Have you ‘hacked’ your brand yet?

Think about estate agents, for example, who all sell a very similar service. Then think about the estate agents in your area who are much bigger than others. These will be the ones who haven’t just created a nice logo or use fancy branded cars; they will have branded their entire customer service proposition, right down to the first impression you get inside their offices. They are defining who they are and what they mean to you, and in this way, they WILL have created a difference to the estate agency two doors down the street. 

Many small businesses are built on their name and reputation, or their sales efforts. Eventually, most realise that to truly grow a business you need to develop a brand. The problem is many just don’t know how to do that because it’s not their area of expertise.

What is a brand?

A brand isn’t just a name. Everything you do is your brand, from the way you communicate on your website to the packaging on any products you make or sell, or even how you answer the phone for support calls. It’s vital to understand your brand is the core of your business, upon which you can build your entire customer proposition.

Maya Angelou famously said: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

So, having a great brand is vital if you want to grow a great business. But most people who start small businesses aren’t naturally great at branding. Many turn to agencies like ours, but they find the costs of a full branding exercise can be challenging.

Introducing the Huddle Hack

This is why we developed the Huddle Hack – a super-quick way to get to the heart of what your brand is and can be. The hack itself only takes a day, although there is often planning beforehand to make sure the hack goes smoothly. Because ideas are formed that would normally take weeks using traditional branding agency methods, the speed of a hack means the costs stay low.

First, we get your key people and our most relevant people in a room together. After the coffees and croissants and ‘getting to know you‘s are out of the way, we start working through a series of very focused, sometimes quite intense but always enjoyable exercises. 

It starts by understanding simple things like the motivating factors behind the business, the core beliefs of the staff and the benefits the service or products give to customers. This tells us the ‘truth’ about your brand that people will believe.

We then use a number of playful ‘tools’ we’ve developed that get to the heart of what you want your customers to understand about your brand and when you can be different to the next company. Along the way, we find many businesses get insights into their customers that they hadn’t realised existed.

By the time we wrap the hack, we’ll come away not just with the ‘voice’ of the brand but also tons of ideas for opportunities, services and products the business can develop. This is always the most enjoyable aspect of every hack we do and, we are not just saying this, but we see a visible lift in the people involved, no matter how long the day has been, in every hack we do.