Blades Creative’s Wellness and Lifestyle Branding Onboarding
Remember how easy it was making friends in elementary school? All it took was sitting next to someone at lunch or in class, and you had an instant friend. Once you grow up, you find out it takes more than a common interest in Lisa Frank to maintain lasting friendships (such a bummer). The biggest hurdle is how hard it is to get to know people–it takes time to understand someone! Do you have questions you ask all new potential friends? Or during an interview when deciding to work with someone? Onboarding a new client is a lot like getting to know a friend, coworker, or partner. I designed the Blades Creative Design Studio onboarding process to help me really get to know my clients and their companies and is an important part of how I create magical wellness and lifestyle branding!
Great lifestyle branding starts with onboarding basics.
In my last blog, I talked about effectively using your brand’s logo design. I mentioned you need to have a clear vision of your company and your ideal customer or client before starting the branding or rebranding process. If you don’t know who you want to buy your products, your marketing won’t connect with them.
But sometimes, onboarding with a wellness and lifestyle branding designer can help you put your ideas into words. Sometimes it just takes someone asking the right questions to help us get to know ourselves better.
On a basic level, I ask new clients conceptual and concrete questions about their brand and their ideal customer, such as:
What are your audience’s demographics?
If your brand was a celebrity, who would it be?
Who are your major competitors?
Towards what primary goal are you working?
The answers to these questions may change over time or even as you develop your branding!
A little about fish, trees, and Einstein
There’s a quote often misattributed to Einstein, but that doesn’t make the sentiment any less wise.
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
So what does a quote from a self-help book published in the early 2000s (not Einstein) have to do with your wellness and lifestyle branding journey? Because if you have the wrong audience in mind for your products or service, you’ll think your business isn’t successful instead of finding the right water to swim in.
The metaphor may have gotten a little muddled, but you get the concept. The more accurate and thoughtful you are during onboarding, the easier it’ll be to find customers who love what you do. You’ll be swimming your way to success.
Okay, I’ll stop with the fish.
Know your archetype; know your audience.
If you’ve worked with other creatives on your brand, chances are you’ve encountered the 12 Jungian (now called marketing) archetypes. If you haven’t, I recommend all my clients read through this article about finding your wellness and lifestyle brand archetype. Knowing your archetype is a way of sharing a shorthand about your brand identity and the customer you want to attract.
Each archetype has a:
Goal: The big lifelong ambition for your brand; disrupt the status quo, find adventure, make connections.
Desire: What your brand wants; rebellion, the truth, love, joy.
Fear: The anxiety that motivates your brand’s desire; being left out, being unloved, appearing ignorant.
Strategy: How you avoid your fears, achieve your desires and work towards your big goal; be honest, be desirable, embrace change.
Finding your archetype requires high-concept thinking about your brand. But starting from the conceptual helps you distill your brand’s identity to four snack-sized ideas. From those ideas, you’ll develop a brand story and an emotional identity for potential customers and clients.
You also don’t have to be just one archetype! Maybe your brand identity is about inspiring creativity while forming meaningful relationships. Or truth-seekers who turn ambitious ideas into reality. A general rule of thumb is the simpler your archetype, the better.
Because (you may have already figured this out) your archetype will appeal to your ideal audience! They have the same goals, desires, and fears. You’re part of the same club–or, put another way, your archetype is the water in which to judge your company’s ability to swim.
I promise I’m really done with the fish now.
Workshopping is worth it!
If you hated homework when you were in school, then onboarding can feel like a chore. But depending on where you are in your company’s journey, workshopping your wellness and lifestyle branding can help you out in many other areas of your business.
Ever struggled to give an elevator pitch for your new business idea, even to your friends and family? The onboarding process can get you saying things like,
“[YOUR AWESOME BUSINESS] is about rebelling against the status quo and daring to dream big in a mundane world. Our products empower self-love to help customers embrace their unbridled potential.”
Identifying your archetype leads you to your brand’s:
Purpose: being a small business owner is hard! What drives you to show up every day?
Mission: what change are you creating in the world?
Promise: how can you help your customers? What pain points are you solving?
Personality: who is your brand? A cheerleader, coach, compatriot, leader?
Tone of Voice: who does the celebrity voice-over in your commercials? And if Morgan Freeman isn’t available?
Brand Story: the emotional connection you make with your customers.
Knowing these elements inside and out prepares you for investor and media interviews, writing a business plan or proposal, or just telling your family what you’ve been up to on Thanksgiving.
The Blades Creative Design Studio onboarding process creates authentic wellness and lifestyle branding.
Creating branding with Blades Creative Design Studio is a group project–you don’t have to come up with high-concept answers all on your own. And sometimes, developing your branding and logo designs can even help you nail down your archetype and audience. It’s not always a straightforward journey to telling your brand story (jk, it’s rarely a straightforward journey!).
But Blades Creative Design Studio is there for the entire process, from onboarding through the final design. I work with wellness and lifestyle brands, offering branding, packaging design, and exclusive partnerships. Want to learn more about the onboarding process or how I can help highlight the magic in your brand’s story? Just send me a message, and let’s get started!