Closing Sales and Shifting Opinions [Part 1]: Understanding Branding For Online Business And Progressive Messaging

When most people think about branding for their businesses, three things come to mind — their business name, business colors, and logo. Thinking about branding this way makes sense because it’s the way most of us experienced branding in school. Our school teams had names (Go Vikings!), colors (blue and white naturally), and logos/mascots (the personification of a Viking via a mascot costume.)  

But limiting business branding to these identifiers dwarfs the potential of what a cohesive brand can do. Not only can effective branding attract audiences and close sales, it can also shift opinions and cultural narratives on social issues. So once entrepreneurs understand the basics, they can start using their brands to promote more than just their products and services.  They can use them to support progressive policy solutions as well.

What is branding?

There are almost as many definitions of branding as there are snowflakes. And like snowflakes, it seems that no two descriptions are alike. So the two most understandable and useful definitions of branding for me are: 

1. A brand is a promise you make to your customers derived from who you are, who you want to be, and who people perceive you to be; and
2. Branding is the sum experience of every touchpoint your customer has with your product.

I think together these two definitions cover the full breadth of branding pretty accurately. The bottom line is that branding about providing a thoughtful and consistent experience for your customers.

What are the elements of a brand? 

There is conflicting information here too. But the most common elements of a brand include:

• the business’ personality, or its mission, values, and messaging;
• a company’s logos, colors, imagery, typography, textures, and shapes; and
• the design of the business’ digital and print assets like Instagram flat lays and the like.

Executing these elements well provides a thoughtful and consistent experience for your business’ customers and its audience.

How to use branding to sell more than just products?

From Nike’s recent Dream Crazier campaign to Toms’ shoes recent shift to Stand For Tomorrow which lets customers decide whether to donate a matching pair of shoes or use a portion of their purchase to contribute to causes like equality, mental health, safe water, ending gun violence, and homelessness, it’s clear that branding can do more than just sell products. A cohesive brand can also be a vehicle for social change. By creating a brand philosophy and personality grounded in authenticity and progressive values, entrepreneurs can bake messaging that shifts opinions toward progressive policy solutions right into the foundation of their businesses.

Where does online business miss the mark?

In the online business industry, many business owners attempt to forward the cause of progressive policy solutions by donating a portion of their sales to various causes and removing the mystique around business ownership by openly talking about the emotional and mental challenges of owning a business. These conversations make the idea of business ownership more accessible because they remove the belief that you have to reach some emotional and mental nirvana before you are fit to lead a company. 

Despite these efforts, where online businesses miss the mark is that they employ the same old tactics of traditional selling to convey their messages of accessibility and progressive change. By focusing on “rags to riches” transformation narratives and social triggers like manufactured authority signaled by wealth and looks, scarcity, and likeability, online business owners diminish the effectiveness of their progressive causes. 

Instead, these conflicting narratives create cognitive dissonance. On one hand, online business owners seem to be the promoters of progressive change. Yet, on the other hand, the online business industry also seems to say that only certain people are good enough to carry those progressive messages. And those people just happen to be young, thin, rich, and white.

But we can change all that by changing the way we brand and create messages for our businesses. In part 2 of this post next week, I’ll discuss the exact steps for doing just that. 

In the meantime, I’d love your thoughts on this week’s post. What does branding mean to you? And do you think online businesses miss the mark when it comes to messaging for progressive change too? How so? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.