brand’s mission?

I asked this because I did not have a mission for my brand until about four years in. Oftentimes, when we start businesses, we are just focused on getting all of the things checked off our to do list and writing our brand’s mission is not one of those things that takes priority.

Question 2: Does your brand have a mission?

If so, can you tell me that mission without looking it up? Oftentimes, if we do actually sit down and write that mission, we create that mission statement. It gets so far buried in a Google Doc inside of our Google Drive that we wouldn’t even know how to find it in the first place. If that mission is not being consistently seen, utilized, consistently being stayed true to, then that mission doesn’t really mean much in terms of our brand.

Question 3: Does that mission still align with your goals for your business?

Now that we have that mission in front of us, or you have that mission sort of top of mind, the next question I want to ask you is, does that mission still align with your goals for your business? Does that mission still align for the growth that you’ve seen? Does it still align with the audience that you’re trying to speak with or speak to?

Question 4: Who is your brand’s ideal client?

Is this ideal client the same client that you spoke to when you first started your business or has it evolved a little bit? What problem are you trying to solve for that ideal client? Oftentimes when we start our business, we start our business with maybe one service offering because we are trying to solve just one problem. But then we continue to add on service offerings as we see that our clients are having different problems that we could fix.

As we continue to add those service offerings on, are they still aligned with our mission that we just defined in the last question or not? In addition to figuring out whether or not our ideal client is the same as it was when we started our business, now that you’ve had the opportunity to work with multiple clients, you can kind of start to formulate that North Star client. Those are the clients that I like to describe as like your dream clients. They’re the ones that guide you back, that give you the hope.

If you have altered who that North Star client is for you based off of the previous clients that you’ve been able to work with, then let’s tweak and adjust that ideal client avatar so that we can continue to strive and target those North Star clients.

Round 2: Your Brand’s Values and Identity

Question 1: What are the three core values your brand lives by?

Are these sitting right next to your mission statement in that Google Doc that’s buried inside of your Google Drive? Or are these values sitting front and center somewhere in your office, on your desk, on your desktop or your laptop screen saver? Where are those three core values and how are they visible not only to your naked eye, but in your messaging to your ideal clients? This should be visible to your clients through your website, branding visuals, and even your social media captions. Ask yourself how they are visible in your actions and your client experience? If those three core values aren’t clear, not only to you, but to your ideal client, then they aren’t really helping to propel your brand forward at all. If you have those three core values, you can scratch that down right next to your mission statement.

Question 2: If your brand had a personality, how would you describe it?

This is the intangible portions of your brand. Think about brand tone, brand adjectives, brand imagery, and things like that. Let’s break it down for the sake of simplicity into three adjectives.

If someone had to describe your brand, not your business, not the service offerings that you offer or your brand in three adjectives, what would they be? You could actually make this a fun Instagram exercise with your audience to see what their impression of your brand is by asking in a caption or interactive Instagram story box.

Even if you define your brand and you’re trying for these three adjectives, but you’re hitting these three adjectives over here, then it’s misaligned. That could be a good tell as to whether or not you are on par with the brand adjectives that you want to put out to the world.

Question 3: What is your brand’s tone of voice?

So whenever you write anything, what is that tone going to sound like? When I used to be a wedding photographer, I always used to say that my brand tone was that of an older sister that was guiding with care and a little force. Brides wanted to be told what to do because they’ve never been in a situation where they’ve had to plan their own wedding before. I was that kind of voice of reason that gave them the structure and clarity that they needed on their wedding day when it came to their wedding timeline for photography. If you could boil down your brand’s tone of voice, what would it be? Who would you be? Who would your brand be?

Round 3: Examining Your Client Experience

This is coming off of an episode that we just recently did about all about client experience. In terms of this episode, we’re going to give you a couple of different questions that you can specifically answer.

Question 1: How does your brand make clients feel when they interact with it?

Does your client experience actually match your intended emotional connection? Think back to those brand adjectives that you just just wrote down and tell me, does your client experience also align with those three adjectives? If not, we need to take a little bit of a closer look at it.

Question 2: What is one thing your brand does better than anyone else?

This is what’s called your UVP, unique value proposition. It’s a core part of branding and marketing. I want to know what you do better, how you do it differently. What makes you different than the next person that offers the same thing as you? If you can’t immediately tell me what that is, then that’s something that we need to get to the bottom of as soon as possible.

If you have that UVP, your unique value proposition, and you know exactly what it is, then let me ask you this. Is that differentiator clear in all of your marketing? Whenever I do brand analysis for clients I have them, once they’re onboarded, answer this questionnaire and it’s about their brand values and mission statement. I get all of that prior to even going into their online deep dive to investigate their brand. However, what I don’t ask them in this questionnaire is very strategic.

I don’t what their UVP is because as I’m going through their social media, email marketing funnels, website, and everything I can dig up about them while looking through a potential client’s lens, should be able to immediately tell what the UVP is. If I can’t, that’s one of the very first things that I bring up in our analysis call. If I can’t look at your website and social media accounts and tell what your UVP is, then that’s something that needs to be fixed as soon as possible.

Round 4: What is Your Longterm Vision for Your Brand?

We’re thinking further than just one year in the future. We’re thinking 10, 15, or 20 years into the future. We’re thinking selling our business. We’re thinking passing it down to our children. What is the longterm vision for your brand? Are those daily actions that you take every single day when you wake up? Are they aligned with your brand’s big picture goals? Final question of the newlywed game.

Question 1: If you could change one thing about your brand right now, what would it be?

If you could change one thing about your brand right now, what would it be? Not only do I want you to tell me what that change would be, I want you to tell me why you would change it. Why does it need to be different? What’s holding you back from making this change? This one is meant to be more introspective. I’m not going to ask you for a specific answer because that could take a lot of thought and time. If there was one thing that you could change, I would want to know what it was so that we could take that change, fix it, and then bring you one step closer to your longterm vision for your brand and your business.

I really hope that it starts to kind of scratch the surface of figuring out whether you are still in love with your brand. Maybe you’ve seen a little bit of growth and change, and it’s time for your brand to be able to match that change so that you can more adequately appeal to your ideal client. This game was a little bit silly, but I hope you found it kind of helpful and a lot fun.

I want to encourage you that if you found yourself kind of stumbling on some of these questions, it’s okay. That’s just a sign that your brand is ready for a little bit of extra love and attention. So maybe you need a revamped brand strategy. Maybe you need a website redesign so that you can dial in your messaging and your copy. That’s all okay. Take it one step at a time.