What is your Business’ Brand?

Every well-run business strives to create a strong brand. A solid, memorable brand image is critical to the success of your company, as it differentiates you from your competition, encourages customer loyalty and ultimately drives sales.  But what, exactly, is your brand?

When I first started my career, I mistakenly thought that a brand was a company’s name, a stylish logo and a cleverly designed slogan. It was not until I became an entrepreneur in 2005, however, that I realized there is much more to a company’s brand. After founding and building my own business, I was surprised to learn that my brand lived and evolved in the minds of those I opened my business to service: my customers. Yes, you heard it correctly: my brand was ultimately my customers’ perception of my company and its services. It was built with every customer interaction, whether it was the first digital interaction with our logo, website, or marketing material, or more importantly the first personal interaction, such as a phone call, email, or online request for a quote. How long it took my company to respond to a customer request was an essential part of our brand.

Being a service business, details such as the cleanliness of our vehicles and uniforms also mattered. Drawing upon my prior experience in consulting, I took the time to develop a holistic brand strategy for my business, and I implemented the following tactics to ensure that our branding basics were covered.

1.) Deliver a High Quality and Reliable Service

The foundation of your brand is your product or service. When engineering a brand management strategy, many companies focus on external branding efforts such as logo design, marketing material and advertising campaigns. If your company fails to provide a valuable service that customers want to buy, however, your company will be unable to back up its promises, and your external branding efforts will be fighting a losing battle.

When I was in the early stages of building my business, my first priority was to provide a service that sells itself. I provided high-quality and detail-oriented service that was sure to exceed customer expectations, hired skilled and experienced employees, streamlined operations to ensure timely delivery, and offered personalized customer service online, over the phone and in person. Each time we completed work for a customer, my goal was to leave them thoroughly impressed with our work quality and professionalism. I knew that consistently exceeding their expectations would cause them to become loyal customers, and they would go on to leave positive online reviews and tell their friends and neighbors about our service.

People trust the experiences of past customers far more than a company’s marketing content. According to Nielsen, 92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all other forms of advertising. This means that word-of-mouth advertising is the most powerful brand development tool at your disposal. Word-of-mouth was important for businesses in the days before the internet, when people simply spoke about their experiences with a company to their friends. With the rise of online platforms such as Yelp and Facebook, customers have the potential to reach millions of people with their reviews.

Whether the image of your brand that customers share with others is either positive or negative, depends entirely upon the quality of their experience. This explains why prioritizing quality service was critical to the success of my business. When I finally began to invest more time and money into my external brand, my efforts were focused on expressing the value I knew my service would provide to my customers.

2.) Logo Design to Capture your Brand

Your logo is the face of your company. It is placed on your website, on your products, and on every marketing tool you produce. When a prospective customer views your logo, they immediately form a crucial first impression of your brand and the unique values it represents. Therefore, great care must be taken during its design to ensure that it effectively captures your company’s essence.

The power of a logo lies in its visual nature. As humans, we are incredibly visual. In fact, nearly 50% of our brains are involved in visual processing. If you want to efficiently express an idea, an image is by far the best way to do it. Studies have shown that it takes only 150 milliseconds for us to process an image, and it takes just another 100 milliseconds for us to attach meaning to it. This illustrates why logo design is such an important branding tool: when a customer glances at your logo, they form an impression of your entire company in less than the blink of an eye.

What first impression do you want your logo to make? The answer will depend on the type of business you are operating and the audience you intend to reach. Here are three key steps to consider:

• First, research your industry to identify trends and determine what is appropriate for the field. The appropriate look and feel of a real estate company’s logo, for example, is going to be very different than that of a manufacturer’s logo.
• Next, identify and understand your intended customer base. Who are your prospective customers, and what value do they seek when they purchase your product or service?
• Finally, determine your business’ value proposition and decide how you want your customers to perceive your brand.

Whether you want your company to be seen as reliable and professional or trendy and sophisticated, keep your desired brand image in mind and focus your design efforts on expressing your company’s distinct personality.

When you begin the design process, strive to create a logo that is eye-catching but simple. A simple logo is not only easier to commit to memory, it’s more easily recalled when seen again. This will help build brand recognition. Also, your logo should be incorporated into all of your business materials, so a simple, well-designed logo will work in any physical or digital medium. It should look great no matter where you put it – in your website’s header, your Facebook profile image or your business cards.

Your logo should also make effective use of color and graphical imagery. While your logo design should be simple enough that it works well in black and white, using color is particularly important for driving engagement with viewers: studies have found that adding color to blog posts, product guides, print advertising and other brand collateral increases readership by 80%. Also, on both a conscious and subconscious level, colors and images convey meaning and evoke certain emotions. For example, blue is associated with confidence, security, and sincerity, while orange denotes innovation and forward thinking. You should carefully select the color scheme that forms the desired emotional connection with your customers, and your logo’s color, font, and imagery should work together to capture your company’s unique brand image.

3.) Implement an Employee Brand Management Strategy

Fortunately for me, it only took one negative customer review to realize I missed one of the most crucial yet most overlooked pieces of brand management. After conducting a post-mortem on the review, it hit me square in the chest: the brand’s positive or negative perception rests largely upon the company’s most import asset, one that is frequently undervalued, under-trained, underpaid and overworked. You guessed it, the employees!

Many companies focus all of their branding efforts on marketing activities such as advertising campaigns and packaging, yet one of the most powerful brand assets your company has is your people. Regardless of which industry you’re in, building a strong brand requires that all employees feel connected to the brand and understand their role in turning brand aspirations into reality. By turning employees into trusted brand ambassadors, companies bring their strongest asset and their most vocal internal advocates in direct contact with their customer base.

When your employees are engaged with their work, feel connected to the company, and are willing to go above and beyond to create satisfying customer experiences, customers will leave each interaction with a positive impression of your brand.

The majority of employees, however, are unengaged and do not feel a strong connection to their company’s brand. In one study, Gallup asked more than 3,000 randomly selected workers to assess their agreement with the statement, “I know what my company stands for and what makes our brand different from our competitors.” Shockingly, only 41% of employees strongly agreed with this statement. This indicates that more than half of the employees surveyed were not fully aware of their company’s brand positioning and differentiation. How can your team deliver on the company’s brand promise if they aren’t clear about what it is? As a leader, it is your responsibility to educate your team on your brand’s foundations and explain the importance of expressing the brand in each customer interaction.

To highlight the importance of an employee’s role in shaping your brand, consider the following scenario: imagine your company has invested heavily in branding, using web content, promotional materials and marketing techniques to promote your product or service. You have raised brand awareness and effectively conveyed the value your company can offer. However, when customers call your central line, your unengaged, disgruntled and poorly trained representative’s standard response is “hmm….?, um, uh… umm… not sure. No, can’t help with that.” How do you think callers will perceive your brand? Unfriendly, unprofessional, and unreliable.  Since one of the values you heavily promoted was your excellent customer service, your calling customers will have forever lost trust in your company.

To avoid situations like this, all customer-facing employees should be well-trained and understand that every single interaction has a direct impact on the company’s ability to deliver on its promises and build its desired brand image.

Need help building your business’ brand? Work with us!

At S9 Digital, we take a holistic view of our clients’ brand strategy to ensure the digital branding we create is seamlessly integrated throughout the entire organization. To enhance your brand, contact the experts at S9 Digital today and setup your FREE consultation!