Feb
VISUALISE: The VISION Process
As an entrepreneur, you are probably lucky enough to be doing something you love! But how can you attract customers who will love your business, products or services (almost) as much as you do?
Understanding how to build your brand is vital to achieving this.
Our VISION Process (detailed in my best-selling and award-winning book, Let’s Get Visible!) helps you understand your brand and harness the power of branding to achieve your business aspirations and goals
VISION demystifies the branding process for you with powerful results, helping you create a brand that connects and resonates with your ideal clients on a deeper, emotional level. When you connect with hearts as well as minds, that’s when you achieve brand loyalty and give people a much stronger reason to choose
The first step in The VISION Process is…
VISUALISE
The ‘Visualise’ stage breaks down into three parts
- Your Five Aspirational Brands (or FABs i.e. company brands you admire from a business perspective – choose five and work out WHY they are brands you aspire your company to be like. Is it their ethos? Service? Experience? Quality? etc)
- Your Vision (including where you are now with your company and where you want to go in the 3-5 years) and finally,
- Your Customer’s Vision…
My book goes into the first two stages in more detail but for this article, we’ll dig into the customer vision as I see so many people making the mistake of thinking their amazing products and services are enough to win an audience over!
Newsflash: Nobody cares what you’re selling. They only care about what you can do for them.
In order to truly build a brand your customers will fall in love with, you need to get inside their heads and understand their vision.
WHO IS your ideal customer?
- What lifestyle do they lead? What brands do they buy into? What’s their gender and age? What do they do for a living? Do they like to read? What do they watch? Listen to? Drive? Wear? Where do they eat? Shop? Holiday?
- Where are they now in their lives? What are the problems that your business can help with?
- Think about their aspirations and ambitions. What is their vision of how their life will look after they’ve spent their money with you?
- What lasting difference will you make to their world? Why will they love your service/product and buy it over any other? What’s the transformation you are bringing to their lives?
Why do people buy?
Anyone who buys something is trying to fix a problem or fulfil a need, although it may not be obvious or identified as yet.
Even the guy who buys a new Ferrari has a problem. It may be a status thing: he was bullied at school and now needs people to see how successful he is. He may be lonely: trying to get noticed, win friends or attract the woman of his dreams. He may be insecure or trying to overcompensate for other areas of his life (!).
So brand messages and branding focusing on the Ferrari owner’s popularity and successful life will resonate powerfully for him.
It doesn’t matter if you are selling business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) – you are communicating human-to-human. Start looking deeply at why people may buy from you. If you can tap into a deep-rooted need in your customer that they didn’t even know they had, that’s incredibly powerful.
TAP into hidden needs
Cake Friday! My little one’s favourite day of the week.
I remember being first-time pregnant and waddling around The Baby Show in London with my then-boyfriend, Andy. Blissfully unaware of all the baby paraphernalia that I’d have to cart around with me, I had naïve visions of just wearing my baby in a sling.
Then I spotted a mother wheeling an amazing space-age pushchair-thing along. I asked Andy to run after her (I couldn’t!) to find out what it was.
We found the Stokke stand and asked for a demo. The assistant was busy showing us all the features, but I was mesmerised by the video playing on loop.
It showed the Stokke positioning the child higher so they got to see more of the world out of bus windows, over walls and shop counters. Better still, the child could be positioned to face their parent, boosting their interaction and communication skills. Adults in the video were chatting to the beaming child in the Stokke whilst other children in normal pushchairs languished at knee height, ignored and bored.
As if that wasn’t enough, the amazing Stokke was shown protecting its precious cargo, high above exhaust fumes, cigarette smokers and snuffling dogs. A pushchair – sorry travel system – that would make our child happier, a better communicator and safer?
We fell in love and bought one on the spot!
If you’ve read about my DoSaySee model, you might notice that the Stokke appealed to me first because of how it looked (See), then the video spoke to me and tapped into my until-then unidentified need to protect and develop my children (Say), and only once we used it did we discover how amazing it really was (Do) – its features were way down the list as to why we bought.
Did Stokke deliver on its brand promise? Well, people have always commented on how eloquent my boys are, so it must have helped, all the lovely chats I’d had with them. I was quite heartbroken when we finally had to sell it but I’m still a passionate brand advocate for Stokke and a loyal fan for life.
Case sTudy: Slept like a baby
Shaleena’s company Slept Like a Baby sells blackout blinds. Rarely a pleasurable or luxury purchase, they tend to be bought by shift-workers and parents who want to help their children get to sleep more easily, especially in the summer months and for daytime naps. They are seen as an essential product, their appearance often being secondary to their function.
Shaleena wanted to change that and focus on the baby-care sector and interior design space with the upper end of her range. Her blinds are customised so buyers can have their children’s name applied and/or theme the blinds to their room. She also provides beautifully custom-embroidered and sequinned blackout blinds for grown-ups’ rooms – as well as more standard blinds.
focus on THE TRANSFORMATION
I encouraged Shaleena to focus not on the blinds’ features (which probably don’t vary much from those of her competitors), but around the transformation that her products bring, hence her company name and strapline.
Sleep = happy baby = happy parents.
The obvious product benefit that anyone in this space may focus on is better sleep.
But what does better sleep for baby actually mean? Better sleep means a happier baby. Better sleep aids baby’s learning and development. It also means the parents sleep better, which gives them increased energy and makes them feel like they can cope with the day. This, in turn, makes them feel like better parents, partners, friends and workers.
A happier, healthier and more successful family plus a more beautiful home?! Sold!
Buy the book
Sapna Pieroux’s award-winning book,’Let’s Get Visible!’ takes you through the whole VISION process, showing you how to get brand clarity, stand out in your industry and supercharge your business growth.
If you need help with your branding and creating a brand your customers will love, book a free Brand Clarity call with her and let’s see what we can do…