Branding and communities

Branding & communities

How can brands and communities work better together? What’s the commonality between them? How can we make people's lives better?

• Branding is traditionally transactional → leads to marketing → leads to sales
• Community branding – someone who has well-being in the brand

Organizations and there are communities | brands are “out here” - a brand is something that lives and breathes in the hearts and minds of individual

Brands are a series of overlapping communities.

Triple bottom line = people, profits, planet

It’s a small planet, we’re all interconnected; how can we do better together? A different kind of tribe.

Brand values and purpose.  Authentic brand purpose.

Three different things going on here:

• established brands
• brand triage (brand management)
• emerging / new brands

brand is a promise; a brand is what people say it is

building a community around a set of values

branding seems to be easier when you have a community of purpose

How do you take the passion that’s common; and create pathways where people move in the same direction.

How do you have a strong enough vision where everyone is onboard? There’s a lot of implicit.

People come to community for their own purposes. Sometimes it’s to gratify their own ego. Sometimes they want to learn something. Sometimes they want to help. Ask the question, why are people coming to my community?

There was some conversation about personal brands and how they overlap with corporate and organizational brands.

In traditional sales cycles, sell yourself, your product and your brand.

best practices for building brands

1. storytelling
2. ambassadors
3. consistency
4. keep it simple
5. brand mantra (3-5 words of what your brand promise/value is)
6. intro and outro
7. repetition
8. show and tell (use images visuals)
9. building shared vision
10. authentic
11. understand your community (don’t believe the stats) and why people join a community/organization
12. don’t underestimate the emotional driver

Notes initially scribbled by Jason Hibbets -- excuse typos and any ideas missed during the session.