Developing an Honest Brand that Resonates with Consumers

Your company has a set of core values and beliefs that should be explored at the outset of the branding process. You should start by asking the questions:

Who are we? What do we want your company to accomplish for ourselves, our customers, and our community at large? What do we believe to be the best route to achieve these goals?

We see a lot of mortgage originators providing detailed mission statements about helping members of their community achieve sustainable homeownership, increasing the availability of housing credit to their community as a whole, or similar aspirations. If your company culture and the belief systems of your employees support this mission, then this could be a good place to start.

You should take a look at your compensation plans, any internal communications, your hiring process, and any employee review processed to ensure that these align with and support your original company mission. If your mission statement is to help overlooked parts of the community fund their dwellings but you tend to hire and promote a disproportionate number of Jumbo Loan specialist LO’s, you should either rethink these divergent practices, or reconsider how close to the heart that mission statement was really held. Maybe, if you are being honest about the core beliefs of your organization, your actual mission statement is something more along the lines of “delivering unparalleled service at every step of the mortgage process”.

Once you’ve dialed in on what you honestly believe is the true and active mission of your company, this statement should be used to inform all aspects of your brand. It can be helpful to create a tag line of sorts that sums up your company’s beliefs in a way that both consumers and employees can quickly understand. Maybe this tag line for your brand is something along the lines of “when advanced technology is paired with a caring human touch, everyone benefits.” This statement should not get too cluttered with multiple ideas or beliefs but should remain simplistic and quickly believable. A concise message here will make your detailed branding decisions down the line easier, while an over complicated tag line will confuse and muddle your messaging down the line.

Only once this basic brand statement and core belief system is nailed down should you be deciding on specifics such as logos, color pallets, brand imagery, website design, etc. For the hypothetical brand whose story can be summed up with the tag line “when advanced technology is paired with a caring human touch, everyone benefits.” your designers might find a way to develop a bank of imagery that merges smiling human customer service agents with technological motifs. The color pallet might be based around blues because the psychological connection between this color and trust relate to the trust you want consumers to have in both your employees and your tech stack. Your outward messaging should regularly mention both human connection and advanced technology. The audiences of any given marketing channel should be analyzed and your marketing team should be considering how to best tailer your presentation of core brand to the demographics of each. If an audience skews younger, the technology might be the focus and if the audience skews older, the personal connection aspect might be given more emphasis.

In this way all of your brand decisions should be tricking down from your initial findings about the true beliefs and values of your company. If you’ve been honest with yourself and your audience from the beginning and have made sure that company systems and procedure have been purposefully designed, your branding will resonate with consumers that share your beliefs. If you are presenting a dishonest brand image that you do not actively try to live up to behind the scenes or that just simply doesn’t align with actual practices, many consumers will know and your advertising efforts will fall flat.

If you would like to schedule a meeting with Spillane Consulting Associates’ Brand Experts in order to discuss any portion of your branding journey please contact Bill Dolan, Director at (617) 694-2617 or email at wdolan@scapartnering.com