Episode 36 | What is Your Brand Angle

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Welcome to the Boss It Podcast. My name is Sophia Noreen and I took an Etsy startup, and launched it in big box retailers within 12 months. As a creative with an entrepreneurial drive, I left my full time career in healthcare to find better harmony between career, family and self care. We believe you can have it all. Yes, you can launch and run a successful scalable business while maintaining harmony in all aspects of your life. We believe we can learn from each other and draw on many experiences to create the best life possible. During each episode, we will share proven life hacks that will keep you on top and striving every day. There should be no hesitation. Make a plan. Take action. We are here for you.

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Boss It Podcast. My name is Sophia Noreen, and I'm going to be your host for today, and we have a special treat because we are going to be talking about what is your brand angle. This is a part of our branding series. We're going to have a few episodes, a total of four episodes on branding that is going to help you set the tone for your brand, in that way, when you are speaking to an individual or you want to give your pitch, you are all ready to do so. Let's get started. If you are watching the video, this is part of our Masterclass series on branding, and if you're listening to the podcast, you both will have the opportunity to grab the workbook associated with this Masterclass in the show notes. If you're in the student portal, it will be located below this video so you can grab the workbook, so you can follow along and complete the exercises. So we are discussing what is a brand angle, what are the different types of brand angles, and finally, why do we need to do this? Why are we going to be speaking about brand angles? What is a brand angle? A brand angle is also known as a content angle or a marketing angle, and basically it's giving perspective to different individuals that would be interacting with your brand. When you know the perspective of these individuals then it's easier to speak to these individuals, that is why this exercise is so important. Sometimes we go straight into our brand messaging or our pillars of our business, or we try to go ahead and construct our elevator pitch, but by not doing this step by understanding the perspective of your customers, of your team and also of the market, you may be missing some elements that would be really, really important to your brand messaging. So that is a reason why we want to start here with your brand angle so we don't miss any key elements when we're constructing what our branding is all about. I just mentioned there's three brand angles that you need to consider, one is your customer angle. The second is your internal angle and the final one is your competitive angle. Let's go into each one of these. And again, if you have the workbook, then you can start jotting down ideas that would be appropriate for your business or for your brand. Basically the goal here is for you to understand what the different angles are for your specific brand or business. So that is the reason why the workbook is so important. That way you're able to quickly jot down exactly what you're thinking, and then you can revisit at the end so we can sum all of this up. The customer angle- we want you to understand your customer's perspective, what's their pain point, what pain point are you trying to solve for your customer? Now, many businesses are basically solving a problem for their customer, and that's why their customer's willing to go ahead and invest monetarily or invest their time and engaging with your brand or your business because you are actually solving a problem for them. That is generally the main reason, the problem might be something that doesn't appear to be a problem such as for example, entertainment. Sometimes people are like: What are entertainment services providing while they're serving a pain point of creating variety in someone's life? So if you dig really deep in your business or your brand, you'll find that you are actually solving a pain point for your customer or your client. Basically what we need to do with the customer angle is to understand how the customer perceives your brand. When a customer thinks of your particular brand or your particular service, you have to understand why would they spend time with you? Why would they give you business? Why would they give you their time? What is setting you apart in their eyes? So if you can come down to your customer's level and be like: My customer comes to me because I have fantastic customer service. I have a reasonable price point. I am diligent and I get the job done. Write it out, in your workbook I want you to think of your customer, put yourself in your customer's shoes, in your customer avatar shoes and describe exactly what you're doing for your customer, and that is the reason why they're coming to you for business. Some people may be like: I don't know how to do that. I'm still a little bit confused about who my ideal customer is, and I'm not sure about this customer angle. This is where it's really important because you need to do your homework. Not everybody has the innate ability of understanding their customer because they may not be their customer. In our product- based business, Also Sophia, we started off providing cultural products for party and crafts and DIY and home decor, and I happened to be the ideal customer. I created products and I understood the pain point. I understood the customer's perspective because I was the customer. But you may not be the customer. You may not innately know what the pain points are of the customer because perhaps you are making products for the hair industry and specifically for beards, you are creating moisturizers for facial beards, and you're a female. You may not understand all the pain points of your customer because you are not a man with a beard. Now, this is a really, really out-of-the-box example, but I'm sure it exists. I did listen to a podcast yesterday and the individual on there was a female, but she was now pivoting her business offer grooming products for men as well as for females. But she's not a man herself. What are some things that she could have done to understand that customer angle for that particular line of products in her business? She could have gone ahead and made a focus group. She could go ahead and use really, really great tools on social media like polls, we can ask polls of our audience that we have captured already. You can use surveys by sending them out to your email, and the thing that I love most, if you have an online shop is you can go and look at the analytics. When you go to the backend of your website and look at your analytics, you will find that there is information on there about where your customer spends their time, what product is selling the most, and that will tell you where your customer is spending their energy and time, which means that that particular product or that particular page, perhaps a page is like a blog, that is a pain point that you are solving for your customer. And so, don't forget to use your analytics at the backend of whatever selling platform you're planning to use. It could be even Etsy, it could be your Shopify, it could be Woohoo Commerce. All of these different backends, it could be Google Shop now, there should be an analytical section. You can also use our analytics in the social media world. For example, I can go ahead and look on Instagram and look at the backend of Instagram, and see if I have a professional account or a business account. You can see that individuals spend more time on this particular posts. It gets more engagement. So again, the idea here is to understand your customer, understand your customer's perspective and the pain point you're solving. If you yourself don't fit into the cohort of your ideal customer, so the example we used earlier is female trying to make male grooming products and she herself is not a male, and have facial hair like a man. She may be the individual that needs to go and pull a focus group together because she is not in that cohort herself. She may have to do a little bit more digging to understand if the products she is providing are beneficial to the customer. Again, take a few of these options. The exercise here is that you really need to know your customer angles in order for us to really build the foundation so we can create great brand messaging, and of course, an elevator pitch. So pick maybe one or two of these items from this list, and go ahead and write it down on how you plan to conduct it, because remember, we're going to make a plan and take action, and let's move on to our next angle which is the internal angle. Now the internal angle is your team's ability to understand the brand's vision, because if you're the team of one, you're still a team, you are the life force of your growing company. You need to understand that the brand is serving the team. Of course, it's a symbiotic relationship because of the team is serving the brand, but the brand is also serving the team. It is what is going to provide the momentum or the energy that will keep your team going especially when there's those hills and valleys. When it comes to success in your business, remember it's never a straight line up, there's going to be some tumultuous ground at times, so the best thing to do is for your team to understand where you're going. If you know where you're going, then it's easier to get there, otherwise you'll just be floundering around and trying to figure it all out, and sometimes that fails. This is a great thing to consider, is the internal angle and your team's understanding of where you're going and then how they feel connected to the brand. And again, if you're a team of one, this is still applicable. You have to ask yourself, where are we going? Where am I going with this? What is my plan? What is my vision of the next three to five years? How do I feel that the brand is serving me and I'm serving the brand, and those things have to be visited very regularly. We suggest that you hold team meetings. We have a team meeting going actually daily at this point, because we're in the heat of our selling season for Also Sophia, and we will continue to meet regularly until we feel that we've gotten into a good system or a good flow, and we don't need to meet on a daily basis. Now they're pretty quick touch points. We don't need to have an hour long meeting. We usually meet for maybe 10 to 15 minutes, and then if there's a new process that we're trying to figure out, then it takes a bit longer. But understanding where the team is coming from, and then them having an understanding of where we are going as the brand so we are very open that the vision is this for automating all of these things, so that way we have the capacity to take on more business, and having those open-ended conversations with their team will make them feel also more empowered. This is great because it allows them to serve the brand and the brand serves them in recognition, and in turn they give the best quality service possible. Be it that they are potentially in customer service, say that they're part of the fulfillment team, say that they are doing social media for you. Wherever they lie amongst your team members, you want to make sure they feel empowered, they have the autonomy, and that way they will continue doing the best work that they can do. So don't forget, again, if you're a team of one, this is still applicable. This is not to be thought of: I don't have a team yet so this is not applicable. You are the team, so you need to visit your missions and your vision regularly to really help keep you empowered to keep going. We talked about surveys with our customers. You can also survey your team against surveying yourself. Maybe three questions each week regarding on the things that you want to accomplish, or serving things that may need to be changed or evaluated regularly. I do say if you're changing a process, you should evaluate it in about three months again, to ensure that it's still something that needs to be done or something that needs to be corrected because changing your processes too quickly can cause other tumultuous effects. So it's better to change it, but leave a gap to test it. Touch points- so if you are growing your team, it's great to have weekly touch points if possible. Sometimes daily, depending on how big your team is, and then like I said, openly share your plan and your vision for where you want to go. Again, team of one, you still do that. You still have to have that open conversation with yourself. If you know where you're going, then it's easier to get there, and we say that all the time. So don't forget to try some of these elements out. If you are just starting out, my suggestion is to start writing down a little bit of a three to five-year plan on how you feel like you want to grow, and we can get more into that in another Masterclass or podcasts about you writing out your vision and your plan, but it's extremely, extremely important to keep you going, and allowing you to have momentum and steam. The final angle- the competitive angle. This can feel a little bit uncomfortable because some people are like: I don't want to assess the competitive angle. I don't want to necessarily go and size myself up to my competition. But you, unfortunately, do not sell in a silo and if you're starting a business, then you need to know who is in your market place and who will be competing with you for your customer's attention. If you know this, it will make it so much easier for you to write a very compelling business statement. I'll make it so much easier for you to write a compelling brand message and speak to your customer that is unique. Remember, many people will be selling the same or similar products. That should not discourage you from starting, what you need to do is you need to start by making yourself unique. How are you going to stand out amongst everyone else? What is going to be something that your customers will say about you, which they won't say about anybody else? And that is the reason why the competitive angle is probably one of the more important angles, I think they're all very important, but this is the one that I feel that people will forget about. This is how many big brands have separated themselves out. I'll give you a few examples that are coming to the top of my mind. Apple is a very good example of this. Apple is selling you the emotion of having an Apple product versus the technology of what they're actually selling. So they're actually selling you technology, but once you go and become an Apple user, people are faithfully an Apple brand user. Many people who will buy Apple may not buy anything else again, that's why they have lineups outside their stores previous to the pandemic. They would have lineups. They would be booked up all the time. And then in Canada, anyways, when I looked down at the Microsoft store in our big mall, it was empty. Now it's unfortunate, but this is exactly what they did. They sized themselves up in the market. Obviously Microsoft was well ahead of the game, in the early two thousands, but Apple did something besides being innovative they have won the hearts of their customer, and they did that by looking at their competitive angle. Again, a big example by pulling Apple into the mix here, but something that you guys should understand that you're never too early to look at your marketplace, understand who else is there? What else are they up to? How can you stand out, and what makes you unique? So again, look at your workbook, jot down some notes now, and then of course you may want to do a deeper dive after this recording is over, after you've listened to the podcast or the masterclass, and just take some time to really understand who's in your marketplace and how are we going to make you stand out? Here are a few ways that you can construct a competitive angle: survey the market, go see who your competitors are, and like I said, what makes you different? How are you going to stand out? That's pretty much it, and there's not much more to be said about that. I think really at the end of the day, you need to do your homework. And it sounds really funny, but I'll tell you one more quick story. If you've ever read Sam Walton, he was the founder and owner of Walmart. He would go, and it's a great biography by the way, I suggest if you are in business and you want to really hear somebody who had that competitive and eager appetite for business, you should read Sam Walton's book. It's an audio book as well, if you're into listening to audio. Anyways, it was literally the first business book I ever read and I read it from cover to cover, and that generally doesn't happen with me. So Sam Walton's book is great and he used to go and spy on his competition. He would literally go into the stores. We're talking about 1960s and the 1970s. He may have even started earlier than that, but he literally would go into his competitor stores and write down the price tags of the items. He would want to see if he could beat them in the price because their vision was to have the lowest price possible. They wanted to have the most competitive price in their stores, so he would actually go and spy on them and then he had a little tape recorder back in the day. He would have a notebook to start, and then later on, he would have a tape recorder and he would dictate. It just shows you that because he was so well aware of what his competitors were up to, it was easier for him to go and make his brand and his company more appetizing for his customers. And again, we all say there's a lot of room to play. There's a big sandbox in business, and even if you take a small sliver of the pie, you can be just as successful and you're not going to serve every single individual out there. With the Walmart example, remember not everybody is a Walmart customer. Not everybody wants to step into the store. So there is going to be segments of the population that, yes, they will love what your mission and your brand is and what you stand for, and where you lie in the market so you're going to serve that sliver. And then there's going to be other individuals that will say: No, I'm not really a Walmart customer, Sam, so the lowest price for me is the most important thing. That's fine, so there's other businesses that can serve those customers. Okay guys, so that is it in regards to the three angles. The reason why we want to know about all this like where are we going with this? Why do we want to go through the exercises of knowing these three different angles? Really it's because when you know the angles, you're able to construct a more holistic messaging for your brand, your brand promise, your positioning statements, and we're going to talk about those things in the next Masterclass or in the upcoming podcast. So that is the reason why I'm doing this exercise today, going ahead and looking at your brand angles, we'll help you set the foundation for the upcoming podcast. Remember, we want you to be intentional when you are creating your brand promise and your positioning statements. We want you to be intentional when you are creating the vision and your elevator pitch, your brand pillars because that will help set the foundation for everything that you do in business as you move forward. Okay guys, that's all we got for today. Remember if you have questions about any of the material that we presented in this Masterclass or in this podcast, you can always email us at [email protected], and again, the workbook that is associated with this class is in the show notes for the podcast, or if you're watching the replay for the Masterclass, it is going to be in the student portal. So you guys have access to it. Go and get started. I want to make sure you're successful, and if you are listening to the podcast, we'll catch you next week and remember, make a plan and take action and yes, you can have it all. Bye for now.

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