Mana

What is Mana?

Mana: n. Supernatural power; adj. miraculous, divinely guided, spiritual.

The ancient Hawaiians believed that everything was alive and contained spiritual energy,
that everything had Mana.

Mana Brand Marketing operates from the core belief that a brand carries the energy and spirit of its owner. Your brand, therefore, is as much about you as it is about your product or service. Everything about your brand needs to reflect your energy, passion and your vision. Your brand has its own Mana.

The process of branding involves working to understand, appreciate, acknowledge and intuit your brand essence and values and how that can potentially evolve.

With our clients, Mana engages in a process of collaboration and co-creation to discover the brand essence. What do you sell or provide? How do you do that? What do you value in relation to your customers? What is most important to you, besides making money?

We do not decide your brand but rather help reveal what is already there. The process involves exploration and discovery, a search to understand the essence of your brand promise. What you do and what you do not do are equally important, in the same way that a sculptor chisels and carves away the block, removing and not removing, to uncover what is already inside.

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”  —  Michelangelo

Mana takes the time to get to know you, your company, and your product or service through meetings, visits, and information sharing. Ideas and perceptions emerge from these exchanges.  

Mana then creates strategically guided visual and verbal design solutions that evoke your unique brand value. The designs are intended to connect to current and potential customers in an emotionally relevant way, using language and the principles of design, including images, color, symbols. These different elements are then refined and focused until the right brand expression is manifested. When you say, “I love it! That's it! That’s my brand!” that is when your core brand expression begins to take on a life of its own.

What is a Brand and What is Branding?

Consumers now have more products and services to choose from than ever before, and there are more ways to investigate, research, interact with, and purchase those products and services in the new interactive, instantaneous, international marketplace.  As businesses try to find ways to stand out this crowded, cluttered, and confusing global marketplace, the tools and processes of Brand and Branding are essential in order to convey the unique value, benefits, and relevance of your products and services to customers and prospects.

The Brand:

The Brand is the core essence and value offered by your company's product or service to your customers.

Brand is more than any specific feature or benefit. Brand is about your promise to your customers. Most importantly, Brand is about the way people experience your product or service and their emotional connection to it. Brand is about the relevance of your product or service to customers and how they integrate your offering into their life.  A brand has an energetic connection to a customer and touches them as a whole person, engaging all of their senses and sensibilities.

Branding:

Branding is the entire process involved in creating and embodying your brand visually, verbally, and experientially across all touch points of interaction with the consumer. It can encompass design in all media, ranging from traditional (print, radio and TV) to online (Internet and Social Media) and physical spaces (retail). Branding aims to establish your product/service with a significant and differentiated presence in the market that attracts, engages, creates and retains loyal customers.

Why is Branding Important to Your Business Success?

Your brand has the power to create a first impression for the consumer and that first impression can differentiate and position you well above the competition. Your Brand differentiation and positioning can also translate into premium pricing.

Today, a successful brand must:

• Be recognizable and relevant to consumers

• Communicated in every relevant customer touch point across the physical to virtual world.

• Communicate in every relevant touch point for a company’s business 'ecosystem’. That includes internal (staff, employees, contractors) and external (partners, affiliates) environments.
  

• Communicate in every relevant customer touch point across the physical to virtual world

• Be authentic and embody a true reflection of who you are and how you do business.

• Deliver a consistent experience of satisfaction and customer delight.

Your brand becomes the shorthand for your offering.Your Core Brand Identity becomes the shorthand for your offering. The visual and verbal impact of your brand communicates all the ways in which your customer experiences your brand.

The golden arches of McDonald’s, the Nike swoosh, the Target bull’s-eye, the Apple icon, and Starbucks’ mermaid all signify the quality, the products, services and experience you expect to receive. When you purchase from any of these companies, you know what you are getting:
the brand stands for something you recognize and trust.

Creating YOUR Core Brand Identity and expression is one of the most important investments you can make for your business success

Apple, the golden arches of McDonald’s, the Nike swoosh, and Starbucks’ mermaid all signify the quality, the products, services and experience you expect to receive. When you purchase from these companies, you know what you are getting: The brand stands for something you recognize and trust.

Creating YOUR brand identity and expression is one of the most important investments you can make for your business.

How Do You Build a Powerful and Sustainable Brand?

“Products are built in the factory, but brands are built in the mind.” —  Walter Landor - Landor & Associates

Powerful brands are built in the consumer’s mind, but truly successful brands must also connect to the heart.

The way to assure that connection is to start from the core product/service and value proposition and work outward:

1. Identify your brand essence and values and decide what your promise is to your customer

2. Use strategic insight and research to understand the target audiences
   

3. Develop a core brand identity and branding system that expresses the brand visually, verbally and experientially in a way that will connect with the target audiences.
   

Building Sustainable Brands:

Truly successful brands connect with, establish, grow and maintain an emotional relationship with the customer that is beyond any specific price point, feature or function. A successful brand transcends objectivity and
becomes personally relevant and enriching to the customer.

The branding process needs to answer this essential question:

How does my business / product / service provide an experience that connects to my customer’s needs and desires?

To assure the success of your brand:

1. Ensure that your brand stands for something that is compelling and simple.

2. Make it easy for potential customers to understand and appreciate how your brand fits into their life either by solving a problem or creating an opportunity for a new experience.

3. Build your brand on a simple idea that serves as the foundation, and then execute the verbal, visual and experiential aspects of that brand consistently across all points of customer interaction.