HIIT 3: Map Your Illumination

When it comes to your brand, there are two key pathways that will determine if your brand will become a firebrand – one that is white hot, passionate, trailblazing, intuitive, unique and carving its own path in business and beyond:

1. If you’re blazing an entirely new path

OR

2. If you’re vastly refining an existing offering.

If you’re blazing a new path, here are a few things to think about:

• Does your brand or offering solve a new problem?

• Do you leverage an asset / knowledge / concept or innovation that no-one has?

• Are you building a business that will create its own inertia, disrupting value chains and improving them as it goes?

• Are you doing something others can’t do/won’t do? - Is the market ready for it?

• What budget, time and effort are you willing to invest in getting your message through about your entirely new offering? If you’re vastly refining an existing offering, think on the following:

• Does your brand offering provide a better solution to an old one?

• Are you providing an entirely new mix of known products or services in a way that’s difficult to duplicate?

• Are you creating an entirely new way for people to access products like yours in the marketplace e.g. the Netflix model that disrupted how people watch videos.

• Are you hoping that people switch to your solution, or is your goal to get users who are new to the market or unaware of existing solutions?

Mapping your brand's pathway and what will illuminate it needs to involve strategic thinking, market research, trend forecasting and tweaking your business model to cut through the noise and become an industry and brand trailblazer, disrupter and firebrand.