Welcome to the Boroondara Creative Network. My name is Bridget and I'm from Boroondara Arts. I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners as the original custodians of this land, including the Wurundjeri people in the northern part of our city, and pay my respects to the Elders past, present and to other elders who may be viewing this today.

In today's session, Janine Hendry from the Guild of Objects will be talking to us about how we can manage our online brand and presence.

After this short presentation, you're invited to continue the conversation with Janine and others from the Creative Network in an online conversation on Saturday 10 October from 12pm to 1pm.

If you'd like to come along and join us, please email me at [email protected].

So, enjoy the presentation, and we look forward to seeing you soon.

Hi, everyone. It's Janine from the Guild of Objects. And I'm here, as always, to support your creative journey. Today we're talking about branding and how you can manage your brand both online and offline. And I think the first question that you need to think about is, firstly, what is a brand, and, in particular, what is your brand?

And here's what we know about brands. Brands, at their very core, are how we want people to feel about us or about our output, about our work. They are, in essence, everything we do. So they're a short cut, if you like, for getting people to generate emotion about what it is that you do.

So, for example, when we think about Nike, we might look at the Nike Swoosh, we look at the Swoosh, we think about the tagline "Just do it", and our feeling is, "Yep, everyone can just pop on "these shoes, these clothes, just get out there and have a go."

So, there are a number of components of a brand that you will need to think about. Firstly, what's your brand name going to be?

Are you thinking of using your name? If so, what are the implications of that? What is your tagline? Er, generally something that's fairly succinct, that talks about you or your work.

And then you think about your logo. And when we think about logo, we think about it in terms of things like colourways - different colours make people feel quite differently about things. You'll think about font and any iconography that is...or you want to put into that logo.

So, step one - think about your brand. Having thought about the elements of your brand, the most important thing then is consistency. That means you've got to manage that brand in both an online and an offline environment. 

So, your website, for example, needs to reflect what your brand is and how it is you want people to feel. Do you want them? to feel, um, excited? Do you want them to feel like they are being soothed? Do you want them to feel curious? So, think about how you want your brand to feel and then think about how you can replicate that into your online environment. Managing it and managing it consistently across all platforms is really super important.

And that extends to the kind of things that you might want to do online. Are you looking at doing, for example, online workshops? If so, you're going to need to think about how you manage those workshops, how you run those workshops, importantly, how you receive payment for those workshops.

Are you going to coordinate and pair up with a company who has the plat...who has the software, sorry, to run the workshops for you? So, think about how you might run the workshops from conceiving of the idea to doing the advertising and communication to accepting money to how you're going to run them. Are you going to run them via Zoom? Are they going to be purely text-based? Are you going to put them onto YouTube? Are you going to embed them in your website? All of those things are things that you will need to think about.

Similarly, if you're going to sell products online.....you've got to think about the products in terms of how they actually fit into your overall branding, and then push that out to think about how you might choose to put those particular products on your website. 

That's going to be really super important if you don't have a pre-existing website that allows you to, um...gives you an ecommerce functionality. You can, with most websites, put an add-on that'll give you an ecommerce functionality. Um, but if you're thinking of selling products, if you're thinking of selling your services or running things like online workshops, my advice would be to think about all those things up-front when you're looking at developing your brand.

So, let's talk about this more when I see you online in October.

Thanks. And 'bye for now.