Today I welcome to the show Sunny Bonnell the co-founder of Motto. Motto is a comprehensive branding and design firm that helps visionary entrepreneurs and companies build magnetic brands.
At Motto, Sunny is a visionary thinker and branding expert who also serves as the creative director in addition to her co-founder duties.
Sunny was named one of Graphic Design – USA’s “25 Creatives to Watch in 2014” and has been featured on MSN Business, CBS News, American Express, and various print and online design publications.
She thrives on inspiring others to pursue their passions and pushes both herself and her clients to reach beyond their threshold to achieve success.
Sunny, Welcome to the brand new you show.
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PERSONAL BRANDS AND BRANDING
At Motto, Sunny views branding as something much bigger than a design. It’s really the deliberate effort you make to tell the world this is who I am.
Branding is the process of defining shaping and influencing both visually and verbally the story, the emotion and the meaning you want your audience to experience.
Where Sunny sees her clients struggle the most is internally with the foundational “things” required to build a brand such as; defining their meaning, purpose, vision, values in a way that makes it easier to articulate them to the world.
Comparing this to personal branding, I see and wrestle with many of the same things. Most people I speak with about personal branding don’t even take these internal things into consideration when building their brand.
Everyone wants to jump right into the more “sexy” stuff like building a website or designing a logo but without the focus that comes from this internal assessment even the most excited of my clients will fade away once the going gets tough.
The branding process needs to begin with the purpose, vision, values and positioning of your brand before anything else. These are the foundations brand building. Start with understanding the competition, your audience in order to help create a positioning statement or USP.
This is how you achieve a well-defined and emotionally connecting brand. Starting here will help you find the one meaningful idea at the center of your brand.
ARCHETYPES FOR BRANDS
Image taken from: https://musingsandbooks.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/archetype-adventure-a-guide-to-archetypes-in-literature/
This is the second time on the podcast we have discussed the use of archetypes for branding. The first time was with personal branding specialist Danielle Miller. You may recall from our discussion that I align with the Creator archetype.
In literature, an archetype is a character or a situation that represents universal patterns of human nature. An archetype, can be a symbol, a character, a theme, or even a setting.
Carl Jung, Swiss psychologist, suggested the root of an archetype is in the “collective unconscious” of mankind in which the phrase “collective unconscious” refers to experiences shared by a race or culture.
These experiences could include love, religion, death, birth, life, struggle, survival etc. They exist in the subconscious of every individual.
If used properly Sunny suggests archetypes can provide a clear pathway to meaning for a brand by adding a dimension of personification to a brand which can help define a brand personality.
By borrowing specific character types, archetypes can be used as powerful positioning tool that can help people, employees, customers or others identify with a brand.
There are a number of online tests you can take point you in a direction but Sunny suggests you really need someone who understands archetypes to help fully benefit from their purpose. Danielle offered a quiz on her site. You can take the quiz HERE.
In all there are 12 fundamental archetypes as shown above. As an individual it's possible for you to have some characteristics of a couple different archetypes. Take me for example I identify with the Creator and Hero archetypes.
If you are interested in learning more about archetypes Sunny recommended a book by Dr. Carol Pearson called “The Hero and the Outlaw” (Affiliate Link).
PURPOSE AND VISION
Sunny and I talk a lot about purpose and why it's so important. We all want our lives to count for something unfortunately defining our purpose is often not a process we allow ourselves to fully participate in. As a result we get in our own way.
Once you understand your purpose it becomes the force from which all of your behaviors and actions align.
People often confuse purpose with vision. Purpose is really more about why you are doing something it gives you direction and a point from which decisions get made while vision on the other hand is the way you want the world to be.
SUMMARY
You can get in touch with Sunny and learn more about Motto at these links.
Web: wearemotto.com
Sunny leaves us with these final thoughts
“Be loyal to the nightmare of your choice. Whatever you’re doing you have to be loyal to it. Do whatever it takes to continue pushing yourself to grow, evolve and make things better.”
