The Secret to Good Branding

The secret to good branding comes down to trust between your client, your designer, and you.

On a strategy call with my client and blogger Juli Bauer Roth yesterday, I had an epiphany.

For background, Juli and I were connecting by phone for the first time since the debut of her new brand, new website, new program, and new meal guide. With over 330k+ followers on Instagram and an insane amount of daily hits to her blog PaleOMG , the stakes of this new launch had been high. Sure, we had some launch hiccups (as goes with all sites), but after 1200+ program sales, the results were clear: Juli’s new brand and offering was a success.

My team’s experience branding Juli has been fulfilling beyond belief. She’s already tripled her investment in our services within just three days of launching, which is indescribable and amazing to see. I’ve been reflecting about what’s made this branding experience different from others I’ve done over the years, and it boils down to this one thing:

The secret to good branding comes down to trust between your client, your designer, and you.

Below are my tips for establishing trust on all sides of the branding process.

Share a common vision.

I start all working relationships with a brand audit because it’s the perfect opportunity to imagine the future of my client’s brand with my client.

I’ve learned the hard way: My vision for a client’s brand might be different from their own. I use the audit as a way to really, truly listen to their hopes and desires because it allows me to get on the same wavelength.

In Juli’s case, she wanted her blog PaleOMG to be more than recipes. It was important to her that her brand made a difference in the way women felt about themselves. To her, eating well, working out, and dressing impeccably are all key ingredients of living a healthy life. I was on board with her vision from the beginning: The new PaleOMG needed to make women happy in all facets of their lives.

Juli’s new Power Program launched with over 1,200 sales in just a week.

Express with honesty.

When someone completes a brand audit with me, my team sends back a detailed brand audit recap that includes a mood board.

Our mood board was close but not exact to Juli’s vision. Because Juli trusted us from already discussing her brand’s future for 90 minutes (see step 1), she felt safe to really articulate what was and wasn’t important to her. She wanted bright colors, patterns, and a tropical vibe.

Because I trust my designer more than I trust myself, I let him follow his instincts to deliver a truly incredible brand. Because Juli trusted me, and I trusted my designer, we arrived at something that’s undeniably PaleOMG.

Recognize that things never go according to plan.

We originally wanted to launch her program to kick off the new year, but every disaster you can imagine got in the way of that happening. Juli had, quite literally, over 100 videos that needed to be edited and uploaded, and that obviously took more time than expected because there are limited hours in the day. A volcano erupted in the Philippines, where some of her developer agency’s key team members were based, so that delayed us by a week too. A mass migration of her 2k+ blog posts didn’t happen, so they had to be individually migrated.

I could go on and on, but the moral of the story is that Juli trusted us and her other vendors throughout the whole process, and that counted for everything. Instead of lashing out on each other, we worked as a team to make the launch the best it could be, as soon as it could be.

Celebrate and learn.

Juli never expected us to know all the right answers, but she trusted us to have the resourcefulness to investigate and help wherever we could. I try to do the same thing with my own team, and I feel like it’s the secret sauce behind a successful collaboration.

After celebrating and crying happy tears (I wish I’d recorded the call, Juli!), we’ve worked as a team to reflect on what did work, what didn’t work, and started planning for the next venture. And because we trust each other wholeheartedly, I have no doubt that it will be a success again.

What have you learned from branding yourself with a team? I want to know! Comment below.