Running a successful modern business demands insight, focus, and lots of hard work. While quality products and services are essential to every success story, marketing is the real backbone of your business.

Your brand DNA is the essence of your business identity and the starting point for every good marketing campaign. Your brand identity signifies your value to the rest of the world and gives your customers a reason to choose you over your rivals.

What is brand?

Your brand is a promise you make to the market. More than a logo and much more than a slogan, your brand is an abstract yet easy-to-identify marker that helps your business stand out from the crowd. While your products, services, physical assets, and intellectual property are part of your brand — as a signifier of value rather than value itself — your brand has a special quality that needs to be addressed on its own terms.

Your brand DNA is the essence of this quality and the unique signature that sets the tone for your entire business.

Why is brand DNA important?

Your DNA makes you a living, breathing brand.

Operating a small business in Australia can be tough when you don't know where you belong. Once you discover your brand DNA, you will feel more confident about building awareness, engaging your market, and inspiring loyalty among your customers. Your brand DNA functions like a springboard, giving you the motivation and energy you need to stand tall and forge ahead with confidence.

The following three attributes are central to every strong brand:

• Authenticity - Your brand should be true to your identity. It's important to understand what makes you unique and spread this message to the world.
• Relevance - Your brand should provide value to the market. Being unique is not enough; you need to offer something useful to the people who define your success.
• Consistency - Your brand should endure over time. As a promise to the market, you need to build trust, inspire loyalty, and remain steadfast across time and space.
  
  

Each of these elements matters, so grab a coffee and spend some time thinking about how they apply to you.

How to define your brand DNA

Discovering your DNA puts a spring in your step and a smile on your face.  Defining your brand DNA can be challenging. While it sits at the core of your business, it is often surrounded by noise and can be difficult to grasp. It's important to dig deep, be honest with yourself, and listen to your team.

Answering the following five questions will help you discover, define, and deliver something special to the world:

1. What is your story?

Create a page-turning narrative

What motivated you to start the company? Where did you come from? Who's on your team and why? Having a good story helps you make stronger and more meaningful connections. Every business has its own unique narrative, and it's your job to make it as captivating as possible. A good story enables more emotional connections, which help to drive market interest and inspire customer and staff loyalty. Lots of successful companies — including Apple and Airbnb — use the power of stories to help customers feel included and involved. 

2. What is your mission?

Light a fire under your dreams

What is your place in the world? What are your goals for the future? How are you helping your customers? Regardless of your size or industry sector, everyone has a part to play in the great human story. Creating a mission statement is a valuable process that helps you to identify your purpose and understand your goals. Along with your history, it's important to analyse your goals and dreams. Once you understand your mission, it's much easier to define your brand based on what you are trying to achieve.

3. What makes you distinctive?

Show off your spots and stripes 

What makes you tick? What is your unique selling proposition? Why should anyone care? Everyone is different, with specific and individual markers helping to define your value. Once you've identified your unique position and role compared to other businesses, you can start to communicate this difference to the world. There are lots of ways to do this, including logos, colours, taglines, endorsements, and advertising styles. In defining these elements, you can begin to craft a unique story that sets you apart and resonates with your market. 

4. Who do you sell to?

Find your tribe

Who is your ideal customer? Where do your people hang out? How do you define your community? While being authentic with yourself is vital, you also need to sell your vision to the outside world. Understanding your customers and respecting their values can help you build something relevant that grows over time. While being unique is a great starting point, it's the consistent application of your brand DNA that helps you catapult ahead of the competition.

5. How do you communicate?

Build friendships and make communities

Have you found your voice? What is your personality? How often do you speak and where? From the words you use to the pictures you post and the timing of your delivery, the quality and quantity of your messaging is integral. You need to communicate your value clearly and build trust slowly. It's important to maintain a consistent identity across all marketing channels, communication platforms, and geographical locations.

Examples of brand DNA

Learning from the best provides inspiration and motivation

Finding your own brand DNA can be hard, with business owners often too close to see clearly. Every truly successful business has brand clarity based on a strong DNA profile. Let's look at five examples from huge global names that are easy to translate into the world of small business:

• Apple enjoys a strong brand identity based on elegance and user-oriented simplicity. The world of technology can be complex and confusing — Apple rises to the top by presenting an image of clarity and identity. This DNA is central to its entire business, from the simplicity of its logo and packaging to its operating system and hardware design

• Airbnb is a leading global brand based around community and storytelling. This single company normalised something that would have been very strange just a few years ago — staying in a stranger's home — and they've done it all through branding. Its brand DNA is based on building trust and motivation through community feedback and travel stories.

• The Ikea brand is all about functionality, consistency, and simplicity through design. It has become a global leader in furniture and homeware products and a recognised leader in brand awareness. Ikea's brand DNA is about strong consistent colours, known delivery and packaging systems, and shopping as a fun and functional experience.

• Afterpay is a great Aussie success story, and branding played a key role in their upwards trajectory. Afterpay uses an energetic logo and fresh colours that resonate with its target market. Its brand DNA is about freedom and sustainable financial wellness through accessibility and technology.
  
  
• Vegemite is an Australian icon with a strong and instantly recognisable brand identity. Vegemite has stuck to its guns over many years, with its persistent logo, brand colours, and recipe proving the power of consistency. While it's not afraid to be quirky or change with the times, Vegemite's brand DNA is based on an established and very Australian story. 

Brand DNA is the central core of your business. It's your brand's position in the market, the promise you make to your customers, and the values that set you apart. From the purpose of your business to the voice you use to communicate, everything plays an important role. Just like the nucleotides that make up your body's DNA, these individual elements can be moved around — but never left out — to produce endless diversity in a consistent and familiar package.

If you're ready to transform your business with a killer brand strategy, please contact me for more information about The Marketing DNA Foundation Program.