This is not a call to change the colours of your logo. This isn’t about a “refresh.” This is something much bigger.
Every system needs calibration. Your brand is a system, and it requires frequent calibration.
A simple enough statement, but as with anything in the BAM universe, it is loaded with all kinds of meaning. Consider an ecosystem. Plants and animals move through seasons. Things bloom and grow and die off. Dead plants decompose into the essential elements before they are reused for something else. Trees shed their leaves in the autumn as a reset for the spring - this calibration allows for longevity.
Every few months, you change the oil in your car, you bring it in for a tune-up every year or so, and parts wear down and get replaced - a car is a complicated machine for a simple task. If you ignore the calibration of its systems, the parts will wear down, and soon enough, you’re taking the bus to work.
Every system - organic, mechanical, spiritual, theological - needs routine realignment and recalibration to run smoothly and efficiently for years to come. While the day in and out of your business may have you feeling like your brand is a technical, mechanical thing, it is definitely an organic being. Calibrating your brand requires craftsmanship to ensure you serve the right audiences in the right capacity.
When your brand falls out of alignment, out of tune, the problems start. You might be working longer hours for less money, for pain in the ass clients, or noticing the starting slivers of burnout.
Without calibration, your brand could die off or grind to a halt on the side of the road. Without calibration, your brand is totaled.
Buckle in; we're going to cover a few things:
When it comes to “branding,” what do we mean when we say “recalibrate” and “alignment”?
How you probably approached building your initial brand and the problems I bet you’re having right now.
How to calibrate the brand you have into the brand you need.
With little irony, the very act of recalibrating starts with establishing a baseline for your brand.
Calibrate: transitive verb. To measure precisely, to adjust precisely for a particular function.
Alignment: noun. The act of aligning or being aligned, particularly the proper state or positioning of parts in relation to each other.
Calibration starts with establishing a baseline, a zero point, a place to work from. As companies do more work, reach wider audiences, and find ways to leverage their brand, they get further from their baseline purpose.
Recalibration aligns your brand with your purpose and the audience who needs you the most.
The common misconception: branding is easy. I can’t tell you how many people build their “brand” in an afternoon and think the work is done. They buy a domain, secure the social media handles, and get a discount logo from Fiverr or an online generator. Others build their brand from “mood boards” and a “feeling.” Or, my favorite, the countless companies who build their brand by copying the megabrands like the Apples, Pepsis, and Teslas of the world.
Their brand may be recognizable, but that doesn’t mean anything about the megabrands will apply to you. You may like a logo or a colour scheme, but the visuals are not a baseline for the brand. They will do little for establishing the structure your brand needs to thrive.
With all of that said, I understand that everyone has to start somewhere. Businesses that start off as solo-shops or consultants need something to build from and “brand” doesn’t always feel like a priority when you’re thinking about securing clients and making deadlines. It sometimes even feels like the weight of what you do and what you invoice for seem to change, so how can you apply to a brand to it?
Eventually, there’s no way around it. Your brand needs alignment. You need to calibrate what you are doing and who you are doing it for into a representative brand.
Everything good in life starts with a handful of questions:
What’s working? What’s not?
What do you love?
Are your clients returning? Are they sticking around and letting your brand shape their lifestyle?
Are you solving more problems than you create?
Does your business/ life/ purpose feel sustainable?
Regardless of how you answer, there’s a pretty good chance you need your brand calibrated so what people think of you matches what you do for them. Regular maintenance is essential for your brand; just as you check your ledgers for ways to reduce costs or expand clients, the brand is a continuously evolving entity of your business that needs frequent attention.
The only constant in life, is change. But this isn’t to say that you need to refresh or rebuild your brand from the ground up (far different from establishing your baseline). What you need is a system capable of testing your brand's fortitude.
This is the very idea that I built The Big BAM Process around. Offhand, people think we are a branding agency. We’re not. We don't build brands, we break them down. We tear them to pieces to deconstruct your vision and determine what you need to put your brand on a successful path.
This means calibrating your brand with the right audience (not the biggest, or the most expensive, but the right one for you). This might be restructuring your products or repackaging them in a new way.
Or, yes, as a consolation prize, this might mean you get a new logo.
The Big BAM Process isn’t easy. It’s not meant to be. It is very much the program designed to separate the wheat from the chaff. Just take a look at some of the brands that have recently dismantled their idea of branding and calibrated it into something that will stand the test of time. They are all seeing incredible results and changed how they personally view the world around them.
But it’s not for everyone.
Most owners won’t take the time to recalibrate their brand. They won’t bother finding their foundation or fine-tuning their messaging.
They’ll likely just let their brand grind to a halt and wonder why nothing is selling, why no one cares, or why they feel totally burnt out.
And it’ll be a shame.
For everyone else, though. There’s the Big BAM Process. Are you brave enough to hit the link?