Closing Sales and Shifting Opinions [Part 2]: Principles For Branding Your Online Business With Authenticity

In Part 1 of Closing Sales and Shifting Opinions, I talked about branding. Specifically, I wrote about what a brand is, what the elements are, and how it can be used to promote progressive agendas like this Nike ad. In Part 2 of this series, I go a little bit deeper by explaining how to brand your online business authentically, and why that should matter to you in the first place.  

Let’s start with the why. Here’s the full story.

A little while ago, I decided to update some of the brand messages for Legally Bold. As I began to educate myself on messaging methodologies, something that has been bothering me about the online business industry for a while came into full view.

I realized that there is a tension between the values that the online business industry espouses and what they are really signaling just below the surface. 

On its face, the industry feels like the progressive entrepreneurial community of my dreams. Online entrepreneurs speak earnestly about values, giving back, freedom, feminism, inclusion, community, and social impact. All while they earn a great living working from home. 

At the same time though, through the industry’s use of “social triggers” branding techniques and images of founders and others who are unbelievably skinny, well-coiffed, constantly positive, and expensively dressed, it also signals that you have to be young, rich, thin, white and attractive to ride this ride.  

No matter how well-intentioned, these conscious and unconscious messages don’t line up. In the pursuit of authenticity and doing business with a heart, online entrepreneurs have simply transferred a different type of artifice online. One that says we love and accept everyone’s money. But you still have to make yourself fit the ideal white woman (on man) myth if you want us to accept you.

Of course, not everyone falls into this artificial authenticity trap in their branding. And you don’t have to either. You can create brand messages that sell your services, and on a deeper level, brings your audience into your vision without the signaling bs. Here are some principles* for doing just that: 

Principle #1 Reframe

Frames are the mental structures that shape the way we, the public, see the world. So reframing means that you change those mental structures. Basically, you adjust what constitutes common sense or commonly held knowledge. The best example of this is the Affordable Care Act. No one calls it that, though. Republicans reframed the Affordable Care Act to Obamacare, and that one word carries with it an entire political point of view. 

For us to use reframing principles in our branding online, we have to start with language. Instead of talking about social triggers and pain points, use new words like vision and values when branding, marketing, or selling your products. By creating new language, we will start to shift ideas about what constitutes common sense branding online.

Principle #2 Lead With Vision

When it comes to draft your webpages and sales pages, the traditional online business advice tells us to use the PAS (Problem-Agitate-Solution) formula in our communication. We define and draw out the problem. Then we agitate it by making that problem more emotional. Until we ultimately solve the problem with our products or services. 

In the new marketing model, you lead with a vision, not pain points. You attract your audience because you tell them the truth about where you want the business to go and invite them to come along with you. You don’t gain attention by manipulating their emotions.

Principle #3 Talk About The Real Heroes and Villains

In traditional online branding, the villain in the story is the person with the problems, and that person is always the customer. Under the new branding framework, you change all that. You make your customers the heroes of their own story and place the villain role where it belongs— on the external dynamic that created the problem in the first place.

Principle #4 Let Go of Fake Authority

In the online world, entrepreneurs signal wealth, thinness, whiteness, and attractiveness because our brains are wired to believe that those signals equal authority. That’s often not the case online, though. Some people start and run businesses without any skills, education, or experience behind what they are selling. They use the false authority created by those signals to make you buy their products anyway. 

But just because there are online business owners leveraging fake authority doesn’t mean there aren’t people online with real authority stemming from their work histories and education. Because there are. They are just told to confine their body of work to a short professional bio in favor of using the PAS technique. Under the new model, we let go of the fake authority model and replace it with the actual work we’ve done that makes us a leader.

What is your take on these principles and on reframing online branding and messaging generally? I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas. Let me know in the comments below. 

* These principles were developed via a combination of the work of Kelly Diels, Frank Luntz, and Dr. George Lakoff.