Small businesses looking to succeed and be sustainable long term need to connect emotionally with their audience. The competition is fierce, the arena crowded, but a strong brand stands out. Your brand is your story, and people fall in love with stories, trust them implicitly and pledge loyalty to them. How an organization is perceived IS their brand and it affects success or failure.
What is a Brand?
Often a question like this is explained with more questions. As an organization, ask yourself, who are you? who needs to know? how will they find out? why should they care? These are the essential, foundational underpinnings of a brand. Well known brand expert and author, Marty Neumeier, sums it up like this:
“Brand is not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is.”
A brand is therefore a feeling, belief or association in the minds of your audience about you that is positive or negative.
What is Branding?
Because it rests in the minds of your audience, you cannot control it. Whether you”ve implemented an in depth brand strategy or not, you have a brand. Customers that have dealt with you have already formed an opinion. Once formed, it’’s hard to change. There is no better argument to illustrate why EVERY business needs to pay attention to their brand.
What you CAN do is influence their perception. To do this well, you need a plan. You need a position. You need to know who you are, what makes you unique, and who your audience is. If you know those things in detail, reaching out in a meaningful, consistent way is easier. How do you reach out? Through a wide array of brand touchpoints.
Brand Touchpoints are the different places your audience interacts with your brand. Many of these are visual, such as a logo or website, but also includes your face to face encounters, phone conversations, customer experience and so on. Managing all of these consistently becomes a problem when there is no foundation. Only after you have a strong message or position, can you effectively design your touchpoints to maximize impact.
Why Should a Small Business Care About Branding?
By changing or encouraging a certain perception, you can affect behaviour. By affecting behaviour, you can increase performance. A quality brand identity program personifies the brand (story-telling), expressing itself in every touchpoint. Your brand is a constant representation of your core values. Branding makes it easier for the customer to buy and positions the organization for growth and sustainability through positioning. Branding makes it easier to sell by communicating a strong, clear, intelligent message. Finally, branding makes it easier to build brand equity. Future success is dependent on public awareness.\r\n
