Identify Your Brand Position by Using Brand Keywords

With your Brand’s history complete with the brand book, it’s time to start distilling the keywords for your Brand. If you haven’t done this exercise yet, a Word Cloud is an excellent way to tease them.

Identify Brand Keywords for the Brand Book

Copy the text you wrote for the brand book on the history of your Brand and head on over to wordle.net Paste the text of the history into the “Paste in a bunch of text” field and hit “Go.” What you’ll get is a word cloud that looks something like this: Right away, we can see some essential things about the history we created in the brand book. First (and appropriately), we used the words “Rubber” and “Duckie” the most. That’s good; that means we were talking about our Brand. If, for some reason, your word cloud doesn’t show the name of your Brand in the largest font size, it’s you should consider making some edits to the history so that your brand name is the most commonly used word or words in your brand book history. Next, you’ll notice that other words from history jump out at you. In this case, “charities,” “rubber,” “fame,” “song,” “win,” and “race.” Some are helpful descriptors for our brand position, but some are not. “Fame,” for instance, would not be a good keyword for the Rubber Duckie brand–although it is famous, it’s not what we want people to think of when they hear “Rubber Duckie.” To get rid of it is easy, in Wordle, right click on the word “Fame” and then click, “Remove Fame.” Continue this process until you are happy with the words that remain as descriptive keywords for your Brand. What you will be left with is something that looks like this: This Word Cloud is a good representation of the Brand based on our written history, but it may not tell the whole story. All brands evolve, and it’s essential to make sure that the keywords for our brand book reflect where we have been and where we want our brand to go in the future. There are probably some documents that have been written about your brand position. Please take a few of them and repeat the above steps to see what word clouds emerge. For the Rubber Duckie Brand, we have Ernie’s Song, first broadcast in 1970 and written by Jeff Moss, to measure our success. When we take the lyrics to the song and put them into the Wordle Create page, then tidy up a bit, we get a word cloud that looks like this:

Clearly, this is a very different-looking word cloud than the one above derived from the history we wrote. The differences are important to note. The first is a bit more of a “zoomed out” view of the Brand, while the second is an excellent description of the experience of playing with a Rubber Duckie. Which is right for our brand book? Both and neither. This is where you have to put on your strategic marketing hat. List the ten most descriptive keywords for your brand position using several word clouds. These should embody your brand attributes, brand values, and brand aspirations. Try to order the words from most important to least important. For the Rubber Duckie brand book, I think we end up with a list that looks like this:

1. imagination
2. friend
3. joy
4. clean
5. charity
6. children
7. dream
8. chubby
9. bathtime
10. squeezable

Word clouds display the relative importance of the keywords in a visually appealing manner. They are ideal for including your Brand’s keywords in your final Brand Book. To create our final word cloud for the brand book, return your keywords list to Wordle and open a create window. Paste your list into the create window. Add your brand name 6 or 7 times to the text to give the word cloud some dimension. Then copy the first 5 (or so) items from your list and paste them in twice more. So you end up with a create box that has the following words in it:

imagination friend joy clean charity children dream chubby bathtime squeeze  Rubber Duckie Rubber Duckie Rubber Duckie Rubber Duckie Rubber Duckie Rubber Duckie imagination friend joy clean charity imagination friend joy clean charity

Then, hit the “Go” button and adjust the fonts, layout, and colors until you are happy with how your Word Cloud is displayed for your brand book. Once you’re happy, print your screen to a PDF (if you can) or press the “PrtSc” button on your keyboard to copy your screen. Then, paste the screenshot into a picture editing program and crop the image to be just the Word cloud. Of course, if you have a good image editing program, you can also build your own Word Cloud, using the one you created on Wordle as inspiration. You will end up with a word cloud that displays the most relevant keywords for your Brand’s position in the Brand Book.

Rubber Duckie’s Brand Keywords for the Brand Book

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