The world wants to see more of you.
Most brands are so much bigger, more interesting, more unique than their website lets on. Maybe it’s modesty, maybe it’s fear that causes this quietness, but it ends up having the same effect; people don’t see the real you. Doesn’t this happen all the time? You engage with a business and are surprised by how special, strange, funny, fantastic they are. None of it to be seen in the website or their public comms. Else it’s hidden behind some very obscure menu item.
How to disappear completely
How does this happen? One way is through overuse of cliché. Lets say you’re a hotel and your tagline is ‘Escape the everyday’. You’re a coffee shop and you say ‘Committed to the highest quality’. Every sector (and subsector) has these over-squeezed lines and words that you should avoid like the bubonic plague.
Another way to disappear is through templated design. Boring layouts, mild typography, indecisive colour schemes, all deployed to present some safe face that we think our customers will accept. Clip our own wings to fit into a ‘clean’ design. But ‘clean’ is hiding! Even if you think of your business as a calm or conservative brand, there are ways to step into a unique Myth and express yourself congruently.
The cost
If people can’t see your full and true self, they cannot know you, they cannot resonate with you, cannot choose you, cannot pay you. Competition in every sector is high, and a strong Brand is essentially the only remaining reliable way to ‘win’ customers.
How to show yourself
If this resonates with you, and you are on board with what I’m explaining, you can change things by Going Deeper. Build your brand around your radically unique Truth. Look at the 16 Questions on this site, and use them as a starting point to excavate your deepest thoughts and feelings around your business. Be your own therapist.
Those answers will hold a little golden nugget that can become your tagline, your headlines, your tone of voice, and even inspire your visual identity. Actually, this is the only correct way to go about the branding process.
The world awaits to delight in you.
Do not hide, show! show! Your success depends on it.