Articles on Branding, Brand Design, and Brand Strategy

Please don’t settle for a presence. Having a presence means that you simply exist. And what’s special, interesting, and compelling about that? NOTHING.

It’s time you approach your business differently. It’s time to transform your business into an extraordinary brand – one that propels you to the forefront of your industry, gets you noticed in a big way, and makes you the ONLY choice in the eyes of your ideal consumers, instead of just another choice.

Check out the articles below to find tools, tips, insights, and strategies to help you create a powerful, purposeful, personal, and profitable brand:

Branding Mistakes That Will Sabotage Your Small Business Success

Brand StrategyIt takes an enormous amount of time, effort, perseverance, determination, consistency, and action to build a strong and powerful brand … But it only takes one negative brand experience to undermine your credibility and sabotage your success in the eyes of your ideal clients and customers.

Here are 8 branding tips to help you avoid the most common brand mistakes small business make:

Branding Tip 1: Stick to Your Brand Fonts

Don’t use gimmicky, cheesy fonts to be “different” and stand out from the crowd. Using fonts with “wow” and “pop” aren’t going help your brand, neither is changing your fonts in each piece of marketing material! Too many fonts, cheesy fonts, or constantly changing fonts will give your brand an amateur and unprofessional feel. Stick to your official brand fonts to build credibility and promote your professionalism, and maybe every once is a while add in one unique font for a special use case. (NOTE: The same rule applies to your brand colors!)

Learn 7 More Branding Tips

A Behind the Scenes Look at a WordPress Website Makeover

Today's Innovative Woman Magazine WordPress Website MakeoverRecently we launched a brand new custom WordPress website for Today’s Innovative Woman, and wanted to share some of the behind the scenes strategy for the site and insight into why we built it the way we did.

At Bourn Creative we view the primary role of design as problem solving. While the visual look and feel is important, it must first and foremost support the overall site strategy.

Today’s Innovative Woman is a magazine for women entrepreneurs and business owners with print distribution of more than 10,000, visibility at events around the country, and a strong online community.

While the original WordPress theme worked great when the magazine was first launched, Today’s Innovative Woman was was quickly outgrowing the site. With a booming community, growing subscriber base, and influx of guest writers and featured experts, not only did publisher Cathy Alessandra need a new custom WordPress site, but she needed a whole new online strategy!

Read More About The Redesign For Today’s Innovative Woman

Marketing Tips to Position You As An Expert

Marketing tips to position you as an expertThese days everyone wants to be an expert. Heck, everyone thinks they are an expert.

I even think some people just wake up and decide to call themselves an expert out of the blue just because they can.

But what about those who want to become a true expert, a real expert, a respected expert?

How to they become known as an expert? How to they get other people to say they are an expert and endorse them — instead of them saying it about themselves?

Get Marketing Tips to Position You As An Expert

Capitalize on Your Uniqueness

Branding You - Capitalize On Your UniquenessIn the book, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill shares a story about Henry Ford charging a company a large sum of money (for the times) to solve a problem the company had been struggling to untangle. Ford completed the task quickly, received his payment, and then proceeded — immediately — to share his solution.

Seeing how fast Ford had worked, the folks who hired him were angry. They felt hoodwinked.

But, Mr. Ford replied, “Whether it took me five minutes or five months, you got the result you were looking for when you hired me. You didn’t hire me for how long it would take. You hired me for the expertise and value I bring to the table and those qualities have taken me my entire life to accumulate.”

In other words, Ford’s unique level of expertise and experience — expertise and experience that the business owners did not have —is what gave his work its value.

As business owners and entrepreneurs, we need to have enough confidence in our goods and services that we can ask for the price they are worth.

Read More About Capitalizing on Your Uniqueness

Identify Your “One Thing” to Create a Powerful, Personal, Profitable Brand

Building a BrandHave you ever wondered, How does he/she do it? How does he get so many clients? How does she show up everywhere?”

I’ll bet you have. I have. And I’ll bet that thousands of other business owners have too — Why? Because there are TONS of blog posts, articles, and resources available online to teach you how to get more clients, attract more leads, and make more money.

But a lot of it is jibberish!

Many articles give you tasks to check off a list and marketing tips to implement — and that’s a problem.

Learn How to Create a Brand That Makes Marketing Easy

Branding You: Build Your Brand Around The One Thing Your Competitors Don’t Have

Branding You

Whether you like it or not, YOU are a brand.

YOU are what sets your brand apart from the crowd and YOU are your brand’s most valuable asset. You hold the keys to ultimate success for your business — you just need to understand how to build a brand around you.

A brand builds credibility, creates influence, and increases visibility. A strong brand is remembered, respected, and referred by its tribe. A brand can make or break your business — and ignoring your brand can be business suicide.

Branding, the strategy behind a brand

Branding is all about clearly communicating what makes you unique, special, and different — what genius and value you bring to the table that makes you the best choice for your ideal clients and customers.

Learn More About Branding YOU

Where Start-Ups Fail: Visual Social Media Brand Design

Facebook Brand DesignPresenting your brand consistently across all marketing platforms is a critical part of transforming your business into an extraordinary brand, and social media branding is becoming more important every day.

As social media sites continue to grow in popularity, often the very first interaction a person has with your brand is through a site like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Pinterest.

With social media you present your brand in different ways – the two most common are in the written word and the visual design.

Learn Why Start-Ups Fail With Social Media Brand Design

Star Wars Brand Spans Generations With Reinvention and Experiences

Bourn Family Loves The Star Wars Brand and Sees Episode I in 3DThis weekend kicked off T-Ball for my 5 year-old Carter. He looked so cute in his baseball gear! Brian’s coaching the team and I’m the team parent (of course).

As excited as we were to go to the first practice yesterday, we ALL were even more excited to go see Star Wars Episode I: Phantom Menace in 3D.

Brian LOVES Stars Wars and has since childhood.

His love rubbed off on Carter and now they both watch the movies A LOT, play with our Star Wars Figures, and collect the Star Wars Lego sets. Because they play Star Wars so much, Natalie got into it, and soon it became a family thing.

Read More About The Power of The Star Wars Brand

Branding Pumpkins?

Bishops Pumpkin FarmThis past week put both Brian and I on overload. We were not only in catch-up mode from my Arizona trip for Ali Brown’s Millionaire Protege Club retreat, but also three of our biggest clients all needed giant projects done all at the same time!

Needless to say we were really looking forward to some detached-downtime over weekend with the kids. On Saturday after soccer, we played boards games, Wii, and Legos all day. Then on Sunday we hit the pumpkin patch and Bishop’s Pumpkin Farm with Brian’s mom, June.

When June arrived at our house on Sunday, we were getting in the car and she asked, “Which pumpkin patch are we going to?”

“What?! There is only one pumpkin patch to go to,” I replied. Then it dawned on me. There are a few really good pumpkin patches around our house, but I only ever think of one. For me the words “Pumpkin Patch” and “Bishop’s Farm” mean the same thing.

Read More About Branding Pumpkins