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Take a moment and think about your brand image.  What messages are your marketing materials sending to your customers or potential consumers?  Do people that know your business will have the same image?

Although I smile often, drinking a coke doesn't make me smile and wearing Wrangler jeans doesn't make me ride a horse any better, or play football any better for that matter.  Maybe you haven't noticed that Brett Favre is the new Wrangler spokesperson.  Microsoft however makes me more productive at the office and at home.

When you are creating a brand image, is it better to create the image first and then work to fulfill it, or to work first and let the image follow?

I wasn't around when Coca-Cola was first created, nor when Wrangler first made work wear.  I imagine however, that they set out to produce great products and succeeded in doing so.  The brands that they created were the result of hard work and quality products.  The brand images naturally followed.

The branding of Coca-Cola changed only after it became so well known that they no longer needed to describe the product as much as they needed to keep the product in front of the consumer.  Coke's new brand is such a great product that everyone "enjoys" it including Santa Clause and cuddly white bears.

Wrangler on the other hand captured a market so well that their product was completely overlooked by other consumers.  Their efforts at creating a casual and recreational brand are opening the doors to markets previously un-reached.

Microsoft produced software that changed the world in ways that don't need my further explanation.  Their competitors have successfully attacked them by focusing on simplicity and a "cool" factor.  The result is a brand image of an aging product that is still good, but difficult to use.  It's no wonder that their new marketing efforts demonstrate that the computing world still revolves around Microsoft products ("I'm a PC") and children doing complex tasks.  

Your brand image is neither the chicken nor the egg.  It's the sum of all parts.  Your brand image is what you're left with when you have worked hard, produced products or services and marketed yourself.  The sum of all your efforts is what creates opinions about you and the opinions about you are the brand that you are.  Successful marketing can change your brand image only so long as the sum of your efforts are equal to the image you are presenting.

Coach Brandon asks: What is the sum of your efforts? 

Afterword:  When Jodi asked me to guest blog for her, I was both excited and nervous.  I'm happy to put words together for my own blog and don't fret too much about the content.  But writing for someone else meant writing something that was both meaningful and valuable.  In addition, writing for the Publicity Studio forced me to consider how my brand was going to fit into her brand image.  

I write about personal success and happiness at Coach Brandon's Blog.  How was I going to fit my insights into an article about marketing?  It wasn't until after I wrote a draft of this article that I realized that personal success and happiness is exactly the same as branding a business except that it's on a personal scale.  Presenting yourself as a successful person requires that you are successful and that you do the things that successful people do.  For people to consider you a happy person, you have to be happy.

Jodi says: Call Coach Brandon Johnston at 612.326.4717 for an image consultation or email him at brandon@coachbrandon.net