TUTORIAL ARTICLE

Beginner

30 min

Define or pivot your brand

Learn the essentials of creating or refreshing a brand that resonates with your audience.

What you’ll need
Practice in the app

Introduction 

Branding is how you and your business show up in the world. Whether you’re a small business owner or content creator, a lot goes into a brand and it’s important to know when and how to pivot.

In this course, award-winning actor, storyteller, business owner, and content creator, Christy Carlson Romano, will share her tips for branding and rebranding yourself or your business.

Let’s get started!

Discovering and defining your brand

Today, we are going to walk through the whole brand journey–from inception, to establishing your content pillars, to creating content, and refreshing or rebranding your brand.

Discovery

How do you even come up with a brand, much less establish one?

This step is often all about approach. Are you approaching your brand via a product, and then it’s your personality that sells the product? Or is it that your personality and sharing your passions has led you to selling or promoting a product?

The basis if your brand may come from one of two options – either 1) you establish a service or product-based business that has an identity and is wholly separate from yourself or 2) you lean in and make yourself the brand. As with most things, there are pros and cons to both.

Pro to separating brand from self: Christy’s podcast company, PodCo, is a whole team who are making assets, coming up with new ideas, and running the shows. In this case, the separation of Christy from PodCo as a whole is the pro. Because she operating in this space as PodCo there is less individual scrutiny than if everything was “Christy Carlson Romano”.

Con to separating brand from self: A con of separation of self from the identity of a brand can be that it might mean more conservative growth. In Christy’s case, she is a public figure and people may choose to follow her brand because of name recognition. If you have any equity in the marketplace or have built any name recognition within it, separating your name from your brand would mean you’d be starting from scratch.

Pro to yourself as a brand: A pro of establishing yourself as a brand is that you may have the ability to grow faster because you’re working as an entity of one. You don’t have to filter your content through a brand voice because you’re probably using your own voice. Additionally, if you’ve existed in the marketplace chances are the brand you’re working to establish already has some brand recognition that can help you grow.

Con of yourself as a brand: A con of you as brand is that you’ll need to be highly protective of the brand, because it’s you. Everything you do is extremely visible and open to scrutiny and separating yourself from that scrutiny is difficult.

Creator tip: If you go the route of having a brand that is not yourself it’s important to give yourself a brand name and create separation between your actual self and yourself as the product.

Define

Defining your brand, who you are, what you stand for, what you want to be known for is the fun part. It’s important to ask: what do you want to do with your brand?

There are a lot of resources out there that can help you define what your brand is. Adobe Express has a brand worksheet alongside this course. Check it out in the template section below and use it as a starting place for defining your brand.

In Christy’s case, she has experience in both. She currently creates content under her own name and brand, but also has a brand that is separate from her; PodCo. If you are doing both, it’s important to have a clearly defined brand so that you have a clear perspective on what to share where.

Content pillars and format

Once you have defined your brand, it is time to start creating for that brand. To get started, you’ll need to establish your content pillars and formats.

Content Pillars

A content pillar (or bucket) is a category of content you create within. When you create your pillars it’s important that you keep in mind that they should be aligned to your business goal and your customer’s needs and wants. Is your goal with your online presence to be entertaining, educational, inspirational, or maybe all three? Let these goals help you define your pillars.

Content Formats

Content formats are the way information is presented to your audience. Each one of your pillars can translate into a format but each format should suit the type of content. For example; since Christy’s podcasts are video podcasts, Instagram Reels and TikTok videos are the best formats for sharing video snippets from the podcast whereas behind the scenes content might show best in photo format, so IG Feed or Stories could work for that.

How do you define your pillars and formats?

Christy says you should always start with your authentic self. What do you like sharing? Why are you sharing it? Once you define your pillars you can really start to whittle down what you’ll share.

Christy recommends having a brainstorm to write down all the things you like to do or want to share. When you’re getting started, don’t hold back. You can always hone in on what works best for you later, get all the big ideas down on paper and worry about the how in a bit. It may also help to think about the things you’re already doing in relation to your business and translate that into content.

Creator tip: Putting yourself out there in public sphere can be difficult. Balancing your wants and needs with your audience’s wants and needs is a constant push and pull. Center yourself in content you’d want to watch and that you enjoy making. Authenticity is key and without authenticity, your content won't resonate as well. Make sure you check out Christy’s other course on authentic storytelling for tips on finding your authentic self.

Content creation tips

  • Start with what you know. Sharing and educating from your center is always going to result in better content overall.

  • Starting is better than not starting. Don’t hold yourself back!

  • You don’t need fancy equipment to make quality content. Work with what you’ve got.

  • Everybody feels entitled to the same level of attention online. Remember this as you set out and have patience with yourself as you learn the space, put content out there, and grow.

  • Titling is key to content succeeding. So are captions and the words you associate with the content itself. What the “best” keywords are is always changing, so do your research and leverage your learnings as you go.

Creator trap:

As a creator or business owner, you may be tempted not to delegate, but there are trade-offs for everything. Being involved in every area of the business means you’ll be stretched more thin and might burn out, but allowing someone to step in and support and help, or hiring

people for certain jobs you know aren’t your area of expertise, is crucial to growth.

As you establish yourself as a creator, there may become an expectation that you produce a certain type of content and trying new things may sometimes be met with resistance. Be strategic about how you transition content in or out of your offering. Follow your gut, make the content you want to see, but also don’t ignore the data or your audience.

Putting it all into action

Find your superpower

Christy utilizes nostalgia in her content. Nostalgia is a powerful tool because it can create feelings of comfort and belonging and it also builds authentic connection. Leverage this, but don’t abuse it!

Make content that supports your story and your brand– the best content is at the cross-section of content you’re passionate enough to share about and useful and relevant to your audience.

Remember: the “marketplace” is a human marketplace. When there’s a need for something, find a way to fill that need.

Be your own green light

Think like a writer! Write, pitch, and be your own green light with content. Don’t wait for someone to come tell you what to do or make because that is likely never going to happen.

Define Sustainability for you

Once you establish your content pillars and formats try them out. Set a timeframe for yourself and observe the data and trends. Learn from it so you can pivot and grow.

Remember that it’s not failure to end something. Knowing when to pivot and when that part of the story has been told so you can move onto the next part is a part of life and content creation. You can move forward with ideas, loop back, change your mind– creation is not a straight line.

When to refresh or rebrand

After your brand has been established for a while, you may find yourself needing or wanting to pivot. How do you know when to pivot, why might you pivot, and how do you even go about it? First, there are levels of re-branding:

The refresh:

A brand refresh is more aesthetic and superficial. Doing a refresh might even be about keeping up with trends or the industry standard. To be competitive in the landscape and to grow you have to keep up with the competition, to a degree.

Often a brand refresh is simple. It might be as simple as changing your brand colors, updating your logo, or the type of content you’re posting on your social media.

With a refresh the risk is low that you’ll lose parts or all your audience because refreshes aren’t significant enough that you’ll alienate followers or that they won’t be able to find you or recognize you when they do.

Pros to a refresh:

  • For the most part, a refresh is low-hanging fruit. It’s relatively simple to pull one off and doesn’t take a lot of coordination.

  • Your brand still stays the same, recognizable entity it’s always been.

Cons to a refresh:

  • It might not be enough. Sometimes what you really need to infuse new energy in your brand (and yourself) is something more drastic than simply changing a few colors can solve.

  • You may risk tiring your audience out if you tell the same story for too long once it's run its course– the content might feel tired and you might lose parts of your audience, anyway because they’re bored.

The rebrand:

A rebrand is an entire shift in what you have to say to the world. It’s about changing the space you built and becoming a whole different person to the Internet.

Pros to a rebrand:

  • You’re starting over and are empowered to have a totally fresh conversation with your audience.

  • You can try something completely new! The world is your oyster.

Cons to a rebrand:

  • You risk losing the audience you’ve built. Be mindful of how far you go and answer the question: why would my previous audience want to keep watching me?

  • You might lose brand equity and recognition that you’ve built in the marketplace.

Things to keep in mind as you consider a refresh or a rebrand:

Always start at the root question of why do you want to rebrand? Is it because you’ve changed your name? Changed your product, offering, or the purpose of your brand or content? Maybe you’ve discovered your audience is different than you originally thought it was. These are all great reasons to consider a rebrand!

Remember, no matter which route you go, whatever you’re rebranding to still has to be authentically you.

Creator tip: You don’t have to keep doing the same thing forever. If the story you’re telling has been told authentically, to its completion, then there’s no reason to make extra content when it’s run its course. Don’t be afraid to try new things!

Conclusion

As you continue your brand journey, keep these tips in mind:

  • When you’re at the very beginning of ideating your brand ask yourself who you are creating content for and decide if you are creating a brand separate from yourself or if you are the brand.

  • Spend time defining your brand pillars and formats. Balance your authentic content creation interests with your audience’s needs and wants. Don’t be afraid to revisit this as you grow.

  • You don’t need fancy equipment to make great content. Don’t let that hold you back from starting.

  • Know when to delegate and bring experts in to handle tasks you know aren’t your area of expertise.

  • It can be powerful to leverage nostalgia. Nostalgia is a superpower because it is a deeply human emotion. Just make sure you don’t abuse this authentic connection.

  • Consider a brand refresh or rebrand when needed. Know when a story or design has run its course and you should move on or updated it.

  • Lean into tools like Adobe Express to make content creation easier and empower you to find your voice.

  • Set yourself apart, embrace color, and don’t be afraid to take up space.

What you’ll need
Practice in the app

Try these tutorials with Adobe Express

Create web pages, social media graphics, and videos.