5 Things I Learned About Branding
These are my thoughts from two sessions on branding in the Makesense Academy incubation program.
The first three are lessons from Alexis’ Personal Branding session:
1. Practice writing because writing bleeds through everything.
I couldn’t agree more! Two of the most useful courses I took in college were English 10 (Academic Writing) and English 30 (Writing for the Professions). Super useful when I became faculty, when I was building HEED, and now in Saliksik. Writing is such an essential skill in life. You can use it to inspire, challenge ideas, protect people, persuade others, provide comfort, etc.
2. The foundation of good branding is great relationships.
In terms of personal branding, I experienced firsthand how true this lesson is. In UP, when people hear the word “humanitarian engineering” or “HEED” my name would most likely come up with it. In the department, when people hear the word “product design” or “MADE Lab” my name would most likely come up with it as well. I’ve built relationships around those two brands through the years and I’m grateful that many of those relationships persist to this day (and now a lot of them are also part of the Saliksik community!).
One of Saliksik’s core values is collaboration and with this comes building relationships. As a venture, we want to create authentic relationships, not contractual ones. We always want to be able to add value to these relationships and not be the ones to always take stuff out of it. Give and take kumbaga. Parang love lang. Char. :)))
3. When storytelling, find the right angle/frame that would make people care for your cause.
This was a very good reminder because it stresses the fact that a good story told in the wrong way will not create the intended impact. We must always be aware of our audience, the platform we use to share stories, and the intention behind the storytelling.
The next two lessons are from Andy & Ysa’s session:
4. Stories move people, but they also move the product.
Coming from academia, I was always focused only on moving people because I didn’t have a product or enterprise to worry about. But now as a social entrepreneur, I have to (and want to) learn to take storytelling one step further so that people will support Saliksik in achieving our vision to empower Filipino research for national progress.
5. “Your story must fall apart when you take your brand out of it.”
I think this stresses the crucial role that branding plays, especially since Saliksik is primarily engaged in the B2C model. This was also touched upon in Vince’s Sales session where he said that marketing and branding are more crucial in B2C than B2B.
There you have it! Thanks for reading! I hope you were able to get something out of the five lessons, too.
Originally written on July 29, 2020. The author is migrating her works to Medium from other platforms.
