It’s time to V-Day your wellness business brand

Have you heard of V-Day?

V-Day is a reframe of traditional Valentine’s Day celebrations with the stage show “The Vagina Monologues,” a monologue-based play created by Tony-award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author Eve Ensler (who, I learned while researching this blog, has renamed herself “V”!)

It may still be popular today, but in the early 2000s, it was WILDLY popular.

I heard of it one day between classes at the University of Oregon.

I went to the show.

I loved it.

And a few years later, after ping-ponging around the West Coast and Hawai’i, I made my way back to a tiny college town near where I grew up in Western Kentucky to finish my degree…and I brought The Vagina Monologues with me.

Now, here are some factors I want you to consider:

• The U of O is located in extremely liberal-to-the-point-of-anarchy Eugene, Oregon, where there’s a health food store on every corner, and even in the early 2000s, the smell of marijuana smoke was as ubiquitous as the music (and members) of the Grateful Dead.
  
• The tiny university in Western Kentucky (that I love and am proud to call my alma mater…Murray State University) is…not so liberal. And by “not so liberal,” I mean it was located in a dry county—meaning the sale of alcohol was ILLEGAL—until 2012, and even today, you can’t get a beer until 1 PM on a Sunday. By law. No, I’m not kidding.

So, it was within this (truly lovely) town of 18,000 souls that I landed with my big idea of holding a V-Day celebration.

Here’s what happened.

My band of radical misfit feminists and I (really just myself and a few dedicated, awesome women) organized, planned, and successfully nailed MSU’s inaugural performance of The Vagina Monologues to a sold-out crowd and raised a good bit of money for a local women-based non-profit.

We also concomitantly and royally pissed off many, many people.

So many people that, years later, when calling the registrar’s office to get a copy of my transcript for a grad school application, the woman I spoke with recognized my name and called me “that vagina girl.”

Truly a supreme life moment, if I’m being honest.

Now, here’s the thing: You’ve got to V-Day your wellness business.

Specifically, your wellness business brand.

What does that mean?

It means you have to do to your business exactly what I did when I brought The Vagina Monologues to Murray State:

• Stand up and out for exactly what you believe in (your mission)
• Don’t just say what you believe in; shout it (brand-based marketing)
• Shout it so clearly and loudly people remember (brand recognition)
• Be ok with pissing some people off (not your audience)
• Be thrilled that you’re reaching your true audience and helping tons of people (while also making tons of sales)

Brand encompasses a few different aspects of your business—the aesthetic, like your color palette and logo, the tone, how you say what you want to say and interact with clients, and positioning, essentially how you’re different from other businesses and why that matters.

But underpinning this (definitely important stuff) is your mission—what you want to accomplish and WHY—and the personality your business takes on to highlight the mission.

Your images and brand voice and everything else flow from this core.

When you’re clear on your mission, the reason your wellness business exists in the first place, you realize that the brand vibe you choose serves to elevate the mission.

And, all of a sudden, you won’t be so worried about upsetting anyone who gets in their feels about what you’re up to.

Because you’re not just a business with a brand ID to uphold: You’re on a literal mission.

In the case of V-Day and The Vagina Monologues, that was raising awareness and money for violence against women.

But for you, that might be ending perimenopausal invisibility, fueling female athletes in ways that are best for their bodies, or science-based solutions for lupus.

The beauty of being an entrepreneur is that you get to choose the focus that’s most important to you, along with the look that will differentiate it and lift it up.

The hard part?

Sticking with and building that brand so it reaches 1,000s, tens of thousands, or even millions of people.

Do you need support building your wellness brand?

Click here to register for our free brand webinar featuring brand genius Todd Duff, CEO of Innovations Branding House.

Todd and our team will help you ID your brand and answer any burning brand questions.