Branding a Small Business
By: Alistair Baker, CEO & Founder, Cogent Business LimitedMany small businesses undervalue the importance of branding and why they should invest resources to build their brand.
The mystique of branding will be unravelled in this paper. I will demonstrate why a brand is an essential part of your business and discuss how to build your brand in a way that is meaningful, easy to do and cost effective to achieve.
What is a brand? A brand is the vehicle through which customers, prospective customers, partners, suppliers, employees and even your competition associate themselves with your company. Branding is all about the essence of your company and the experience these critical stakeholders receive from every single interaction they have with your company.
The impact of these interactions drive perception of what the company represents and stands for. Just as every individual has a personality, the personality of your company is reflected through its brand.
Make branding meaningful to me! The easiest way to really connect and relate to branding is to think about a product or service that you just love or hate.
Recently I asked a man in his early 20s who was using his new Apple iPhone in a shop if he liked his iPhone. I expected him to say "it's great, it has everything I need from a personal device and it's just a cool product to have despite a couple of issues that you expect from a new device". What he said was astounding, as very calmly he replied "like it, I live it".
To say he is emotionally attached to his iPhone, Apple as a company and everything he experiences in return for the money he has spent would be an understatement. I will wager his next computer will be an Apple even if he has been a Microsoft Windows user all of his life; he has fallen in love with Apple.
His loyalty to the brand will have him reactively enthuse to anyone who asks about Apple's products and services and proactively show and tell his friends and family his new lifestyle product. He is now one of millions of Apple advocates.
From Apple's perspective, this is exactly what they want and is a result of their clear strategy in product innovation, design and brand marketing. The real beauty is he paid for the privilege to join this army of advocates for Apple and become a brand warrior. Apple connected with him through their brand and he now battles against their competition for them. His influence on the individual consumer will be far more powerful than anything Apple can influence directly.
Successful brands generate emotion. Love drives loyalty, hate drives the rapid search for an alternative. Think Marmite, they even use love and hate in their brand promotion!
But that's just for big business! Well, is it? Do you think people don't emotionally attach or detach from your company based on the experience you give them? Ask yourself how many of your customers continue to come back to you. Have you had customers who have purchased from you once and you have never seen them again? If you don't understand why this happens you don't understand your brand.
If you think about the products and services you enjoy purchasing as a consumer, the shops you like to spend time in or the websites you frequently visit and have bookmarked as your favourites, they will all have these factors in common: they all meet your needs, they add significant value to you, they offer a pleasurable experience, you go back frequently to visit them, feel a loyalty to them and most likely will advocate to other people about them.
Personally, I am likely to be responsible for over 100 people becoming customers of Costco Corporation, a US wholesale store that has a presence in the UK. I just love their products, the in-store experience and what I consider as their exceptional value for money. Collectively these people probably account for £400,000+ per annum of revenue which Costco would not have benefited from without me being a Costco brand warrior. Brand warriors work!
Logo or no-Logo? Is a brand just about an expensive Logo? No! absolutely not!
The brand is about the experience and all the ingredients that make up the experience you deliver through your products and services.
A logo is purely the focal point for all of these experiences that enable stakeholders to simply identify what the company is all about. A strong logo articulates the brand and represents the brand's identity. A mark is an icon that depicts your brand. Cogent Business' mark is 
the and will be on all of our visible material as well as being an integral part of our logo. A mark supports the brand and makes the brand easily identifiable.
Smart branding uses strong visual identity as it is a far more powerful way of getting someone's memory retention and recall. As they say, a picture paints a thousand words.
Nike have the 'swoosh' which visually articulates their brand and billions of people around the globe inherently know who is talking to them when they see it. The Nike Swoosh, along with their 'Just do It' tagline have an estimated asset value of over $7bn. The 'swoosh' needs no introduction.
What's in a tag line? A tag line re-enforces the brand's identity. Tesco's 'Every Little Helps' and Sainsbury's 'Try Something New Today' position two strong competitive brands with the same business objectives of customer retention, new customer additions, profitability and market share by positioning different brand values. One is about value for money versus the other being about inspiring your imagination with exciting products.
If a tag line will add value to your brand, as Nike most famously say using their own tag line, 'Just Do It'!
Benefits of investing in your brand: Investing in your brand builds strong loyalty and business growth. Building your own army of brand warrior advocates who will tell other people how they love your products, services or company will potentially spur others who have never heard of your company or purchased products or services from you to find out more. Your brand warrior may have even closed the sale for you!
Brand everything you touch! Everything that can influence a stakeholder should be consistent in how you are representing your company's brand.
Creating the right brand identity from your logo to your website to all your business documents drives reinforcement and consistency in the experience. How your people represent themselves on the company's behalf all influence perception beyond the views of the product or service you sell.
Listen, learn and educate: Every one of your people should be able to articulate your brand and what it stands for. If they can't then you really need to understand why not. Your people and your customers will also have very valuable opinions and listening to this feedback is essential to the company that wishes to learn and continually improve.
There is also a good chance that your customers will already be talking about your products and services online in forums and blogs, if this has not happened yet, it will.
The phenomenon of Groundswell is where people get relatively unbiased information about a company's products or services from other customers via the internet. How many times do you use the internet to gain insight into a company's offerings that are not written by the company itself? This is having a profound effect on how big companies respond to the reality of their customers' unsolicited and uncontrollable feedback. A company can no longer market their way out of a problem they behaved their way in to... as a number of large organisations found out to their cost when they were accused of exploiting child labour for the production of some of their products in the Far East...The consumer is now fighting back en-masse - this is the new social democracy.
As new social network technologies develop and become more localised, groundswell will have an impact on small businesses; it's just a matter of time.
So how do I develop my brand? By investing some time and a small amount of money you can put yourself on a path to building and sustaining a great brand. When you want to stand out from the crowd a great brand will make this a far simpler task.
How you invest in your brand nurture and protect it will dictate how much equity your brand will carry. Building a brand 'book' – containing the ways in which you will use your brand and adhering to it will ensure you don't dilute the brands value by being inconsistent in how it is used to support your business. Answering the following questions about your business will start you on the path to professionalising your brand:
- What is the core purpose of the business and which markets are you serving?
- What are the core values of the company?
- How is the company perceived both outside-in by your customers, partners and suppliers and inside-out by your employees?
- How do you compare to and differentiate from your competition?
- How well does your brand align to these factors?
- What do you need to change to get alignment of your business strategy and your brand strategy?
What should you do next? Taking a step back and thinking about your brand – perhaps by thinking through the questions above is a great first step to take. Maybe this tells you that everything is good in your business, or potentially it raises some issues which should be addressed. The next step is usually to get some help from some experts used to helping companies like yours. Many people think at this point that they're going to have to spend a lot of money. This doesn't have to be the case and it is worth remembering from some of the examples in this article that a small amount invested in getting your brand right can pay huge dividends later on.
How can Cogent Enterprise help? Cogent have a number of partnerships with specialists in this area who are focussed on businesses like yours. We would be very happy to work with you to help you build and professionalise your brand - and at a price that is suited to you. If you wish to find out more, email to brandme@cogentbusiness.com and we will contact you to discuss how we can help.
Learn more about Routine Magic™, GreenBox, BlackBox, SafeBox, and Zoned Branding.