|
|
> Business to Business > Marketing > Minding Your Business Brand
|
Minding Your Business Brand
|
| |
|
John Bidwell is president of Bidwell ID in Florence, MA. He can be contacted at john@bidwellid.com.
|
Creating a business personality, By John Bidwell
(This is the first of three articles. The second will cover the process for building a brand, and the third on how to keep your brand thriving.)
At one time, according to Merriam-Webster, a brand was "a mark made by burning with a hot iron to attest manufacture or quality or to designate ownership." Shades of the Wild, Wild West! Today, a company's brand means "goods [or services] identified by name as the product of a single firm or manufacturer." For a company branding creates meaning. And the right brand can help a company become meaningful, relevant, and profitable.
The good news is that people want to know your company's brand. We humans are an inquisitive species with a need to categorize. Despite a world awash in brands, we are forever on the search, scanning for solutions, products, and services that meet our needs. We are hardwired to look and listen.
The Branding Challenge
Now the challenge. People don't look and listen for long before categorizing your brand. If you don't provide them with a fast and easy way to categorize you, people don't know how to make sense of your company or product. Define your brand, or your prospects must figure it out for themselves. They might get it right. They might be wrong. Or they might tune you out because understanding or deciphering your brand takes too much time.
Branding provides the tools to say why your services and products are the best solution. It is the process of mindfully creating an authentic and unique image of your identity and message. It is your business personality. It's what differentiates your business. But there are a couple of reasons why companies don't differentiate.
First, it is too much work. Jim Collin's, author of Good to Great, found that on average it takes four years for a company to figure out what they do best. Most companies can't tell you why they are different in any meaningful way. They figure that they are getting by just fine, so why bother with all the fuss. Second, most companies are scared. They work to keep up with Jones, Inc. Instead of studying the market to find opportunities to differentiate, they get scared that they should be doing what the competition is doing, and everybody ends up copying one another.
Branding Done Right
Done right, though, branding will:
1. Fulfill peoples' desire to know you
2. Raise external and internal brand awareness
3. Create simple, clear, and consistent messages
4. Be the foundation of all your marketing and communications
5. Connect you to buyers
6. Help motivate the buyers
Surly Brewing is a good example of doing branding right. Within two years of opening in 2005, Surly was voted the top microbrewery in America by Beer Advocate Magazine. Ultimately, Surly's reputation rests on its recipes, but it has been very conscious of its customers and brand since day one. Their beer flavors are distinct-they have attitude-and so they chose a name to reflect that. They built a unique and authentic brand, setting themselves apart from most microbreweries that adopt soporific, bucolic personas (lots of waterfalls and animals in ovals). Now, Surly is selling not just beer, but its brand. Merchandise flies off the shelves at almost the same rate as its beer. Fans post their own videos on YouTube. Do you know another microbrewery that can make these claims?
The opposite of doing branding right is not doing it wrong, but not doing it all. The mistake is thinking that just because you have not given it any attention, you don't have to worry about it. But every company has at least a default brand. Without consciously tending to your brand, it is unlikely that all your communications send the right message, or even the same message. Like the proverbial elephant surrounded by blind men, each of your employees talks about your business in a different way, and your customers have different experiences.
Believe it or not, we don't actually recommend branding for every company. If you are a startup with limited funds, don't hire a branding firm. It will cost you too much at a time when you have other concerns. But heed branding. Follow the basic tenants, which we will discus in our next article. Then after a couple of years, call the professionals. By then you will have a much better idea of your brand, and you'll have resources to do it right.
|
|
|
|
|
