If someone hacked your email and sent out a general message, would recipients be able to recognize quickly that the message wasn’t from you. How would they be able to know?

Or perhaps you have received a text or email from someone you knew as a professional. There was something so different and odd about the language or look and feel of the message, while you acknowledge that there is some chance it seemed legitimate, you ultimately knew it was not because it didn’t look or sound like what you expected. 

Or still, consider a time when you encountered a brand message or advertisement that stuck out in your mind so dramatically. It impacted you and stayed with you. From that point on, whenever you saw something from this entity, you knew immediately who it was from and what it was about. 

This is the power of an unforgettable brand.

How do we become an unforgettable brand? The key to being unforgettable is to be unforgeable, that is, not able to be copied or counterfeited. This requires a signature style and system for delivering your brand’s uniqueness and value. In the age of AI, templates, and rampant stealing of intellectual property, this has become much harder to do, but it’s also underscored why this is so important. 

I’m not one to just sound the alarm unnecessarily, just to create hype or get people worked up, but if there is one piece of advice I could give business owners, it would be this:

In this marketplace, your signature is your survival. Let’s explore how to do this.

Your Brand Signature

Your brand signature is really the next level of your brand. It’s especially valuable for service providers like coaches and consultants. Nobody is the only one that does something. Many use similar methodologies and approaches, have the same credentials and qualifications. What separates one subject matter expert from another? If services can be delivered remotely, what makes a difference? This is where the value of your signature style comes into play.  

To stay unforgettable, your brand must become unforgeable—not merely better, but impossible to duplicate. You must be easily identified and accessed. Easily recognized and recalled. 

Why Your Brand Signature is so Important

We maintain that having a brand signature is a necessity, not a luxury. There are significant threats to your brand’s ability to retain a place of uniqueness that you may not even think about. Here are a few:

• Meme culture promotes and rewards stealing other people’s content, with or without attribution. 
• Freeware and open source tools like Canva have condensed democratized design, making it easy for people to use templates that often have a similar look and feel. 
• Perhaps the biggest threat that we perceive is the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence in the brand-building process. In a world where AI can mimic tone, replicate visuals, generate “original” concepts, and churn out endless variations of your best work, the real threat to your brand isn’t competition… it’s commoditization.

For our purposes, we’re going to assume that everyone is using AI in some way to develop content. In that case, the key to achieving unforgeability that unlocks unforgetability is how you use it and layer in the elements that make its outputs human. Internally and with our clients, we focus on AI as a starting point and not an ending point. We say AI can help you with input, but humanity and creativity are still required for great output.

Going deeper into this idea of the Brand Signature, we have developed the 4Vs as an approach to uncovering and unleashing the 4 dimensions of your brand signature so your brand can truly be unforgettable and unforgeable.

The 4 Vs – A Roadmap for Establishing an Unforgettable and Unforgeable Brand

• A signature voice – how you sound
• A signature visual style – how you show up
• A signature viewpoint/vision – how you see it
• A signature vehicle (methodology, approach, delivery system) – how you share it

A Signature Voice: How You Sound and How You Say It

You need a unique and consistent way of talking about who you are and what you provide. This way of speaking, which should show up in real-life and digital settings must go beyond surface-level descriptors like “casual” or “professional.” AI can give you raw material, and even help craft content that stands out, but a voice with quirks, patterns, rhythms, and contradictions unique to you. It can give essence, but you bring the essential. A way to test output is sharing it with devoted followers. A/B testing messaging is a great way to ensure your content sounds like you. 

A Signature Visual Language: How You Show Up

Again, this is about developing a system of showing up that goes beyond trendy color palettes or popular font pairings. It can involve things that are easily overlooked like how you use scale and size in your creative, as well as white space. It also can include things like proprietary shapes, symbolism, texture, motion patterns, design metaphors. It’s not about having all these items either, its about the system that is created through how they are used. Increasingly popular are companies that have designed their own icon sets that are used on websites and other digital materials. If you are viewing this on a Microsoft or Apple device or in a Google Chrome browser,  you are familiar with custom iconography. We can all think of those market outliers that look nothing like contemporaries and competitors and have helped create a “category of one.” The goal of this approach is to be eye-catching and consistent so you are easily and quickly recognized.

A Signature Point of View: How You See It

This dimension encompasses your worldview, your stances, your ethos, moral compass, and philosophy. This goes beyond what you do and gets down to who you are. You cannot prompt your way to passion. Messages just hit different when you know the person or company delivering it really means what they say. 

For many clients we work with, we try to get them to delineate between core values and virtues. Virtues go one step further than values, which can tend to be very general and vague. Virtues are matters of identity and moral fabric, right and wrong, good and evil. If you can obtain clarity around these items and be able to speak and share about them with conviction. 

You have a desire to be something unique and valuable. You want to be it because you believe it. This principle shows up in your world view and your world-building, then you must invite people into it. 

A Signature Vehicle for Delivery: How You Share It

This final dimension involves your proprietary process, methodology, customer experience, or service model. These are the elements that elevate your identity and offerings by transforming your brand into a repeatable experience and a recognizable ecosystem. Style is easy to copy. Systems are hard to steal.

We have a proprietary brand building system that we use at Enthuse Creative, which breaks down basic branding into 4 simple phases: Know Yourself, Know Your Audience, Show Up, Show Off.

3 Benefits and Advantages of an Unforgeable Brand

On top of being unforgeable and unforgettable, there are many other benefits for brands that are unique in how they are designed and delivered. These advantages have real impact on your bottom line in a competitive market.

• Internally, your business can position itself to drive innovation. The ideal of thinking and working differently can permeate through your culture and operations.
• You can increase your brand perception and value through proprietary intellectual property
• You shorten your sales cycle and create demand instead of chasing it
• You create a pull that attracts clients who value your worldview, not your deliverables

When you are unforgettable, people remember you long after a brand touchpoint or brand experience, even when they are not a customer. When your brand is unforgeable: You’re not only different, you’re distinct and you become irreplaceable and irreproducible because no generative model can replicate your internal world.

Differentiation is not a new brand strategy emphasis. In fact, it is a part of almost all brand strategy engagements. At Enthuse Creative, we talk often about how in branding, the goal is no longer just differentiation, rather it’s distinction.

Unforgeable means not able to be copied. If your messaging has become stale or stuck, this doesn’t have to be an obstacle, it can be an opportunity for you to reinvent yourself and reposition your brand with new presence that can’t be denied and can’t be copied.

When you cannot be copied, you can’t be cloned, you won’t be confused. People will remember you and recall you. When your brand makes this kind of impression, also makes you easy to refer and recommend. 

Think of it this way: The more unique and memorable your brand’s expression, the more memorable and meaningful the impression your brand will make on your audience. 

Being unforgettable means being unforgeable. In an era where advanced artificial intelligence and other tools make it easy for anyone to copy how you look, sound, or write, your advantage comes from what cannot be replicated. It is something that every business needs to consider. You’ve got to bridge authenticity and uniqueness in a way that creates meaning and purpose for your audience.