WHO is your business?

Who, yes WHO. Not what, not where, why, or how. Who.

You might not give a hoot about your brands core identity, but trust me when I tell you that your clients do and so does your competition.

Have you ever heard something described as having "personality"?

Well, that personality is built out of identity and is what old-school masterminds called "reputation". Brand awareness, market share, and social reach are other ways of describing the fame of one's identity. Still, few track the conversation past the initial one-liner unless it translates to profits.

But how much of YOUR identity is mutually exclusive to how much you earn? We'd all like to think that we just happen to have jobs and financial success, but that we are so much more than a cog in the machine. In fact, most of us would agree that a healthy employee or founder is successful in their work almost precisely because their identity gave them the traits needed to be competitive.

Your brand is no different. If everything about it from its colors to its slogan is exclusively to generate profit, you and the whole world are missing out.

You see, your identity and your company's identity should have distinctive qualities that make it unique from everyone else. If those qualities aren't born out of values, you'll drift along with your peers just like you did in high school or college, except the side effects aren't just a splitting headache the next morning.

Don't get me wrong, it's still a headache! It's just in the form of an improperly valued contract, bad debt write-off, or defaulted payment to a key vendor, and sometimes, takes months to wear off.

In every scenario in life, including business; your values dictate your rationale. Period.

If your company has directives, and yet no values; you'll forever be controlled by your environment (aka the competition).

Not only does this restrict your ability to lead within your industry, but it removes the highest, most pivotal gear from your grasp; meeting expectations. This vastly reduces your capacity to cruise past growing pains and retain repeating, loyal customer bases.

A solid sense of identity allows us to set standards for ourselves, which eventually get adopted by the marketplace. If we don't set those expectations, others will, and more often than not, they'll be placed way too high.

Think about it this way:

You and I both are very different people (I'm assuming (and hoping)) and so, not surprisingly; we might have very opposite opinions about famous movie stars, and yet, despite how different we are; if we both knew one of them personally - we'd say the same thing.

Why?

Because they were able to relate back to us.

When we lack an intimate perspective on something or someone, our minds fill in the blank based on our past experiences with similar or like situations. We get a "feeling" or a "vibe" about a person or place, sometimes even closing ourselves off to the possibility of it being very different from our gut reaction altogether.

But what happens when we are right, or even wrong but are pleasantly surprised by the character of the person? We change our opinion and begin to better understand it, according to how it makes us feel in return. That's relationship.

Examples of this in business could be how fast you might be connected to a support specialist and not just only to sales teams. Or maybe how easy it is to return an item that was incorrectly purchased. Moments where the values and priorities of a company come before the profits can easily turn us into lifelong customers and even unofficial brand ambassadors.

So who is your brand and how would people introduce them to a friend at a corporate party? Does your brand relate back to its audience or are they placing you in a box? Worse yet, are you chasing the expectations that your clients put on you? Why?

Type your answers or comments below! I'd love to hear your thoughts.