One thing’s obvious. The world needs more of YOU and your incredible work. What’s less obvious? How to get your business and mission in front of the right people so you become the go to brand for them. And once your perfect clients discover how you help them, how do you avoid having your value stolen or copied by competitors? How do you ensure you remain unique?
Join the Brand Tuned Accelerator to learn how to position your business and brand for the long term by combining strategic brand thinking with intellectual property.
REGISTER YOUR INTERESTEffective branding requires joined up thinking that combines three disciplines: marketing, design, and intellectual property. That means taking account of these three disciplines concurrently rather than one after another, because they are intertwined and interrelated. While global giants, like the Amazons and Googles of this world know how to put inter-disciplinary teams together when creating brands, most small businesses tend to address these disciplines in silos. Whether due to lack of information or inability to access the right expertise small businesses tend not to know to develop their brand strategy in a joined-up way. This can lead to poor decisions, less success and a need to undo earlier decisions and start over.
The Brand Tuned Accelerator gives you the insights, guidance and support you need to develop your strategy for building a distinctive, differentiated brand that’s uniquely positioned in your industry. Whether you’re launching a new business, product or service, are growing an existing business, or rebranding, it’s essential to be intentional about the reputation you create for your brand.
The Brand Tuned Accelerator equips you to create your brand strategy over 12 weeks, so you emerge with a clear brand plan for what you want to be known for and how to design your identity. That's how you secure valuable intellectual property. IP is where the value in a successful business lies.
By understanding how IP arises in branding you can set your intellectual property strategy to ensure you make correct choices of name, tagline, symbol, character, colours, shapes and other identifiers. These are important because they contain the value of your brand as it grows and develops. Identifiers are designations of origin. They have a special job to do, so need to be the right type of name or brand sign, to be fulfil that role. They are how customers recognise your brand. All the associations about your brand are captured through your name, and sometimes through other symbols when these are consistently used and become famous. For example, the shape of the Coca Cola bottle, or the Swoosh symbol, or the tagline Because you’re worth it, are symbols that designate the origin of Coca Cola, Nike, or L’Oreal in these examples.
Before you engage a graphic designer to create your brand identity, your brand plan should explain your strategy for how to approach these choices because designers and marketers you may engage to create your brand identity don’t know all they need to know about IP. They’re not trained in it. They tend to pick up their knowledge through experience. However, as there are so many myths and misconceptions around IP, they tend to act on and pass on incorrect information without even realising it.
My background as an intellectual property lawyer turned trained marketer who has been supporting businesses to protect and manage their brands for nearly 30 years, gives me unique insights into how to transform your business fortunes by developing the right brand strategy.
I started specialising in intellectual property as an in-house solicitor at Reuters for 5 years, and subsequently went on to do a master’s degree in IP at London University. After a spell working at international law firm Eversheds I founded my own IP law firm Azrights in 2005. As a law firm owner, I soon discovered that most founders don’t know what IP even means. Some of them suffer due to their own AND their designers’ lack of appropriate awareness of it.
If you leave the choice of name and brand identity to a designer, they won’t take the brand protection dimension into account so you risk ending up with a worthless name and branding that’s impossible to legally own. So, it’s important to understand what’s involved to create a unique brand that can’t be copied, so you can ensure you end up with a unique identity that can stand out long term. That means being aware how IP impacts your business.
Brand and IP strategy come before visual identity and IP protection. However, the approach to visual identity should form an inherent part of your brand and IP strategy as IP impacts what is visually, aurally and conceptually distinctive. Creating a more valuable brand involves using IP strategically.
Business success comes from brand creation and brand protection working together. The Accelerator program is for business owners who want to create their brand or reposition their existing brand to better stand out.
There are 12 on-demand lessons that guide you to think through your brand plan. These are supplemented with monthly group accountability and mastermind sessions.
What the weekly videos cover:
Week 01:
THE BRAND STARTS FROM THE INSIDE OUT
The founder’s identity is key to uncovering the unique brand being created and the IP strategy that is appropriate. A list of questions to brainstorm and think through your approach.
Week 02:
THINK IP FIRST
The role IP and brand protection in a brand’s distinctiveness is explained. By the end of this module you will better understand IP’s role in branding.
Week 03:
THE WHAT AND WHY OF BRAND
The purpose of brands and how a brand’s perspective imbues everything it does is explained using Cadbury, Innocent, and Marks & Spencer as case studies. By the end of this module you will have a clear way to understand how commodities differ from brands and exactly what you need to do to create your brand.
Week 04:
UNDERSTAN- DING THE MARKET AND CUSTOMERS
How to assess market need for the product or service and interview people to discover buyer problems is the focus of this module, by the end of which you will have clear approaches to use depending on whether the brand is creating something new or wants to get feedback on existing products and services.
Week 05:
BUSINESS STRATEGY
The importance of creating minimum viable products to test for clients creating something new and exploring business model and sub-category creation is the focus of this module. By the end of this week you will have a range of approaches to use to explore business models and new subcategories, in order to create the right business strategy.
Week 06:
DIFFERENTIATION, POSITIONING, AND DISTINCTIVENESS
‘Differentiate or Die’ , ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ , and other teachings about differentiation, innovation and disruption is explained so students understand how even a patented innovation only gives protection against competition for a limited period of time. By the end of this module students will know why it is key to also focus on distinctiveness in light of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute’s findings about what lasts.
Week 07:
POSITIONING
How to develop the brand’s positioning statement with radical differentiation in mind and prominently communicate the category (e.g. we are a legal service), the brand name, where and how to buy the brand using the brand’s distinctive assets in all communications. By the end of this module students will know how to position their brands so they’re recognisable and clear.
Week 08:
NAMING
The naming hierarchy and strategy depends on the business model and geographic scope of the brand. By the end of this module students will know how to choose legally distinctive names and taglines, and run preliminary checks on them by working out the trade mark classification and learning how to do basic legal availability checks.
Week 09:
BUSINESS, PRODUCT AND PERSONAL NAMES
The fewer names a brand uses the better in terms of its marketing resources. Therefore, given that the founder’s identity imbues the brand, we explore whether using the founder’s own name might be the right strategy. Students will have clarity on how to take a 360 degree view of naming.
Week 10:
DISTINCTIVENESS
Creating a brief for the brand’s distinctive look and feel and deciding the brand’s touchpoints so it is visually and aurally different in the category. By the end of this module students will know why it is important to create 3-4 distinctive brand assets, what legal searches might be needed, and what guidelines to develop so the brand can be uniquely recognisable and how legal protection needs to play a part in maintaining its uniqueness.
Week 11:
BRAND STRATEGY
We pull everything together to ensure the bramd aligns to business strategy and finalise its purpose, mission, vision, values, brand experience and touchpoints. By the end of this module students will know why building mental and physical availability should be part of the strategy for promoting the brand so it becomes unique and famous through its distinctive assets.
Week 12:
DRIVING THE BRAND
The need to ring fence a budget for long term brand building and maintaining a watchful eye for competitor activity, including colours and symbols they adopt so as to distance the brand from the competition to maintain distinctiveness is emphasised. By the end of this module students will know why it’s important to have an annual retainer to review the brand’s performance and make any necessary adjustments to maintain its distinctiveness is desirable.
The program comprises 12-24 businesses who will mastermind through monthly meetings.
There is a one to one individual consultation meeting with Shireen Smith for each business.
