Do you like to answer questions?

(Well, that was a question, so I guess you either answered it or stopped reading.)

In an age where we are swimming through monsoons of data — even with machines that instantly compute trends and patterns in that data — it’s amazing that so much of business success still comes down to the power of really simple questions that help define your brand identity.

Like these below. Take a minute and give them a read. They’re questions we at Alter Endeavors ask all the time. They’re pretty simple. But be careful, because that doesn’t mean they’re easy.

Here we go.

Is your company persuasive?

Is it persuasive to the people who matter?

How do you know that it’s persuasive? Do you measure it? What’s your actual success rate? What % of people who become aware of your company do you actually convert into solid customers?

Are there things in your messaging, right now, at this moment, that let consumers disqualify you?  (By the way, the answer to this one is “Yes.” We all have them. It’s hard to search-and-find your disqualifiers, but they’re there.)

How does your website affect those who see it? Emotionally? Cognitively? Persuasion-ally?

The ads you send out into the world, are they ignorable? What effects do they have on people who actually pay attention to them?

Is the content you create truly interesting? Truly? To whom?

Is your product actually better than similar products? How?

How much should you spend to distribute your messages? How much is too much? Too little?

How do you find the audience that will want what you sell? How do you get your messages to them?

Does your messaging need great art and visuals in order to work?

Are you personally persuasive? With whom? What techniques do you use?

Is everyone in your company actually trained to persuade?

Is the story of your company enthralling? Or mundane?

Do consumers get to actually meet the people in your company? Live? Virtually?

When you’re building messages, how often do you say, “Good enough,” or “Just get it done,” and move on?

If you could hire a really great Hollywood producer, how would they change your messaging?

What kind of message could you create, right now, that might actually go wildly viral, and forever change the magnitude of your exposure and engagement?

Okay, okay, okay — that’s plenty. You probably stopped answering early on. Right after you noticed that you kept thinking, “I don’t know.”

Which is natural. Because even though these questions are essential, honestly, most businesses never hunker down and put real time and resources into answering them. It takes focused work to create real answers to important questions. Especially if you want answers that are researched, detailed, well thought out, and, most of all, accurate.

The fact that we can only partially answer important questions is one of the reasons we turn to experts to help us. Otherwise, we end up guessing at things that are really important to the survival of our businesses.

At AE, we constantly investigate our own expertise and work tirelessly to expand it by asking and answering questions like those. Because the better answers we have, the better service we provide.

And isn’t providing a great service the real way to guarantee your success in business?  We can help you start answering those brand identity questions if you contact us!