As I mentioned in my New Year's Day post, we launched The Lip-sticking Society along with a new look for the Lip-sticking blog. Yvonne DiVita, the founder of the blog, followed up the following day with this great post, Creating the Lip-sticking Society, where she wrote about why we did it and part of the how. So I promised to follow up on my first guest blogging day of the new year and elaborate a little more on "the how" and provide some further insights into why we did what we did from a brand perspective.

I've
always thought the term Lip-sticking was very unique and loved the
graphic logo that Yvonne had created for the blog. So I encouraged her
to seriously consider branding and trademarking it. What I learned
early in my career about trademarks is that they need to be adjectives,
not nouns. A noun should always follow the brand. So in this case we've added the word "blog" and officially changed the name to The Lip-sticking Blog. We now have launched a new expanded site which we have named The Lip-sticking Society. Also in development is Lip-sticking the Book, which will include excerpts from the blog.

I then introduced Yvonne to a Brand Positioning Worksheet that I
have used many times for many clients and she and I completed it
together. This became the strategic cornerstone for the creation of the
Lip-sticking Society and served as a guide to help keep us on track.
From my past experiences I learned that when launching a new business
or product it is easy to get sidetracked or to be swayed by personal
beliefs and opinions. You always need to remember who your audience is
and in some cases you could be very different.

So one of the main
goals of this branding exercise was to develop the tagline for the
Lip-sticking Society. This included not only writing down all the
personality words that Yvonne shared here in her original post, but some other very important steps that we needed to complete first.

Step
1 was describing the product in writing, in this case the new site. If
you don't have a clear vision of what you are creating it's very hard
to define its unique value in the marketplace.

Step 2 was
defining the primary and the secondary audiences of the site which
we based both on existing readers as well as future prospective
readers.

Step 3 is a unique exercise in which we defined the
value proposition in three ways: the functional, emotional and
self-defining benefits in the voice of the customer.

Step 4  was listing the unique features and benefits of the product, in order of their priority as much as possible.

Step 5 was creating the personality words that I mentioned above.

The
Final Step was then developing the tagline, or positioning statement as
it is also called. In most cases it ends up being a combination of
functional and emotional, or functional and self expressive, and
sometimes all three influence it. In the case of marketing a product or
service that has no or very little awareness, functional benefits are
mostly used since they need to clearly define what the product or
service is.

So
we ended up using the word “Smart” because it was part of the initial
tagline for the Lip-sticking blog “Smart marketing to women online” which
was key in what we still wanted to be. The word “Talk” tied nicely into
the term “Lip-sticking” so it too was true to the brand. However, we
didn't settle on "Smart Talk. Smart Learning. Smart Friends."
initially. As Yvonne mentioned in her post, she originally wanted
something slightly different which she shared with a few close friends
who voted it down. I had said that it didn't properly reflect what we
had defined in the worksheet, so the document did prove useful.

I am
now very excited about moving forward with Yvonne along with others on the Lip-sticking team to further develop the Lip-sticking brand along with the
products and services associated with it. Hopefully sharing this
information will be helpful to you in your business and social media
initiatives. I'm thinking it may be great content for the new
Lip-sticking Learning Center. So I invite you to hop over to The Lip-sticking Society and take a look and, as always, I welcome your suggestions and comments.