How brand authenticity can help increase your success

Key quotes:

• "You probably already know it’s important to have a personal brand."
• "Creating a personal brand that others recognize and trust is essential to success as a freelancer or as any other business owner."
• "One of the best things you can do to keep working on your personal brand is to review your strengths."
• "Now that you know your strengths, you can put them to good use."
• "Do your strengths lend you the ability to provide value that others can’t? As you strengthen your personal brand, make sure you illustrate the value you bring to the table."
• "Whether it’s through a business proposition, or whether it’s freelancing, you want to make sure that you offer solid value and that you communicate that value."

Key quotes:

• "Word of mouth marketing and social currency is a way to leverage the way people interact on social media to grow your brand."
• "Before we dive in, let’s talk about what social currency is and how you can use it to build your brand online."
• "More simply, social currency is a measurement of how people talk about a brand organically, in everyday conversations."
• "Some of the main reasons why you should invest in social currency include: Having, for example, your employees to share your content, products or services offerings, you can reach much more people than the company itself."
• "We have already talked about how employees can help build a brand’s social currency, but social currency also helps increase brand value."
• "However, that reliance on authentic interactions does not mean there’s nothing marketers can do to help drive social currency."

Key quotes:

• "With all eyes (always) on you, your brand must continually be on it’s authenticity game."
• "Fortunately, while there is no specific recipe for authenticity (it’s different for every brand) there are a few things brands can do to set themselves on the right track."
• "One of the best ways to foster authenticity is to think about your brand as a person and to cultivate relationships with customers as you would real friendships."
• "Whether it’s your brand messaging or inappropriate tweets liked by your CEO on Twitter — the spotlight never sleeps."
• "This means it’s more important than ever to be consistent with your story, values, and actions so that nobody can accuse your brand of being fake."
• "The best way to ensure brand-wide consistency is to engage your employees."

Key quotes:

• "Just think, when was the last time you gave your trust to a brand that communicates with you in such a manner? Brands capable of telling their story in an authentic way and incorporate consumers emotions into their branding campaign are building a connection between themselves and their target audience."
• "I know, and I can tell you there’s no real formula for developing a brand voice that comes naturally to you and resonates with your audience."
• "Today more than ever (Thank you, Internet!) people are eager to connect with brands on more human levels, they want to understand a company's voice and not to simply hear what they do or what are the benefits of its products or services."
• "Consumers want to be part of a community, they want to feel they have an affinity with brands that reflect their values, and it goes well beyond repeat business."

Key quotes:

• "But exactly does it mean for a brand to be authentic? According to them, “Authenticity helps fuel success in today’s over-traded markets as consumers search for greater meaning and sincerity from the brands they choose — fuelled by a desire to connect with things that feel safe, certain and unambiguous."
• "When a brand’s rhetoric gets out of sync with customers’ actual experiences, the brand’s integrity and future persuasiveness suffers.” To help increase understanding of what makes a brand authentic, the Authentic Brand Index employed qualitative exploration and quantitative data modelling to identify seven key drivers of brand authenticity: So, how does all of this connect to improved business performance? Well, as the Authentic Brand Index states, “Performance on ‘Core Authenticity’ drives business performance."
• "The stronger a brand’s Core Authenticity, the more likely people are to become advocates for the brand, and the greater the share a brand will have of high value customers in its market.” This means that brand authenticity ties in heavily to brand advocacy."