A few months ago, Susan Tormollen, our Balihoo Director of Education showed me a poster she sketched that illustrates "local marketing." I've included my own sketch of the idea below.

Please pardon the lack of art, but consider the brilliance in Susan's idea.

You've heard it before: a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, this picture would be worth $1.2 Trillion dollars for the top 10 Global Brands, according to Interbrand's 2010 Report. What is the worth of your brand picture?

When I saw the first sketch I resolved that every national brand should have one of these—they probably do—and every local marketer whether a franchisee or a channel partner should have one too—and they probably don't. If not, map it! A picture of your brand.

Here are six things you can do with your own brand map:

1. Make Tangible the Abstract Idea of Brand Building—Brand building is a nebulous marketing topic that is hard to grasp. This picture links your brand building advertising efforts—a bill board, a newspaper insert, a radio jingle or an email—to the life of your consumer. 
2. Keep Your Customer In Focus—This map should represent the profile of your ideal customer and begs questions that keep you close to them: Where do they spend their time? Where do they spend their money? What do they value? What else competes for their attention? What does your brand mean to them?
3. Perfect Each Touch—Brands are built one touch at a time. You know this and such a map keeps that top of mind.
4. Focus on Local—As I've covered in the past, local marketing is much more than a trend. This map fits with the think global, act local business approach and puts the focus on local markets. Whether international, national or regional, your consumers live in local markets. Enabling your local partners to effectively market is a significant competitive advantage.
5. Share Your Vision—Whether used in one location or shared with thousands, this picture facilitates you sharing your brand building vision in a scalable fashion and could coincide with training or leadership events.
6. Facilitate Planning—This map could be the central point of individual market campaigns, or brand repositioning efforts with subsequent slides that focus in on the touch points and the mediums that touch a prospect there.

What visual tools do you currently use for brand building? I'm interested.