Brand Yourself: A no-nonsense brand toolkit for small businesses

By Lucy Werner and Hadrien Chatelet

Brand Yourself walks you through everything you need to know about creating a business brand, from brand strategy to picking out fonts, building your personal brand and affordable creative tips to make an impact with your business. Packed with practical exercises, examples and industry hacks and supported by an extensive interactive playbook online, this is the essential guide for business owners on a budget. Build a brand that stands out and that connects with the people you want to reach.

 Lucy Werner is founder of The Wern, a PR and branding consultancy, She is also author of the bestselling Hype Yourself and a publicity expert who is a speaker, lecturer and course creator.

Hadrien Châtelet is the creative director of The Wern and leads the design arm of the business. He is also cofounder of Lucy’s two children and they work together in their garden in east London.

Together they have over 30 years’ industry experience and have taught thousands of entrepreneurs how to stand out and find success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Practical Inspiration Publishing
• Release date: Sep 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781788602754

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

QUOTE

IT ALL STARTS WITH A STORY.

Hadrien Châtelet

Bonjour and welcome to Brand Yourself.

If you don’t know me already – Hello! I’m Lucy Werner, Founder of The Wern, a public relations (PR), brand and graphic design agency for small businesses. I’m the author of Hype Yourself, a business bestseller on do-it-yourself (DIY) PR. I wrote my first book off the back of over 16 years in the trenches of publicity, with the last six years running my own business. I’ve taught for the University of Arts London, Cass Business School and written for Courier magazine, to name but a few. We are a Mailchimp and Squarespace accredited partner and our mission is to bring a hybrid of big agency experience to DIY offerings to create new affordable ways of brand building for small business owners.

So that’s me. To be clear, though, most of the creative expertise and thinking in this book will be Hadrien’s. He is the creative director for The Wern, and he is also my partner and the father of my children. He has worked in bringing brands to life for well over a decade. His first foray into the creative world was when he was caught red-handed graffitiing and then instead of being arrested or fined, he was commissioned on the spot to create street art for Agnès B! In the UK and after more legitimate career moves, he has worked as a junior designer for a wallpaper company, designer for an innovation agency and, before coming to work for me, his most recent role was building and managing the creative department for the European marketing division of Endeavor.

Since joining me at The Wern, he too has fallen in love with supporting independent and small business owners. Hadrien has worked with well over a hundred small business owners in the last year, doing everything from creating brands from scratch and refreshing existing brands, to designing websites, podcast covers, newsletter templates, packaging design and social media templates. And when he isn’t doing all of this, he is also a lecturer for the modern business school Jolt and for the General Assembly, as well as offering one-to-one brand mentoring sessions. Between the two of us, we’ve taught thousands of people about branding and PR.

With our own clients we often share our strategic and tactical tips and, as you might imagine, there is a huge crossover with what we do on a day-to-day basis. But we do play to our strengths, and for this book, Hadrien is the visionary and I provide the words.

BRANDING WITH PURPOSE

There’s one more important thing to mention before we get stuck in. Through all of our work, we’ve seen that more often than not, the ethos of small businesses means they want to leave the world in a better place than they found it. Their services or products are for the greater good. So this book is our attempt to help small business owners build their brand with purpose at the heart.

And it’s important to us to practise what we preach – otherwise, why should you trust us to help with your brand, right? When I was putting the first book to bed, our baby went into cardiac intensive care. We spent the first seven months in and out of hospital and while the worst is over, it is a journey that will be an ongoing part of his life with repeat surgeries required. Hadrien and I were supported by many people during this time, including our wider peer group of small business owners. To recognize this incredible support, one of the ways we want to give back is to donate 50% of this book’s profits to Beau’s Fund – a support fund for Great Ormond Street Hospital that helps to support other parents with babies in cardiac intensive care. So by purchasing this book you are directly helping other parents like us. Thank you.

We also believe that every small business owner has the power to help change equity and equality at a global level as an individual, and we want to reinforce this message through the work that we do, and through the brand building that we help you do. Because of this, we have consciously thought about the case studies, the experts and the individuals who we asked to contribute to this book. This is one small part of our ongoing work to make the world more equal. We are not experts in diversity and inclusion, and as such have invited an expert to talk to you about this in more detail. We realized from our brand-building work that equality should be the pillar of our business; moreover, we want to encourage small business owners to make it a pillar of their business too. But more on that later.

HOW WILL THIS BOOK HELP YOU?

Just as I wrote Hype Yourself to help people who didn’t have the confidence or know what to say when it came to self-promotion, Brand Yourself is focused on small business owners who perhaps don’t have the budget, worry they don’t have the creativity or are just feeling a bit lost about where to start when it comes to building a brand. If you have got to this point and are thinking, ‘Oh noooo, I’ve had my business for umpteen years and I’ve never done this!’ Do not fear! It’s very common practice for even long-term established global brands to have a brand refresh, which can include evaluating your look and feel, your products, services, tone of voice and so on.

Wherever you are on the branding journey, we are going to hold your hand and gently walk you through a DIY branding process. We’ve created an interactive playbook on hypeyourself.com/playbook or you can use your own notebook. Here’s a quick run-through of what we’ll be covering together on the following pages.

Chapter 1: We start with a quick look at what branding is and what it isn’t, before quickly moving on to focus on the brand strategy. There will be a series of exercises and activities to give you everything you need to workshop your own brand. This is the technical bit – it will be the hardest work in the book, I promise. We get the tough bit out of the way quickly!

Chapter 2: Now we start getting into some of the fun creative stuff. You can really let your hair down here, and experiment with your brand’s look and feel. Here we will work on refining your overall vision and purpose to make sure you convey the feelings you want.

Chapter 3: This is the section that straddles PR and branding. Here we look at how we can weave your business brand into your personal brand and vice versa. There is a popular misconception that personal branding is all about sharing your private life. We are going to show you how it isn’t about that.

Chapter 4: The creative prompts. It’s all very well us telling you that it’s easy for a small business owner with no budget – but everything’s easy when you know how! So in this section we are going to share some of our favourite small businesses with great brands to spark your own creative brand implementation ideas. This is the part of the book that will be chock-full of inspiration.

Chapter 5: The next branding leap. There are thousands of branding agencies and designers out there. How do you pick the right one or how do you even brief them?

As ever, the work has to be done by you… but hopefully you can see from this quick overview that we will be here with you the whole way. We’ll be cheering you on, and giving lots of ideas and support – alongside you for every step. Now, buckle up… and let’s get busy branding!

CHAPTER 1

HOW TO COMPILE YOUR BRAND STRATEGY

QUOTE

A BEAUTIFUL BRAND IS AMAZING, BUT A MEANINGFUL ONE IS BETTER.

Hadrien Châtelet

Before we get really stuck in to the hard work of building your brand strategy, let’s take a look at exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about branding.

WHAT IS BRANDING EXACTLY? WHAT ISN’T IT?

Branding is a dynamic process. It is more than just your product, logo or colour palette. It’s about your reputation. It’s what your audience feel about your product, service or company. But mainly, it’s what they remember about you. In that way, PR and branding cross over. It’s why Hadrien and I combine a lot of our strategic thinking across our clients. Done well, your brand, just like publicity, is about conveying a feeling to your audience.

Honestly, if I had a pound for every time a small business owner approached us and asked for a logo, thinking that was their brand, we’d be a very rich agency. It’s a common misconception that creating your brand starts with a logo design, but a logo is just a symbol. It is something that helps your consumer to remember who is talking and what their behaviour is. This is why logos are often the avatars (or profile pics) for social media channels, because on seeing them we instantly understand who is communicating.

The brand is more than just your colours and fonts, too. These are all part of what creates the look and feel, but it’s the whole package that conveys your emotion. Think of it like this: Hadrien wears colourful clothes, but that doesn’t define his personality; it is simply another element that makes up the tapestry of who he is. If you were to take the clothes away, brand Hadrien still exists (albeit slightly chillier). It should be the same with your own brand.

Another misconception we often come across is that the brand is the product. Again, this is only one small part of the overall picture – branding isn’t about something physical or tangible. Flyers, marketing materials and the way your product looks and feels can operate as part of the promotional tool of the brand, but they don’t embody the emotion and feeling of the overarching brand.

As we can see from all of these misconceptions, there’s a common thread: a lot of small businesses think that branding is about the visual appearance of their business. And absolutely, having a good-looking website and an identifiable colour palette is going to help you – but this isn’t what branding actually is. These things come from decisions you make about how to use your brand – in other words, your visual identity comes from your brand strategy.

The brand strategy is the business plan for your brand. When you create your brand, you need to think about what you want your audience to feel.

Let’s take the concept of a book. You start with a preface or an introduction. This first part, like where we introduced ourselves to you, is where we set the scene. We explain where you are, where and who we are and where we’re going to go together. Creating the brand is just that. It is scene-setting for your business. It’s the look and feel, the culture. But more than that, it is the feeling, the heart, the emotion of the people that your audience get to experience when they work with you or buy from you.

So, let’s dive straight in to how to build your brand strategy.

BRAND STRATEGY

This is the most important part of your branding exercise. There are millions of ways you can execute your brand to appeal to all of the senses, and millions of ways that brands can give you different emotions or connections with their audience. But there are only a few ways that are going to be successful for you. That is what we are trying to find – the exact set of conditions where your brand speaks in the right way, saying the right things, to the right audience.

One of the most important things for you to do, to help you find this set of conditions, is to define where you are going. You don’t want to start