Branding – What It Is, Why It Matters and How to Build a Great One!
Creating a great brand can distinguish you from your competitors, increase your customer loyalty, and uplift your price…
Creating a great brand can distinguish you from your competitors, increase your customer loyalty, and uplift your price…
There was a time when branding used to simply refer to your logo, letter head and maybe a bit of decoration on your company vehicles. But branding has evolved into something very much more complex and multi-faceted that should lie at the heart of every business.
As a small business with limited resources, it’s tempting to think that branding is a luxury, or something unnecessary, or perhaps an airy-fairy concept that doesn’t add value. But creating a great brand can distinguish you from your competitors, increase your customer loyalty, and uplift your price.
Your overall brand is the sum of your several parts:
Put all these together, and you have the three P’s of branding:
Your brand can grow to have a worth of its own, adding value to your company and an uplift to your pricing, as well as making sales (and repeat sales) easier and faster. A strong brand can sometimes be worth a great deal more than the rest of the company. Your goods and services become brand led, rather than sales led, with people buying, and placing value on the proposition, simply because of the brand name.
It is worth remembering that Coke was continually beaten by Pepsi in blind tastings, yet outsold Pepsi by billions, by better branding. Think of a pair of Marks and Spencers jeans versus a pair of Levi 501’s, or a high street shoe against a Jimmy Choo, Macs v PCs, and you will start to get the idea of what branding can do, particularly in increasing profitability. A strong brand will reduce customer’s buying objections, be socially attractive to associate with, attract staff, customers and stakeholders alike and buy loyalty from them all.
Values are both functional and emotional. The functional brand values (how something works or performs) are still vital, particularly in some industry sectors like manufacturing and engineering, but it is the emotional ones that stir people’s feelings and give them aspirations. In competitive and global markets buyers can usually source the same functional values from multiple suppliers, but they will only get the emotion – trust, happiness, security, status – with a brand they align to.
Create an extraordinary brand, written with passion, that rings true and stirs passion in others, and you have the core of a successful business.
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