Branding As Freedom and Personal Empowerment

“Your brand is your legacy lived by your customers.”
Virginia Nava

In the past people wanted to buy products and services. Today, everyone wants to connect with the people from which products and services are being created. People want to build personal connections with the brands and the people behind them.

Branding that represents you.

You are an authentic entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is your vehicle for transformation, for changing your surroundings and creating a better world with your services, gifts, talents, and innovations.

Are you a changemaker, visionary, transformational agent, or lightworker? Are you someone who desires to leave your unique mark and make the world a better place?

Think of your brand as your unique signature, your fingerprint, your unique form of contribution to the world.

Leave a mark:

• Free to be you.
• Free to express yourself.
• Free to impact with who you are.

Types of branding

There are 2 kinds of branding:

• Branding to project an image: Branding as “cookie cutter”.
  • This branding requires a lot of effort on your part to maintain an image. It relies on consistency and doesn’t leave a lot of room for growth or change.
  • It is something you have to “fit into”
  • For some people, this feels like being “boxed out”.
  • It is “outer-focused”.
  • Sometimes, you may feel like you left yourself out of the conversation.
  • It makes you appear as something (“expert”, x, y, z).
  • All about you (excluding self for understanding the other).
    • The impact on people doesn’t build trust and rapport with you, because they don’t get to know you.
• Branding as freedom: Branding to share the essence of who you are and listen to other’s
  • This branding requires personal development, knowing who you are, and your talents, and gifts.
  • It is something you flow with.
  • It is a supportive structure that helps you communicate who you are, connect with those who are meant to serve, share and grow.
  • It is focused. There is room for you and room for others.
    • Experience of connection, trust, and vulnerability.
  • It is meant to be expansive and growing. It is less attached to the form and more attached to the essential connection to you, others, and the experience. It is experiential.
  • It helps you be available.
  • Its inclusivity allows others to be able to express themselves.

Why Branding As Freedom?

Branding As  Freedom has its roots in the idea that our expression is sacred. In that sense, marketing, communications, and branding are sacred tools to impact the world as we desire.  

Some branding techniques have been created to communicate a product, instead of what is the product’s essence or the essence of a person or an organization.  

In my experience, as a corporate marketer, strategic marketing consultant, and author, I have found that the essence, the invisible force, is the key to differentiation and success. It is also the core of brand communications, instead of the obvious, which you don’t need to communicate.

For example, when selling green socks, you don’t have to communicate “green socks for sale”. That’s obvious, especially when using a picture of them because the title isn’t adding anything to the image.

However, if the green socks are an effort coming from a women’s cooperative in Machu Picchu, you might sell them like this:  

Empower 500 women, support 2,000 children, and provide sustainability and long-lasting transformation to 2,500 individuals through The Changemaker Green Socks Initiative.

Why Virginia?  

You might want to pick me because I know the difference between branding to project and image and branding to free who you are. 

I have built brands and helped people and organizations share their message for over 20 years until I realized that communication has the power of freedom, the power to connect, impact, and self-actualization.  

That comes from my experience. I have written my personal transformational books with the purpose of impacting someone else. In the process, I found that branding a corporation with a structured message and colors was way different that creating a personal connection to oneself and someone else through brand-building. This requires internal skillsets to do it successfully. 

The personal transformation of Branding As Freedom

Please, let me introduce the Branding As Freedom program to you. Its goal is to support brands to connect with people. These are the key elements of this program.

Readiness to impact someone else with who you are:

• Self-love
• Self-acceptance
• Permission to be oneself in the presence of others
• Feeling comfortable with your natural self.

The structure that is aligned with our true essence:

• Marketing as flow:  Finding marketing avenues that are in alignment with your unique essential nature and attributes.

Patterns of protection:

• Perfectionism, procrastination, waiting, seeking others’ feedback, and ways in which you prevent yourself from sharing your unique perspective.

Love as the energy of exchange:

• Love for yourself and someone else as the energy of impact, choosing love and alignment as the goal instead of closing sales:
  • Letting go of using “fear” or other energy to invite people into your world. Instead, aligning with the energy of love creates connection and allows the person to choose if your service or product aligns with them.
  • Allowing the person to choose powerfully as well as to ask questions.
  • Standing in the energy of “Best for all” and energy of abundance and alignment.

Branding as a voice:

• Seeing branding and marketing as a “megaphone”, a tool to amplify our voice and allow others access to our unique perspective.

The structural aspect of branding as freedom:

• Taking a stand:
  • Choosing a community to serve
• Building a message with high vibration and resonance of alignment and love
• Bringing a vision to life through our words

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Virginia Nava Hieger is the author of Your Unique Gift: Finding Life’s Unique Gift Proposition and Meaningful Freedom: Finding Freedom Through Wholeness, two books aimed at empowering people on a journey of self-discovery, authenticity, wholeness, and personal freedom. 

As a Transformative Power™ guide, she believes each one of us has our source of inner strength and that we simply need the tools to reconnect with it to let our light shine back out into the world.  

Visit her site at www.thetransformativepower.com or get in touch. For a free ebook, email virginianava@thetransformativepower.com.