Web Business Woman

By Guest Blogger, Donna DeClemente, Donna’s Promo Talk

Yvonne’s been writing to you about the launch of The Lip-sticking Society, the new look for the Lip-sticking blog and about how important branding is. So I wanted to also elaborate a little more on this and give you some insights into why we did what we did from a brand perspective.

I’ve always thought the term Lip-sticking was very unique and loved the graphic logo that Yvonne had created for the blog. So I encouraged her to seriously consider branding and trademarking it. What I learned early in my career about trademarks is that they need to be adjectives, not nouns. A noun should always follow the brand. So in this case we’ve added the word “blog” and officially changed the name to The Lip-sticking Blog. We now have launched a new expanded site which we have named The Lip-sticking Society. Also in development is Lip-sticking the Book, which will include excerpts from the blog.

I then introduced Yvonne to a Brand Positioning Worksheet that I have used many times for many clients and she and I completed it together. This became the strategic cornerstone for the creation of the Lip-sticking Society and served as a guide to help keep us on track. From my past experiences I learned that when launching a new business or product it is easy to get sidetracked or to be swayed by personal beliefs and opinions. You always need to remember who your audience is and in some cases you could be very different.

So one of the main goals of this branding exercise was to develop the tagline for the Lip-sticking Society. This included not only writing down all the personality words that Yvonne shared here in her original post, but some other very important steps that we needed to complete first.

Step 1 was describing the product in writing, in this case the new site. If you don’t have a clear vision of what you are creating it’s very hard to define its unique value in the marketplace.

Step 2 was defining the primary and the secondary audiences of the site which we based both on existing readers as well as future prospective readers.

Step 3 is a unique exercise in which we defined the value proposition in three ways: the functional, emotional and self-defining benefits in the voice of the customer.

Step 4  was listing the unique features and benefits of the product, in order of their priority as much as possible.

Step 5 was creating the personality words that I mentioned above.

The Final Step was then developing the tagline, or positioning statement as it is also called. In most cases it ends up being a combination of functional and emotional, or functional and self expressive, and sometimes all three influence it. In the case of marketing a product or service that has no or very little awareness, functional benefits are mostly used since they need to clearly define what the product or service is.

So we ended up using the word “Smart” because it was part of the initial tagline for Lip-sticking blog “Smart marketing to women online” which was key in what we still wanted to be. The word “Talk” tied nicely into the term “Lip-sticking” so it too was true to the brand. However, we didn’t settle on “Smart Talk. Smart Learning. Smart Friends.” initially. As Yvonne mentioned in her post, she originally wanted something slightly different which she shared with a few close friends who voted it down. I had said that it didn’t properly reflect what we had defined in the worksheet, so the document proved useful.

I am now very excited about moving forward with Yvonne along with others on our team to further develop the Lip-sticking brand along with the products and services associated with it. Hopefully sharing this information will be helpful to you in your business and social media initiatives. I’m thinking it may be great content for our new Learning Center. As always we welcome your suggestions and comments.

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