It doesn’t matter if you’re an individual, a start-up business, or a multi-million dollar corporation, history repeats itself every day regarding your brand. Repeating history plays a vital role in developing and maintaining your brand.

Your “brand” is the personal perception each individual customer experiences every time they interact with your company. An interaction is defined as when a person receives a “touch” from your company. A touch has multiple definitions including, but not limited to, a visit to your website, watching your commercials on television, listening to your radio ads, reading your ads in a magazine or talking with your customer service team.

As in personal relationships, the touch is the most intimate of all interactions. The right sort of touch from a good friend can be remembered for a lifetime. Likewise, a harsh interaction or a rough touch can easily harbor resentment and bitterness for years.
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Understanding brand positioning is very important if you want to correct misconceptions and off-brand opinions of your brand.

You may have every intention of analyzing your brand to make sure that it is in a position of strength by participating in scientific research to that end. But first as a litmus test, you might find it useful to do a little under the radar analysis to get a quick feel of your stakeholder’s opinions regarding your brand positioning. We are going to casually ask them.

The idea for this came from a discussion I had with the CEO of an international architectural firm who were coming to terms with their brand. I asked him, “just what do you do at (his firm)?” He quickly gave me his take (elevator speech) on the firm’s qualifications. I thanked him and asked if he felt that his employees would answer that question in more or less the same way. He thought that maybe they would, but he wasn’t certain. I told him to walk up to the first few people he sees the next time he is at his office and ask them, “What do we do here at ABC Company?” I mentioned that he might be surprised by what he hears.

Now he was intrigued.
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Are you so focused on following the rules you’ve forgotten that to make your brand shine out what you really need to do is break them?

Too often we are so fixated on finding and then adhering religiously to the “right” formula (so that customers will buy, buy, buy…) what we actually become is just another face in the crowd; a second-hander, inheriting a world we never made. This is why the Linden Lab story appeals to me so much. Founder and CEO, Philip Rosedale, did it his way. Not content with inheriting a second-hand world, he created his as he wanted it (albeit a Second Life and all!). And boy do they shine out.

In Part 1 I explored the necessity for new ideas, and what that can mean for your business in terms of your bottom line. Here I have one main point – which relates to breaking the rules – and I’m going to travel via Linden Lab’s creative internal business model to make it.
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