Your brand – business or personal - is perhaps the most powerful weapon in your armoury when it comes to beating off your competitors and achieving success. Those who consciously identify exactly who they are, what they stand for and what they are passionate about and encapsulate this into an identifiable brand are able to effortlessly outshine their competitors through being recognisably and consistently ‘different’.
Why? Not because the brand itself has any magic powers but because effective brands are the embodiment of an organisation’s shared values and desired behaviours. Assuming those hit the mark with clients and prospects then the consistency of standards and quality through the organisation will lead to customer loyalty and retention and new customer gains.
So – build a brand, develop it, live it. Sounds simple - but unless you’re fortunate enough to have an effective brand already, if you want it to work harder you probably first need to understand more about exactly what a brand is and what it can do.
A brand is not just a logo or slogan. It has many different definitions but perhaps most usefully can be described as ‘what you stand for’ or ‘the heart of your business’. Essentially, a brand is:
A brand has also been defined as “a promise of a bundle of attributes that someone buys – whether real or illusory, rational or emotional, tangible or invisible”. In short, brands aren’t easy to pin down!
It may be helpful therefore to think of your brand as being the difference between the way you naturally do things (your culture and current reputation) and the way you want to do things (a created, managed perception based on your vision for the future).
From this it is easy to see that for a brand to be successful it needs to accurately reflect the shared sense of direction of everyone within the business, not just their leaders.
Your brand is what differentiates you from your competitors. Externally, it aids immediate recognition, ensures familiarity and consistency, adds value and creates loyalty and often makes the intangible, tangible. Internally within an organisation, it generates commitment, clarifies the way forward, provides a foundation for objectives and goals, unifies and involves.
Brands can represent both product and service-based companies. In fact, many brands are a mixture of both tangible aspects e.g. the quality of food in a restaurant; and intangible elements e.g. the attitude of the staff.
The higher the percentage of non-tangible (service) elements behind a brand the more important it is to establish measurable quality standards and procedures to underpin the brand and ensure consistency.
So, the essential elements involved in building and maintaining a successful brand boil down to:
Size and business sector provide no barrier to success, but to build a brilliant brand, co-operation, consistency and communication are key.
(c) Dianne Bown-Wilson , the M3 Consultancy
www.m3consultancy.co.uk