In this outstanding video Simon Sinek says:

people do the things that prove what they believe.

 

And he's absolutely right. Everyone owns a brand, whether it's a personal brand or a business, but very few brand owners know why their brand exists, even fewer of them know how to communicate the reason for their brand's existence.
Most brand owners, and that is you, can speak for hours about what they do or even how they do it, but those are not the fundamental questions.
If your brand can't effectively communicate its reason for existing it will never, ever drive behavior.
What we tend to do is to try and compensate for our lack of understanding why our brand exists with expounding on what our brand does. But even if what our business does is exceptional, and even if it is funded and peopled by the best skills and sitting on the pinnacle of market conditions, it still will not drive behavior.
Because people buy what they believe.

 

People buy what they believe

America is a great nation, largely because it is founded on its reasons for existing. They are clear, succinct and understandable even by children. Secondly, people find a resonance with the belief, and it drives their behavior.

There are very few nations in the world like that today, most nations expound their culture, their economy, their resources or their GDP - what they do. These may be exceptional, but they do not drive behavior, they do not inspire.
If this is true for a whole nation, how much more so for a single business or person.

Now I must just tell you that right now is an exceptional time to reinvent your brands!
The American economy has been waiting with baited breath for the outcome of the last elections, and the result is that the feeding plate has been taken away from the Fed.
Over the last year or two those with money have been keeping it, generally speaking, not knowing where the next tax bite is coming from. And this contingent is not stored up in big business, it is in small to medium sized business. Most of it is private money, decision makers money, and as we know small business accounts for two thirds of the economy.
The difference between a recession and a depression is that in a depression there is no money, in a recession there is some money but it is just not being spent, for whatever reason.
Right now entrepreneurs are thinking entrepreneurial thoughts again, as opposed to survival thoughts, banks are looking for reasons to invest safely.
And it is time to reinvent your brands, to give them the reason why they should spend that money with you. You can't do that unless you can do two things:

1. Communicate effectively why you exist.
2. With that communication strike a chord of belief with your client.

Access exists for you to extract the most that you possible can out of your brand. We don't just believe in branding as a process, we also believe in your brand.

The fundamental question in this economy is not what you do, and it's not how you do it.
The fundamental question is why. Why is your business, your product, your service there in the first place? And what have you done to prove the legitimacy of that claim?

Reason - Why do you exist?
Resonance - Does it strike a chord?
Respect - What have you done to prove it?

I am here to help you answer the questions of why?

Alan