ZARZA We are Zarza, the prestigious firm behind major projects in information technology.
Listen "Your Brand Identity: What’s Your Frequency?"
Episode Synopsis
If you’re breaking ground with some new start-up in Austin, Texas, or in Silicon Valley, you’re in a place that eats, breathes, and sleeps disruption. If you’re a regional supplier for farming equipment, your world’s probably a bit more seasonal.
But while we give a lot of attention to the outside culture, location, and market demands that shape a business, the factors working on the inside are just as vital.
Every organization has an identity. Not something invented or made up out of thin air, but a genuine self that distinguishes it from other organizations.
While optics, impressions, and outward expression go a long way, your identity holds everything together. And it’s how others recognize you. It makes you unique… and whether or not you know it yet, it makes you remarkable.
https://youtu.be/0EsH06kCMxo
How Do You Find Your Brand Identity?
We call the first step in the process finding your frequency.
Ideally, a process like this would start with your brand identity workshop, where an experienced brand consultant could work through exercises with the leadership of an organization in order to better understand its underlying purpose and values. Because no two organizations are exactly alike, it’s impossible to create a step-by-step guide in a book that works for everyone.
Still, I’ll give an overview of the five main ‘beats’ in the process of helping organizations figure out their authentic identity and how best to express it:
Beat one: Discover your ‘Why’
Beat two: Let your ‘Why’ determine your Purpose
Beat three: Let your Purpose define your Values
Beat four: Let your Values create your Vision
Beat five: Let your Vision set your Goals
In the rest of this post, we’ll cover beats one and two—how discovering your ‘why’ helps you understand what your organization is really about.
The Big Why
Understanding your brand identity starts with why.
Why does it exist?
This isn’t the same as asking: ‘what are the values of your organization?’ as well as ‘what’s it’s character and personality?’
The why captures all of that. A different why creates a different organization.
Organizations are kind of like a cross between people and blenders. Wait. Hear us out.
People have a kind of purposefulness in themselves. A person’s job might involve landscaping yards, but that doesn’t mean the person exists in order to landscape yards. It’s the person who gives a purpose to the landscaping—not the other way around.
On the other hand, blenders have a very clear purpose written into their name: blending food. But blenders are made out of plastic and metal, and so they can continue to exist even when they’ve been tossed in a box and stowed in an attic.
An organization is like a person...and a blender.
Like people, organizations must be driven by a purpose because they’re filled with people. But like blenders, they get their purpose from what they are made for.
An organization’s purpose defines it’s identity. But unlike blenders, organizations are composed of people, not plastic, and those people act intentionally and care about the purpose of what they’re doing. The moment that sense of purpose is gone, the organization disappears.
Let’s think for a moment about the differences between a bank, which exists to make money, and an amateur hockey league, which exists for fun, recreation, and that occasional bout with the gloves off.
If an amateur hockey league started holding money for people and then lending it out at interest, it would be a bank.
If a bank got out of the money business and instead its employees spent all day skating on the ice and scoring goals, it wouldn’t be a bank anymore.
What you do defines what you are.
Even if some parts of an organization feel pointless, or even as fake as one of those North Korean propaganda villages, the scarcity of resources like time and money or the hard-wiring of human psychology guarantees that there is some ultimate reason why...
But while we give a lot of attention to the outside culture, location, and market demands that shape a business, the factors working on the inside are just as vital.
Every organization has an identity. Not something invented or made up out of thin air, but a genuine self that distinguishes it from other organizations.
While optics, impressions, and outward expression go a long way, your identity holds everything together. And it’s how others recognize you. It makes you unique… and whether or not you know it yet, it makes you remarkable.
https://youtu.be/0EsH06kCMxo
How Do You Find Your Brand Identity?
We call the first step in the process finding your frequency.
Ideally, a process like this would start with your brand identity workshop, where an experienced brand consultant could work through exercises with the leadership of an organization in order to better understand its underlying purpose and values. Because no two organizations are exactly alike, it’s impossible to create a step-by-step guide in a book that works for everyone.
Still, I’ll give an overview of the five main ‘beats’ in the process of helping organizations figure out their authentic identity and how best to express it:
Beat one: Discover your ‘Why’
Beat two: Let your ‘Why’ determine your Purpose
Beat three: Let your Purpose define your Values
Beat four: Let your Values create your Vision
Beat five: Let your Vision set your Goals
In the rest of this post, we’ll cover beats one and two—how discovering your ‘why’ helps you understand what your organization is really about.
The Big Why
Understanding your brand identity starts with why.
Why does it exist?
This isn’t the same as asking: ‘what are the values of your organization?’ as well as ‘what’s it’s character and personality?’
The why captures all of that. A different why creates a different organization.
Organizations are kind of like a cross between people and blenders. Wait. Hear us out.
People have a kind of purposefulness in themselves. A person’s job might involve landscaping yards, but that doesn’t mean the person exists in order to landscape yards. It’s the person who gives a purpose to the landscaping—not the other way around.
On the other hand, blenders have a very clear purpose written into their name: blending food. But blenders are made out of plastic and metal, and so they can continue to exist even when they’ve been tossed in a box and stowed in an attic.
An organization is like a person...and a blender.
Like people, organizations must be driven by a purpose because they’re filled with people. But like blenders, they get their purpose from what they are made for.
An organization’s purpose defines it’s identity. But unlike blenders, organizations are composed of people, not plastic, and those people act intentionally and care about the purpose of what they’re doing. The moment that sense of purpose is gone, the organization disappears.
Let’s think for a moment about the differences between a bank, which exists to make money, and an amateur hockey league, which exists for fun, recreation, and that occasional bout with the gloves off.
If an amateur hockey league started holding money for people and then lending it out at interest, it would be a bank.
If a bank got out of the money business and instead its employees spent all day skating on the ice and scoring goals, it wouldn’t be a bank anymore.
What you do defines what you are.
Even if some parts of an organization feel pointless, or even as fake as one of those North Korean propaganda villages, the scarcity of resources like time and money or the hard-wiring of human psychology guarantees that there is some ultimate reason why...
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