Developing a brand statement for your business is an important task, but one which does not have to be hard to accomplish.
Here are four steps to make brand statement creation relatively simple:

1. Determine what emotional associations you would like
A brand is best described as being the one word emotion a customer immediately brings to mind when your product or service are mentioned.
You can certainly list positive words that you wish to establish as your brand identity, but sometimes even a few neutral words can useful as well.
The reason for this is that a word which has some positive associations, but also potentially a few negative ones will do a better job of polarizing customers.
Some customers will love the brand, others may hate it, but the worst of all possible worlds when developing a brand is settling on an association which no one really cares about, one way or the other.
Irrelevant should not be one of the words anyone ever uses to define your brand.

2. Determine which emotional associations are already taken
Once you have some good candidate words, you should then consider not only what emotional associations your competitors already own, but even what emotional associations non-competing products and services have already occupied in customer's minds.
It can be difficult to replace existing emotional associations completely with your own, so you might consider a way to uniquely position your offering (using mental "real estate" which is not already taken).
If this can not be done, then one alternative is to propose a joint venture with some of the firm(s) which already have the emotional association you want.
This assumes that the other firms are in industries which do not directly compete with yours.
In doing so, you can leverage the emotional association of their branding efforts, and attach those same feelings to your own products and services, transferring goodwill from their group of customers to your own.
Of course, it also helps if both customer groups are in the same target market segments for both companies.

3. Determine what the greatest strengths of your product or service offering(s) are
The best way to use branding strategically is to create emotional associations which link to advantages which competitors can not easily duplicate.
Explained differently, if you have a patented invention or other mechanism, or if you use a trademarked process, then ideally your brand should link these intellectually protected properties to the emotional benefits your firm provides.
This creates a much more challenging obstacle to potential competitors, and creates lasting competitive advantages for your firm.
Even when the strengths of your product or service are touted (and are not intellectually protected), this still temporarily tilts the playing field in your favor, if competitors try to compete directly against qualities which are not their relative strengths.

4. Develop your brand statement using these
Once you have these steps in place, it is now possible to create a brand statement.
You might not use the one word emotion(s) directly as part of your marketing efforts, but your target customer segments should be able to come up with it, if asked to free associate what qualities they associate with your company.
Sometimes, you may find that there is no difference between your own offering(s), and that of other companies.
In these instances, if you are the first in your industry to emphasize a previously secret aspect of how your product or service works, then even if it is common to all in the industry, any other businesses which emphasize the same ingredients or methods will only be seen as imitators.

Clearly, there is much involved in creating a good branding statement.
You might consider emotions you want associated with your product or service, as well as which intellectually protected methods you can associate these emotions to.
However, you must also be careful not to overlap mental real estate which other brands have already claimed, and above all else, your target customers must find the brand statement compelling.
After all, in the end, they are the ultimate determiners of whether it is a good one or not.
Copyright 2010, by Marc Mays