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When people go into business, they tend to think of their product as their brand. Suppose, however, you go into a retail business and your small city is home to eleven similar stores. All of you sell the same product, so what is there to pick and choose among you? Location? Price? Style? All, or none, of the above?

According to Travis Brady, whose job it is to help businesses find and market their specific identity, the brand is more than the surface of a company or business. It’s its DNA. The motto of Travis’s company, NextGen, is, “Your brand is the mark you give to the world.” To make this mark, a brand needs to identify what distinguishes it from others. 

Brand identity is particularly crucial “in today’s world of hyper-fast communication, where you have” three seconds to create 'buy in' to you, your brand and your product & service offerings. Your brand is what creates that 'buy in,' that desire for someone to learn more about you, your story and what you have to offer them.” To expand these three seconds into a narrative that will attract the consumer’s attention, Travis has developed a five-step program or methodology, that can be applied to almost any business without compromising what makes it unique. 

Before NextGen came up with its five-step program, the prevailing wisdom was that it took eight years to create a brand and fix it in the public’s mind. The five-step program reduced the time necessary to create a viable brand to eight weeks.  The steps are as follows. First is a discovery and leadership plan that ensures the brand’s identity and value remain consistent from the top of the business to the bottom. Step two analyzes how the branding plan intersects with the business’s existing culture and fine tunes this relationship wherever necessary. Step three begins the implementation of social media marketing with the object of determining what generates the most effective response. In Step four, Travis and NextGen use data derived from step 3 to decide the best way to identify the brand’s value and deliver the company’s service. Once all the pieces are in place and the company’s team all face the same direction, Step five sees Travis help his clients focus their new strategy to scale their business through sales. 

Because what Travis offers is a method of arriving at identity and value, the program can be applied to businesses as varied as computer parts and shoe sales. The branding itself is product specific, but the principle behind it isn’t. “Without brand,” Travis observes, “you have no identity, without identity, how can you scale your business to be unique in a hyper-competitive marketplace?”  On the other hand, “Mastering branding, means being able to scale ‘at will,’ being able to have more customers, followers, and clients who fit your ideal profile, and forever avoiding being "price shopped."

Travis named his business NextGen, “because we believe everyone is unique, different, creative, and has something the world needs. So we challenge the status quo, really getting people out there in a unique and innovative way.”  In business coaching, a profession that is often free form and where advisors can sometimes be little more than cheerleaders, Travis and his company stand out for offering a concrete method by which a business can approach and resolve the fundamental question of how to brand itself. For this, they deserve the label of innovators and merit watching as they continue to grow and refine their techniques.  
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