Building Your Brand

Apr 29, 2010
Darren Hanton

A strong brand encapsulates the qualities, strengths and vision of a company. Your brand can provide a powerful and positive association with your company.

Does branding matter? A great deal if you're a business that wants to grow! Your brand is what makes you distinctive from your competitors and identifies you to your customers. Building brand value is absolutely linked to building the value of your business. A strong brand has the ability to lock customers into a long-term relationship with your business. The most successful brands ensure customer loyalty and market prominence.

What is a Brand?

A brand is much more than just a name, a flashy logo and perhaps a bit of advertising. Your brand will come to represent your business and symbolise its values and ethos to the outside world. If carefully planned, a brand can provide your company with its founding principles and a structure to operate from for many years.

What a Brand Can Do For You

Essentially the most important thing a brand can do for you is "paint a thousand words". Your brand is your opportunity to be unique and to say in a single image why someone should commit themselves to your product or your business. Ultimately the reason for investing time and money in your brand is to add value to your company.

Peter Drucker, Business Strategist, once said "Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands".

Creating a strong brand and taking it seriously positions you as a professional, trustworthy and reliable partner to work with.

Top Tips for Effective Branding

Planning. Before you embark on creating your brand it is critical that you properly plan and develop your ideas about what you want your brand to represent for you. Develop a brand strategy that will fulfil your company's objectives and market intentions. Look at how you want your brand to develop over the short, medium and long-term. Reviewing your brand strategy in the future is important, checking the integrity and relevance of your brand will ensure it continues to meet the company's original objectives.
Investment. Allocate sufficient resources and importance to your brand. A poorly planned branding strategy is likely to create more negatives than positives. A good brand is likely to become your most unique and valuable asset!
Brand Identity. This is the most import aspect of your brand. It will reflect what your products, service or company stands for, whether this is service, quality or innovation for example. Your brand should represent the core values of your business and will be how your customers will identify and judge you. Many companies, use a mission statement to reinforce the company's values behind the brand, this is a good idea and can be summed up often in one punchy sentence. Reiterate and refer to these values at every opportunity so that they eventually they become completely associated with your brand.
Target Market. Regardless of the products or service it is vital that a company understands who its customers are. When a company understands what motivates its customers it can more precisely target them with the most optimal end product or service.
Profile. Determine early on in your strategy how and where you want to position your brand in relation to your competition. How will you differentiate yourself from your competitors? What will be your unique selling points? Analyse the market and work out what makes your brand different or special, it may be service, value or uniqueness. Regardless of the reason, it is the job of your brand to convey this message to the customer.
Uncomplicated. Keep it simple! Long and complicated brand values become confusing and lost in translation to both customers and staff. The key to strong branding is short strap lines and memorable mission statements. These can be included in websites, emails, letters and on packaging to help strengthen your brand.
Consistency. Don't continually chop and change your brand message or values. A brand that is clear, concise and consistent will become part of your customers' subconscious. Repetition of your brand message will eventually turn into recognition!
Engage. Building a strong and successful brand requires both management and staff to be at the heart of the process. If, through the brand, a company is unable to create clear direction and enthusiasm with its own people, it will stand little chance of winning the hearts and minds of its customers. In the same way that "word of mouth" builds customers, happy and enlightened staff builds a brand too.
Communication. There is now a plethora of ways to deliver your brand to market: letterheads, emails, brochures, advertising and websites. There are also many new forms of media such as blogs, podcasts and social media sites to consider. Your brand is also represented by the conduct and attitude of your staff.
Commitment. The durability and longevity of your brand will depend on its credibility. This is determined by the company's commitment to the values that underpin the brand. It is better to understate any promise connected to your brand, rather than overstate a promise and then fail to deliver. A satisfied customer will recommend you to perhaps one or two people, but a customer that is dissatisfied will tell ten or twenty people.