Brand DNA — How to find and leverage yours today!

Knowing your brand’s DNA, your ideal targeted customer and your business model are critical pieces of a successful business.

Your brand’s DNA is the most important of these because it impacts the entire customer journey and ultimately informs a lot of your business processes and operations. It also tells customers why they should to do business with your business.

To do an audit of your brand DNA, look at the language of your brand.

Closely consider:

· How you communicate the ideals that are important to you and your company

· How you connect with customers to engage and resonate on both an emotional and rationale level

· How you participate in the conversation they are already having

I created the two-part exercise below to help you get realigned with your brand DNA. As a business leader or part of the founding team who you are and what you stand for is a critical starting point to understanding the brand DNA.

When you know who you are and what your customers want, you can create a holistic brand archetype. This brand archetype will help you establish your brand story and bleed into the overall 360 brand experience.

Your first goal will be to use this information to refine your message and communicate with clarity what you stand for, what makes you a credible leader in the marketplace, and how you can help transform potential clients in the ways that they desire most. It’s a tall order, but you can do it!

Determine your Brand DNA

Consider the different personality tests or branding tests you have taken over the last few years. These are preset archetypes that can make this work a little easier. Some popular ones you may have taken include:

· Myers Briggs

· The Fascination Advantage

· Strength Finders

· The Enneagram

· Human Design

· and Others!

Considering your results from the personality or branding tests you have taken. What resonated most? What were your key takeaways? You may not agree with all they said in the report and some of the results may even conflict, but you have permission to use your intuition to identify what is true for you. And what to elevate as true for how you want to show up in in your business.

Step 1: Make a list of the top five most empowering things that you have learned about yourself from personality or brand assessments.

Step 2: List three people or brands that you admire greatly.

Write down:

· Who are they?

· What did/does their mission seem to be?

· What adjectives come to mind when you think of them?

· What status quo or injustice do they fight against or defy?

· Can you see how their life story connects with their mission?

· Do you also care about the causes that they promote or the injustices that they rally against?

The values you admire most about these individuals will likely align very closely with who you aspire to be and the impact you want to make through your business (and life!).

The responses to these questions can serve as clear cues to help you define what you stand for or against and who or what mission you want to serve deeply. We resonate most with those things that are also apart of us.

Takeaway Action: Make some notes from the above exercise. Are there connecting words or themes between your personality types, your known strengthens, and the top people you most admire? List those words, feelings, and adjectives that come up a few times or seems most relevant. How does this align with you and/or your business brand? What would you change?

These are clues to your key value, business branding pillars and how you can start to communicate and engage your customers in your own love story. This is the work of creating a clear brand and mission-aligned business so you can stand out in the marketplace, and generate more profits and have more of the desired impact through your work.

If you are a newer business owner, the overarching “why” behind your business or brand may not come up immediately or it may change over time, but your values (what you care about deeply, and the way you do things) will most likely remain the same. As you grow your team and your customer base, they will become baked into your business DNA.

Enjoy the discovery process and be sure to integrate it into your business operations for maximum impact.