Creating Your ADR Business Brand

In the last section I said that a business brand “creates an association between you (or you business) and what you stand for in the client’s mind and heart.” To begin putting words to the kind of association you’d like to create, let’s return to several earlier exercises.

The following exercises will help you put words to a brand, which you can then use to name your ADR blog.

If you’ve become a Mediator Tech reader at a date later than these exercises were posted as part of my Making Mediation Your Day Job™ project, I strongly suggest you go back to those sections of the book (just click the link associated with each one below) and complete the series of exercises in those sections before working through the following.

Exercise 6.1.1: Review Your Earlier Work

Return to the following exercises and read through your written responses to them:

Exercise 2.1.3: How Does Mediation Help You Be of Service?
Exercise 2.2.2: What Problem Does Mediation Solve?
Exercise 2.2.4: Name the Problems People Most Want Solved
Exercise 2.2.7: What If You Couldn’t Mediate?

What common themes do you see? Are there common phrases, particularly ones that don’t use mediator jargon? Are there ideas that really speak to you and your passion for mediation?

Now for some business-building fun. I recommend you do the following exercise when you have time to play a little and it’s the time of day your energy is highest and mind clearest. Give yourself at least an hour, with time to put the pen down, walk around a bit, then sit back down with more ideas.

Exercise 6.1.2: What Is the Association You Want to Create?

This is a brainstorm, so the traditional rules apply: Write as many ideas as you can, even zany ones. Particularly zany ones. Don’t self-edit. Don’t wordsmith. When you find yourself running out of ideas, don’t stop yet. Sit with the question for a moment and you may well get your second wind.

Using your review of the earlier exercises to launch your brainstorm, answer the following question with as many phrases, ideas, or words you can muster. If you have a stack of sticky notes, write one phrase per note. Alternatively, use index cards or small note paper, again with one phrase, word or idea per piece.

What phrases capture the association you’d like to make between what you offer and what our target market wants?

When you’re done, you’ll ideally have a list of at least 20-30 phrases, words, or ideas. If you don’t have that many, let yourself sleep on it or ponder it during your next daily exercise time…any period where your brain has the freedom to work without you pressing it into service on other time-constrained matters.

Exercise 6.13: Sorting Your Ideas

Take your stack of sticky notes, note paper or index cards and spread them out. Begin sorting them into groups. You choose the categories or themes by which you sort. If an idea seems to go with another idea, put them together. Keep moving the individual phrases, words and ideas into groupings until you feel you’ve got them in groups that just feel right to you. It’s fine to take a sticky or card you initially put in one grouping and move it to another grouping. This may take 10-15 minutes. Try to take a playful attitude instead of a serious, “must get this perfect” approach.

Step back and look at your groupings. What groups have many stickies or cards? What thematic groupings feel the most compelling to you?

Take a few moments and write down what you discovered from the sorting activity. If the activity suggested new phrases, words or ideas to you, write them down as well.

Copyright © 2006 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.