Your brand's DNA is what your communication, your hiring strategy, your media strategy, and your organisational movements are based on. Here's a short how to on decoding your brand's DNA, If you are a beginner in the fields of strategy and communications, this might help you make informed decisions.

1. How to decode a
brand’s DNA?
A presentation by Tannistho
tannistho@gmail.com

2. Who is this presentation for?
If you are a seasoned marketer, you can happily skip the slides.
This presentation will be of use to small business
owners, independent professionals and students who are taking up
marketing as a field of study or practice.

3. What is a Brand DNA
Brand DNA refers to the distinctiveness, novelty
and attributes of a brand. It is what helps the
brand stand out, create its own set of brand
communities, and drive emotional attachments in
a crowded marketplace.

4. Why do you need a brand DNA
• As a marketer your intention is to reach out to
the people who will benefit from your product
or services the most and to create an emotional
connection with them.
• Your brand DNA will help you create your
strategy for making this connection possible.

5. So, how do you go about identifying
the DNA of your brand?

6. When you started out…
• … your product or service had a mission. You
did not just want to create another product…
you wanted that product or service to solve a
human problem or create a human impact.

7. For instance…
• Starbucks had the
mission ‘ to inspire
and nurture the human
spirit, one person, one
cup and one
neighbourhood at a
time’.

8. For instance…
• Coca Cola wants to
‘refresh the world,
inspire optimism and
happiness, create value
and make a
difference…”

9. For instance…
• BMW wants to
provide, ‘sheer
driving
pleasure, sporting
and dynamic
performance
combined with
superb design and
exclusive quality’.

10. So, what’s your mission for your
service/product?
You can answer this by asking:
a.
b.
What do you want to change in the world?
How do you want your product/service to help you change it?

11. Ok, so you’ve created your
mission… now what?

12. Take a piece of paper and create the
following columns
ATTRIBUTES
DISTINCTIVENESS
NOVELTY

13. Once, you are done
• Write down the key attributes of your product/service under
the attributes column. For example, on-time
delivery, competitive pricing, superb
packaging, personalised message with each package, etc.
• Your attributes should support your mission.
• Your attributes should be detailed and exhaustive. It is a list
of ‘what does your product or service do’ and ‘how does
your product or service do it’.

14. What’s distinctive about your
attributes?
• When you list your attributes you will realise that you are
not the only one who’s offering these services. Your
competitors are also doing the same. So, what’s distinctive
about your product/service?
• You might re-look at your product/service now and see if
you can add something that’s distinctive. For example,
instead of on-time delivery you probably reach five minutes
before. So you actually do before time delivery. This is an
example of distinctiveness.

15. Now, you go about creating your
novelty…
• So, you have listed your distinctiveness.
• So to arrive at your novelty, you rank each of
your distinctive characteristics in a rank. Rank
from 10 to 1. The least distinctive gets a 10,
the most distinctive gets a 1.
• List out the 1, 2 and 3 characteristics in your
novelty column.,

16. So, now with your listed novelty you
have created your brand’s DNA.
Now, test out the points 1, 2 and 3 that you have arrived at with test users of your
product and service. Test users will be representative
Not all 3 might be accepted in the same way, but this test will tell you how your
brand is going to work with the consumers and what are the changes that you
might need to do.

17. You can now…
Create your brand communication
around the novelties that you have
listed on your DNA structure.

18. Hope it helps folks!