This is draft content, helping a client with their branding (written on Boxing Day, 2020). I’ll be fixing it when it’s not the holiday period, but I wanted to capture the note here.
XXXX, Not sure if you’ve seen Simon Sinek’s ‘Start With Why’, it’s good for getting to the heart of a brand and I often use a variation on it when I’m at the early stages of building a brand.
If you Google ‘Start With Why’, you’ll find it, it’s a TEDx talk that took off.
In a nutshell, Sinek states that most companies start with what (what they do), but a better approach is to start with why.
I think Sinek’s model only takes you so far:
Why → How → What
Before the Why, there’s a Who (and that who is you). There’s a reason your building this company and we need to get to the heart of that. Why you? Why not just keep sticking to your previous job?
If you ask that question you’ll get to the heart of your Why.
This might all sound a bit woolly, but it works.
Take the heart of the above: Why and Who and try and drill down to find your purpose. That will help you to define what the business is.
(And that will help us find the name.)
I’ve lots of names on bits of paper, but I think this will help (and I’d have started with it sooner if my teaching had been over).
So, in the above sketch, cycle through the above loop (Why and Who) and you can begin to get to the root cause.
This is a variation on Five Whys, more on that here: