Defining Your Brand Identity By Ann Daly	1/4

What business are you in?

It's a deceptively simple question. And it isn't a rhetorical one, either. At last June's Dance/USA Roundtable in Miami (2002), opening keynote speaker Alberto Ibargüen, editor of The Miami Herald, urged every attendee to consider the question seriously. Are you primarily an entertainer, he prompted, or an employer? 'What,' he asked, 'do you stand for?'

And, furthermore, how do you communicate that core essence to the rest of the world? Defining your identity is at the heart of branding, the much-ballyhooed trend in marketing that has penetrated into the performing arts. Neill Archer Roan of the Roan Group spent three hours with a wall-to-wall crowd at the Miami Roundtable delivering 'Strategies to Combat Low Awareness and Misconceptions about Dance,' a primer on branding principles and practices.

As Roan pointed out, there has been no substantial change in dance marketing in the last 20 years. He proved his point convincingly–and humorously–by quoting from a variety of dance marketing copy, most of it indistinguishable from the next.

Now branding offers a coherent methodology for creating or refreshing your identity and to differentiate your work from the rest of the crowd. And if you don't have the surplus dollars to hire a consultant, you can effectively undertake your own branding process using the basic tools of clarity, context, and conversation.

WHAT IS BRANDING?

Down here in Texas, the word 'branding' quickly calls up the image of a ranch logo (we've got 'Circle C,' we've got 'Double R'–you get the idea) iron-burned into the rumps of a herd. The brand is a permanent visual mark that identifies one cow from the next, because there are a lot of cows out there, and, let's admit it, a lot of those cows look pretty much alike.

As products in the marketplace have proliferated like cows on the back forty, corporations felt the same need to 'brand' their goods and services--to make them instantly identifiable and, what's more, desirable. 'Today most products and services are bought, not sold,' write Al Ries and Laura Ries in The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. 'And branding greatly facilitates this process. Branding Ôpre-sells' the product or service to the user. Branding is simply a more efficient way to sell things.'

These days, when the number of dance companies in this country tops XXX, similar distinctions need to be drawn for the consumer between your dance experience and all the others.

Your brand is the promise you make about your work--a guarantee of quality. As with any promise, it implies a relationship, this one between you and all your potential audiences. It tells them what to expect from your performances. A brand tells them how you are relevant to their lives, and how you are different from other dance companies. In short, a brand suggests to the world how to perceive your work before they've even experienced it for themselves and–even more–prompts them to want to experience it for themselves.

If it is consistent, relevant, and distinctive, a strong brand will accomplish three things:

• Differentiation

• Audience preference

• Premium price

By branding your dance company, you choreograph its public reception: sharing its values, earning public confidence, and building participation.

Why is it important to be intentional about defining your brand identity? Because, by implication, it also defines your audience, and your patrons, and all your other relationships. Those relationships define your success.

At bottom, defining your brand means being clear about who you are, where you want to go, how you're going to get there, and with whom. It means beings direct about attracting those people who will value your work. You have the power to define yourself to the world. Why let others do it for you? By branding, you create your own self-fulfilling prophecy.

The term 'branding' has become a media buzzword. In the process, it has morphed into a fuzzy concept, referring to everything from identity to logos to advertising campaigns. I like the distinction drawn by branding experts Alycia Perry and David Wisnom III in their excellent book, Before the Brand. They separate out brand identity from brand image. Brand identity refers to who you are, and brand image refers to how you project that identity out into the world (the packaging: name, logo, color, typography, tagline, etc.). In this article, I'll describe the tools you need to define or refine your brand identity.