Building a brand is hard: the OneCrier story

Over the course of this week, I was nudged by the Spirit of God to study chapter 3 of Midas Touch: Why Some Entrepreneurs Get Rich-And Why Most Don’t (that wonderful book written by Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki). The chapter 3 talks a lot about branding; building a powerful brand.

The more I read the book, the more I saw how messed up my own brands were. A brand is not the logo, its the public perception of our offerings. This morning, the Spirit of God asked me a question: why is word-of-mouth referrals not working for OneCrier? (Unlike its ancestor, the original g160).

That was when I started to see the massive flaws in OneCrier’s branding.

I went back to the drawing board, what are OneCrier’s values? What are we supposed to stand for? It was time to check out Omnific Works’ values since that’s where we derived OneCrier from.

Now, Omnific Works has 5 pillars that governs everything done:

• Innovation
• User centered design
• Competence
• World Class
• Integrity

Of all 5 values, OneCrier had only 1 (innovation) going for it, we had ignored every other thing. I was stinged; OneCrier sucked afterall!

I immediately got to work, we started by switching the tagline from “Announce Anything Anywhere” to “keeping you alerted”, the former one was not user-centered. We then crafted a new brand promise: “Our promise is to ensure that you will always tell someone else about us because we will always alert you about events that matters most to you”.

There you have it, but this is merely the 1st phase. The next phase is the toughest and that’s where the greater challenge lies: delivering on this promise! Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com says a brand is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well, this is why great brands are so rare, it is very difficult.

We now have a new promise to deliver to our users and we will work hard towards fulfilling it.

Adapted from my diary entry on February 22, 2013

P.S.

OneCrier in 2012-2014 was a city-based, spam free town crier that sent users info about events coming up around them that they would be interested in. OneCrier got converted into an entertainment and lifestyle brand in 2014.