How BRAVE is your brand?
Back when my Nonna was alive (rest her audacious soul), I used to tell her I take off my clothes for money just to shock her. But it’s true. I strip naked in rooms packed with people, literally and figuratively.
Literally – because I’ve been a nude life model for artists and sketch clubs for going on 11 years now. And figuratively – because my other hobby is spoken word performance. And let me tell you. Of the two activities, performing a poem or story leaves me feeling MUCH more exposed.
When people hear about either of those two things, the common response is:
“Wow, that’s brave”.
And while I’ve never really formulated the thought that I’m ‘brave’, I do live my life stubbornly determined to ‘conquer’ things.
Like the taste of black coffee.
Like the fear of travelling alone.
Or the vulnerability of posing nude.
Or the absolute rollercoaster of building my own business.
So it’s poetic, I suppose, that when I decided to sit down and put some structure to the way I help people build their brands, the acronym that fit the best was BRAVE.
The BRAVE framework is not a process to follow. It’s more a constellation of important elements that you can use to guide yourself as you create, strengthen, or assess a brand. Your own, or for your clients.
It’s a way of approaching brand work so that you know you’ve ticked off all the major considerations, the things that are actually useful, without getting lost in if you really need a brand story AND brand pillars AND brand shoe size and brand fingers and toes and whatever else the internet has told you to worry about.
Here it is.
Each section of the framework is designed to help you identify where your brand’s strengths are and where the biggest opportunities are. Where you can get some quick wins and where you should start planning to invest more time and resources.
I designed this framework to be an iterative process, something you can do every 6-12 months to keep your brand in check. The best part? I’ve put together a mini course that takes you through running the audit for yourself– and it’s totally free.
