Episode 38 | What are Your Brand Pillars?

Laura Hargrave: 0:00

Welcome everyone here at Boss It. We would love to hear from you. Join us in our Boss It community by heading over to our website, bossitclub.com and join our mailing list. As we grow, we will be launching our community of fellow Boss It BFFs, and we want you to be a part of it. Okay, Sophia Noreen, let's dig into this. I can't wait to tell them all about how we got here.

Sophia Noreen: 0:25

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 fantastic episode of the Boss It Podcast, and we are also recording for our Masterclass today. We are continuing with our brand series. Before we get started, I am just going to do a little mic check to make sure my mic is correct. It looks like it is, so thank you everyone for joining us. Again, we're going to be continuing on with the branding series. We spoke about our brand messaging last week, and we spoke about the brand angles the week before. Today in this series, we're going to be speaking about what is your brand pillars? Now, I love this part of the Masterclasses because when you speak about the brand pillars, it brings it all together very nicely, especially if you want to build a great brand name for yourself and for your business. 

Having the brand pillars so you can always go back and review. It's great, I love it. So let's get started with it, and if you guys have questions, you can drop it into the chat. If you have any questions after, you can always email us at [email protected]. Hajra has gone ahead and dropped a link in the chat which has our masterclass.  Today's discussion is going to be what are brand pillars? What are the five common categories of a brand pillar? And finally, I'm going to give you some examples for how we've applied the whole exercise of creating brand pillars for our Boss It Club, for this company, which you guys are very familiar with.

What are brand pillars? Brand pillars are the points that set you apart from your competitors. This includes your brand values, the brand logo, and of course it also includes how your customers perceive you over time. It should be part of your company. It should be printed out on the wall if you are in a big office space, or it should be part of your Google docs. Somewhere where your team can refer to the brand pillars on a regular basis, and that way it really helps align all of the things that you do for your customers and your clients. 

I find that brand pillars really help organize you so you're not everywhere. If it doesn't fall within one of the pillars, likely it's not something that you should continue doing or practicing for your business. So examples of brand pillars, this is an example that I have pulled from a technology company and they're pretty general. Technology companies are very good at wanting to commit to service. They love to have solutions for their customers, so technology solutions, strategic locations, and innovation. 

We have four pillars here and they will ensure that all of their service, all their activities will fall within these four pillars: commitment to service, technological solutions, strategic locations and innovation. I have another great example here for you. This is from highfive.com, they are a company that allows you to do conferencing in conference rooms, video conferencing in conference room, because they believe that when you're speaking over the phone, you don't have that connection with the other person. They'd like to have the ability to have simple video conferencing in every room, in an office building or in a corporate setting.

 I know right now, in fact that we're in the middle of a pandemic, going back to the office hasn't become the norm but this is their objective and their pillars pre-pandemic. Their pillars were easy, everywhere and enterprise. We're going to speak more about the headings underneath, so if you're watching the Masterclass, you'll see that each pillar has a heading, but if you're listening to the recording, I'm going to read out the heading. So easy had the heading: High five is a beautifully simple video conferencing, you can start or enjoy with a simple click. Their next pillar is everywhere: Twenty conference rooms for the price of one, Cisco and Polycom systems. They're literally contrasting with one of their competitor which is very interesting. I don't know if I would actually put my competitor's names into my pillars.

But that's great if you want to do that as well, and really hones in on who you are trying to capture. They capture the same customers as Cisco and Polycom in this situation. And then enterprise: It's built for business, not social networking. So they've really narrowed down that their pillar is, we are selling to companies. We are not selling to homeowners. 

So again, I know you're like: Oh my gosh, where are we going with this? We're going to break it down today into five categories that will help you construct your brand pillars. The first one is purpose or mission, and we're going to use that today. We're going to do that activity today. You're going to really zone into your mission. We've done our positioning statement in our previous Masterclass, so you can head back to episode 37 if you're listening to the podcast, or you can grab the Masterclass out of the portal if you're a student of ours and you can finish your positioning statement.

Perception, we're going to speak about that. That really has to do with your customer angle, which we spoke about in the very first Masterclass. Again, that would be episode 36, if you're listening to the podcast and it would be the first episode in this Masterclass series, if you're in the student portal and again, personality is a tone of voice, which we spoke about last week and again, episode 37 and then promotion. This is putting it all together for us on how we promote our brand. It's our communication style. 

The five categories we're going to speak about are purpose or mission, positioning- that's your positioning statement, perception- how it is perceived by your customer, personality- your tone of voice and promotion- how you set and promotes your brand. It's not promotion like sales promotion, this is brand promotion. So let's go through each one of these together. We are going to be zoning in on to our mission statement, so your activity today is to ensure that you have a mission statement for your company. Why did you start your company? Why did you start your brand? And this is your visionary angle, where are you going with this? Where are we planning on going? 

We want to make sure that we start our brand, we start our company and there's always an end vision. If you haven't thought about this, that is fine, but my suggestion is you really get serious about your vision because if you don't know where you're going, it's going to take a lot of effort to figure out your goals. It's going to also take a lot of effort to get started towards that ultimate reality that you're looking for. I know some people start a company and they're like: I just want freedom. They think about their own lifestyle before they think about the brand. 

That's fine, that's a great motivator. But my suggestion is to really think about how your brand is going to basically evolve into a vision that you would like. That is one of our activities today and that's in the workbook, and I'm going to give you some examples of our company's mission statements.

Also Sophia, the product-based business. The mission statement is break down barriers so underrepresented ethnic celebration products are accessible and available to the population they serve. Again, a whole story. The brand story is that we could not find our ethnic celebration products on the shelves at big retailers, we wanted a convenient product and now, we'd like to give underrepresented cultures and ethnic minority groups the opportunity to also have their products on the shelves that are accessible. Meaning, price should be accessible and the availability should be accessible. That's our mission statement. That's the vision of the company and again, population they serve. 

It's not going to be everywhere. It's going to be only in the areas that are applicable to that population so we would really zone in. Now with e-commerce and shipping being so quick, we've actually already eliminated one of the barriers being that you can only get your products on the shelf. In actuality, you may not be the one ultimately helping get that mission up and going. It could be the fact that you have other elements like e-commerce in our situation that just evolved naturally in the background. Boss It Club's mission statement to educate and inspire female founders to take action in their business. That's our vision in their businesses, so we have multiple female founders. We want them to be empowered. We did not get so granular as we did in our positioning statement, and if you miss that go to our episode 37, right before this episode, or you can go ahead and catch it in the student portal. 

But in the positioning statement, it's very specific on who in the female founder group we are serving. The mission statement is a little bit more broad, I would say. In the workbook, you're going to have access to those activities. You can go ahead and take some time and think about your mission statement. I'm just contrasting this with the positioning statement, because we also want to take this into account when we're building our brand pillars. We want to know where our brand fits in the marketplace. You're going to think about how you're competitive and your internal angle will help you answer this question, and this is the exercise we did last week.

I'm going to show you how the positioning statement is different than the mission statement. Boss It Club aims to educate, elevate, inspire female founders who are in zero to five years of business. So it's getting very specific, it's telling you exactly who we're serving and what we are going to do to help them achieve their goals. We're going to educate them and we're going to elevate them, and we're going to inspire. Our brand pillars help us with that.

If you're getting overwhelmed, don't. I know it's a lot of information to absorb, but just break it down into these subheadings and you can go one by one, and really think about your own company and your own brand because this will really help you digest that information and I'll help set you up for any of your goals moving forward.

The positioning statement for Also Sophia, we're just again reviewing it. It creates culturally modern ethnic products for underserved minority groups in North America and Europe. You'll notice that we've gotten down to the nitty-gritty. We've said who we're serving, and we're saying that it's North America and Europe, minority groups. Again, remember every culture, every community has different minority groups so we're talking about the minority groups in North America and Europe. We're also saying that we're doing culturally modern and ethnic products, meaning they may not be exactly what they used to be. Culturally modern, meaning we may be creating something that's brand new that's serving the population of today. 

The perception, how does your ideal customer perceive your brand? So this is the next, so we went through the first one, I'm just going to go back to make sure we're all good. We did our positioning statement and prior to that, we did our mission statement so we're moving on to the third category that we need to consider when we are going to be creating our brand pillars. That is the perception of your brand. Your ideal customer, what do they think of your brand and again, we're going to go back to the very first Masterclass in this series, and talk about brand angles. We spoke about the internal angle.

We want to understand what our customer's thinking. We want to understand that internal angle, and we can use things that we spoke about in the first Masterclass: analytics, focus groups, social media polls, and testimonials. Those will all help you understand what is your customer thinking? We want to stay in tune with our customer, and I love this quote so obviously it ended up in the slides that your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room. That is from Jeff Bezos, and we all know how successful Jeff Bezos has been with his Amazon because he's created his brand, his entire company to serve the customer. 

Sam Walton is also somebody who did exactly that, and he's the founder of Walmart. I obviously talk about him a lot because he was the first entrepreneurial book that I read was his biography. Again, the perception of your brand is very, very important, and you can go back and look at the internal angle, or I would also look at your competitive angle because sometimes the perception of your competition is also very important, so go back and review episode 36 in the podcast series, or you can go and grab this out of the student portal. It's the very first Masterclass in this series. 

The personality, what is the personality or brand? I know it sounds hilarious but the personality of your brand is extremely important. It's interesting because you're like: Brands don't have personalities, but yes they do, they have personalities so, it's the tone of voice and you want to be memorable. You want to connect with your customer. You want your customer to feel like they are in the business, they're in the brand. They feel responsible.

As a customer that they feel loyal, they want to be part of the community. They want to be part of the brand community and the best way to help connect with your ideal audience and your customers is through your brand story. Constructing a brand story is actually quite involved. There's some steps there. We won't get too much into it today, but you naturally have a brand story. You know what it is? If it helps you can write it out, but this is something that also needs to be considered when you are creating your brand pillars. But don't forget about your brand story, it is very impactful and I do stress that people should share the brand story with their customers, either on the website or through a blog or in a podcast form, or even on social media as a post. Always share your brand story with your customers, they connect with the person behind the brand more than they will the commodity. 

Remember, everyone can sell a book, everyone can sell event agency services, everyone can sell cakes. What is making it special for them to buy from you? It's usually that they're connecting with you as a brand owner or the brand story, so don't forget that. Obviously, I'll share with you some of the brand story and personality behind Also Sophia. For the people who have not heard this story before, I'm just doing a quick snippet. So Also Sophia, a mother of two girls realize that there was no ethnic celebration products available in mass market at a reasonable price to allow greater accessibility. That's a really quick snippet. Obviously the story is much deeper than that, but again, you see that people who would probably relate are people who also have children and individuals who are also looking for products of an ethnic nature that couldn't find it. That's how you connect with your customer.

The goal is to connect. So next, I'm going to share with you Boss It Club's story. A female founder knowing how difficult it is to start and scale a business with little capital or experience, but did it anyways. Again, Boss It Club's brand story and personality is you feel empowerment, starting and scaling a business without having capital and experience, and doing anyways so taking the risk. Again, a very quick snippet, the story is much deeper but you'll see that the four elements are there just to really say: Okay, how am I going to connect with my customers? You just pick out those emotional strings, empowerment and the risk taking in this situation.

The last category when we are doing our brand pillar creation, we need to look at brand promotion. Like I said earlier, brand promotion is not sales promotion. A sales promotion would be like a short term customer incentive to purchase a product, brand promotion is the way you communicate with your customers to build brand loyalty. It's your entire communication strategy. When you are writing a post or doing a blog, or even writing the description for your products, you want to always come back to these three questions to ensure that you're on par with their communication strategy, so whom are you speaking to? How are you speaking to them and what are you saying?

These are very important things that you need to consider because you're promoting your brand, brand promotion. And again, you need to take brand promotion into consideration when you are going ahead and creating your brand pillars. We will go very quickly through them all, but we spoke about, I'm just going to quickly go back, so we spoke about our mission statement. We spoke about the positioning statement. We also spoke about the perception of the brand, so you're looking at your internal angle and you can also get competitive angle. The personality, so your brand story and then finally, you want to look at how are you promoting your brand? So brand promotion through your communication strategy.

Those are the five big categories that I want you to dig deep in this activity today. For this Masterclass, you're going to have the workbook and now once that's all done, once you've dug deep and you've gotten all those questions answered, you're going to look at your brand pillars. The ultimate goal is to fill out this sheet and we will create one for you so it's easy to fill it in. Once you've completed all of the activities in this series for branding, you will have the ability. We've already done a brand promise, we've already done a positioning statement, we've spoke about the target audience. Today, we spoke about mission. Last week, we spoke about tone of voice and we spoke about it again today when we spoke about the brand story. 

Tone of voice does include your brand story. Elevator pitch, we'll speak about next week, and now we're going to look at the brand pillars. We're going to go and see how we can construct three to four brand pillars. Now, each business or brand is going to have different pillars. I'm going to show you some examples from our company Boss It Club, and how we broke it down into the pillars. How we broke it down into the headline benefits, and then supporting examples. If you're listening to the podcast, no problem. When you have time, go ahead and grab the workbook because in the workbook, you'll see all of these headings. 

For highfive, again, we spoke about earlier today: easy, everywhere and enterprise and we spoke about the headline, so on the slide that I'm looking at, it says: Headline benefits, easy high five is a beautifully simple video conferencing. You can see start or join with a simple click, and then everywhere is again, we spoke about it earlier. This is a headline benefit, twenty conference rooms for the price of one Cisco and Polycom system, and then enterprise built for business, not social networking. 

We're going to go and use the same structure to build Boss It Club's brand pillars, and we'll have a headline benefit. And then of course, under each headline benefit, under easy they have for highfive join calls from your calendar, SMS, so that's text messaging or email by clicking a URL, so they're giving very specific examples. This is the activity that I want you all to do for your business, because what will happen is you're creating these beautiful buckets. Your band pillars are like the buckets, and as long as you have the pillars set up for yourself and for anybody working with you, it's very easy to say: Okay, this is an activity, or this new initiative fall into one of our buckets. If it doesn't fall into the bucket, then maybe it's outside of your zone, and you shouldn't take the time to exercise that particular initiative because everything we do, it takes time and energy, and if you're putting time and energy into one thing, you're taking it away from something else. 

You really want to make sure that you're spending your energy, where it matters and by creating your brand pillows, you're really setting up that beautiful roadmap for yourself. That way you are all on the same page. All your customers are on the same page as you. All your team members are on the same page as you, and there's less confusion about where the brand is going. So before I move on, again, if you have any questions you can throw it into the chat otherwise let's keep going. 

Take the time to create your brand pillars. This is going to take time so don't feel like this is going to be a quick process. You might have to sit down and take an hour to think about this or even an afternoon. This is not a rush activity. You are essentially developing a roadmap for yourself by creating your brand pillars.

Let's see what we got here for Boss It Club. Boss It Club's brand pillars with the headlines. We have four buckets, four pillars for Boss It Club. We have structure, educate, accountability and mentorship, so four buckets, four brand pillars, and I'll read out the headliners for each bucket.

For structure, Boss It Club provides the community with roadmaps, space and time to increase productivity. Let me say that one more time. Boss It Club's headliner for structure is it provides the community with roadmaps, space and time to increase productivity. Our next bucket, our next pillar is educate. Boss It Club provide easy to complete lessons with action plans to help accomplish goals. Again, easy to complete lessons with action plans to help accomplish goals, and then accountability is our third bucket, our third pillar. Boss It Club provides accountability clubs to help establish community goal setting and action taking.

That's how we are ensuring that we get our accountability in there as are one of our main pillars. And then our fourth pillar is mentorship, Boss It Club provides access to mentors to help guide and inspire students towards their ultimate vision. Those are the four pillars with the headliners. When you construct your pillars, you're going to go ahead and pick three or four themes, and then you're going to put headliners under each of them and then this is where it gets really, really granular and really great for your day-to-day activities.

How are you supporting your pillars? So for Boss It Club, I gave some examples here. For structure, we're going to have co-working sessions, smart goals that are weekly so we're going work with our students to ensure that they have constructed weekly smart goals and then we're going to have a business focus each month, so that's the structure.

 That way everyone knows that this is what the structure is. We ensure that we do our day-to-day activities, to support these structured goals and that way we're working within that pillar. The next example was educate, so our supporting examples are we're going to give access to many courses each month. They're going to have access to monthly Q and A. They're going to have peer-to-peer support, and support within a community. And then accountability, the supporting examples are they're mashed to an accountability club. They have group commitments that they'll have to keep, and then they'll have smart goals each week that there'll be held accountable. That way people, they'll get into action.

They've been thinking about something for awhile at them, so let's help them get into action. And then finally, the fourth bucket, the fourth pillar, the supporting examples are mentorship. For mentorship is we have the unstoppable mastermind with 40 sessions each year, so they have a mentor within a group setting. They have monthly Q and A's in the mentorship club, and then of course community champions who will be there to help them with day-to-day obstacles that they can chat in the group with. 

That's it. Isn't that great? That was a heavy, heavy Masterclass but we have in the workbook all the activities that you guys need to complete. If you do want to go ahead and start working on your brand pillars, again, I highly suggest it because in that way you'll know where you're going, you'll know who you're speaking to, you know your  mission, you know your positioning statement, you know your tone of voice, you get real on your brand story so you feel comfortable sharing it. 

Remember the more you tell your brand story, the more comfortable you'll become sharing it with people. And then finally, you'll get all the way down to understand the perception of your company to your customers and your competition, and then also constructing and really ensuring that all your communication is consistent.

So who are you talking to? How are you talking to them? But what exactly are you trying to say? So those are all the big categories we spoke about, all the five categories and then the end result is that you can sit down and really construct three to four themes for your pillars, and then you ensure that you have your headliners for each of those themes, and finally supporting examples. 

So that you saw how granular we got with our supporting examples. We gave very specific examples of how we wanted to support each one of those pillars, and that way you are always going to be within a bucket or within a zone. You won't start an activity for your company or your business unless it fits within those buckets. If you have any questions, you can always email us at [email protected].

And remember, there's a workbook that is associated with this Masterclass and this podcast. If you're listening to the podcast, you can go click the link below in the show notes and you can get access to that workbook, so you can get started on this lesson. You can always relisten it as well to help you really get deep on what you should be doing for each one of those categories.

And finally, how you can construct your headliners and your examples for your pillars. And remember, it will take some time so don't get frustrated if it's something that you don't want to do today, but you have in your bucket list to get done. No pun intended. Go ahead and print out the workbook and that way you have it sitting and ready to go when you do feel the instinct to go and get this accomplished. It is a big task, but it's a very, very important task. Okay guys, that's all for today. Thank you again for taking your time and remember, make a plan and take action.

And yes, you can have it all.