Three unconventional self-discovery tools for branding
I previously shared five conventional strategies we can use when looking at branding or re-branding. But I didn’t just use those strategies this time around. During my self-discovery process, I kind of accidentally fell upon a few other tools. They are unconventional and you may not find them in any business or marketing textbook, but anything that helps us to gain insights and awareness into ourselves can be helpful in an initial discovery process. Many of us photographers invest our souls into this work, so it can’t be all business, right? All you need is some time and an open mind!
Remember that while branding ultimately comes from you, the brand may not actually be you and you may not be your ideal client. That can sound strange. How do we spend so much time discovering ourselves only to then try to figure out how to translate that into a brand targeting someone different than you?
Let’s take an example. You are a gardener who offers services to people who have large estates and need to hire for the upkeep of a large property. Let’s say you want to work with millionaire row because they have a significant amount of work and that they aren’t the type to DIY anything so it will be a constant stream of business.
You are probably not a millionaire and you probably don’t live on an estate. You are not your client. But you love landscaping. You love spending time outside and you can be very creative in handling the maintenance of beautiful gardens. You appreciate a client who is hands off and gives you all the space you need to work. Your brand will embody the things you value - nature, not being chained to a desk, pleasure and love of gardening, meticulous attention to detail. But then you take those principles and paint a picture for the target client.
In photography the line isn’t as clear and we often mistake ourselves for our ideal clients. One I see often is related to pricing. If you like seeing prices up front, you may put prices on your site thinking your clients want that too. This is a common error that we make when delivering our brand. Your ideal client may be the type who doesn’t want to sift through a price list but seeks a vendor who will manage all that for them and just give them the invoice to pay.
You should absolutely soul-search for your brand identity. The values of what you discover should be transformed as benefits for the target client. You are involved in the brand identity portion but then it’s a message for others, not for you.
Here are three unconventional tools I used in my branding discovery:
Enneagram personality test
The Enneagram is a personality test, that identifies you as one of 9 ‘types’. The results are provided in a pie chart where you can see all nine types identified in varying sizes that show your most dominant to your least dominant type. There are also interactions with other numbers based on your identified type that can represent movement towards growth or tendencies towards unhealthy characteristics. This isn’t exact science, but I’ll tell you that it can be pretty accurate! I took the test a year ago, and took it again now for curiosity - yup, same results! An Enneagram can be used as a guiding tool to help you evaluate your strengths and weaknesses for your SWOT analysis, and generally can help you gain some clues or insights into what your preferences may be, to help you with branding.
Oracle Card Reading
Ok, we’re getting a bit more esoteric here, but this is a tool that can help us break the tension we may be feeling around our process of branding. Many get frustrated because they find it so hard to understand branding and how to do it, so we can often get caught up in our heads (or end up wanting to bang our head against a wall, like when I experienced a block). Oracle cards are like reading our weekly horoscope - it’s fun and allows us to not take ourselves so seriously! And when we relax, the creative mind can awaken! The idea came to me from one of the magazines I bought for my “present” vision board exercise, and so I went down to the local crystal shop and bought a deck.
I pulled three cards after relaxing and setting an intention to discover what’s next for me and the results were…interesting.
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Masculine/ Feminine Energy Audit
This one surprised me. I was reading an article on a local female life coach/ entrepreneur, again from one of the magazines I bought for vision boarding. I have never given energetics really much thought as it related to business, but I was intrigued and looked further. And then I had some realizations that much of the business world is still very masculine. Even our dominant marketers - think Seth Godin, Gary Vee, Donald Miller. I mean, we see titles like “Crushing It” from Gary Vee, so much marketing can have a very warrior and ‘fight to the top’ mentality. It made me realize that the marketing world does need more feminine energy, and we are starting to see it with women such as Jenna Kutcher, Darcy Benincosa, Marie Forleo, Sarah Petty and many more. And then in looking at my own current branding for MBP, I realized that it actually feels very masculine to me. So I sought out a test (by Tony Robbins no less!) and no surprise, my leading energy is masculine. I sort of liken this to ying/ yang, where balance and harmony is key, but when something doesn’t align, it could be that there is an energetic imbalance. This could indeed have been what triggered my desire for a re-brand, feeling something wasn’t aligned.
Stay tuned for my next post where I will share my results, and begin the process of translating the work into a brand proposition and identity. If you decide to try one or more of these strategies, please post your thoughts in the comments!
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