Your brand goes deeper than a logo. Branding is what generates associations and links that will be held in the mind by a potential customer long after they have purchased your product or service. It needs to be clear, consistent and individual. Establishing the personality and culture of your brand can only be achieved using a layered approach through design, advertising, displays, communication, marketing, and via the service you offer your customers. Recent studies suggest that as much as 75% of buying decisions are based on emotion highlighting the power a strong Brand has to increase customer engagement, build loyalty and improve business performance.
Here are some tips on how to harness the power of your Brand:
- Be clear about what your business stands for. Establish a vision, mission and values this will be the platform to build the culture and deliver a concise and consistent message across all your marketing – to your customers inside and outside of the business.
- Allocate a consistent percentage of your budget and work towards a set of goals. Products and services don’t sell themselves. It may be that you have to spend around 20% of turnover to begin with. Overlooking marketing until the last minute will only lead to panic decision making and random spending. You need a fully-budgeted plan, outlining the costs of how you are going to achieve your marketing goals within a certain time-frame, setting out all the marketing opportunities for your business as well as ideas on how you can gain advantage over competitors.
- Understanding the unique aspect or aspects of your business is critical along with making it your primary message. Just emulating competitors because they seem to be doing well can seem like a good idea but in reality most markets are saturated or very nearly, so you will just become one of the flock and it will be difficult to distinguish you from the crowd and offer no reason to choose you over competitors. ‘Me too’ businesses can survive usually by just competing on price… but that’s like jumping on the hamster wheel, relentless effort without any real gain.
- Take your time and think carefully when creating your brand and brand messaging. Remember when building a reputation you need consistency in all things – once you’re known for example ‘value’ it’s hard to switch to another, like ‘quality’. Changing things will also confuse your customers, affect your standing and future sales as well as being costly to integrate across your marketing.
In short:
- Get a great logo. Place it everywhere.
- Don’t weaken the logo by adding or altering – less is more.
- Write a brand value statement and pin it to the wall in a prominent place.
- Incorporate your brand within every aspect of your business.
- Create brand standards and consistent marketing materials. Not only does this reinforce your brand, it’s more efficient.
If we can help you assess your brand potential contact us
