Here's the Biggest, and Most Common, Mistake Companies Are Making
So you’ve started a company. You have your inventory of products lined up and ready to ship. You’ve hired a stellar sales team. You hired a graphic designer to create a visually compelling logo. That makes you a brand, right? [Cue Steve Jobs chuckling from the afterlife.] Congratulations, you have a company. If you think your brand is complete at this stage, then you’ve already made your first fatal mistake with your business. But not to worry — while it’s a costly mistake, it’s one that you can easily correct with astounding results. For your company to succeed, you must invest in building your brand.
Aside from the fallacy that “brand” is synonymous with “company,” many people also have the misconception that branding is a luxury bonus for companies who want to look cooler, who want to enhance their aesthetic. Branding extends far and deep beyond a company’s logo, website, and marketing brochures. While these visual references are crucial touchpoints, they’re a bit like the Mickey Mouse souvenirs to the entire Disney World brand. If you owned Disney, would you invest all your time and money in the amusement park gift shop?
A strong branding strategy dives deep into the bowels of a company to assess opportunities for innovation, differentiation, and business growth at every level. It then positions your company in a way that differentiates you from your competitors, and creates a desirable impression in the hearts and minds of your customers that inspires them to choose you and keep choosing you. Branding guides everything from which flavors a food company should produce to increase sales to which category of moms a car company should target when selling its new minivan. Ultimately, it’s what separates the companies that merely survive and those that exceed their financial potential year after year.
Still confident about your business? If you’re not sure whether or not your company has a solid brand strategy in place, ask yourself the questions below. If you answer yes to most or all of these, then your brand is in good shape. If you answer yes to some, then it looks like you have a partial foundation formed, but there’s more to be done. However, if you answer no to the majority or all of these, then you should start planning out your strategy ASAP (we can help you with that).
1. Have you sought an untapped space in the market?
To build a strong brand that stands out against your competitors, you must thoroughly research your market and category and know which space has the most need for your service or product.
If you’re constantly fighting for business with several competitors, then your specific area of the market is probably oversaturated. You might want to reassess your space and category and find an untapped space that you can claim and make your own.
2. Are you serving a targeted audience?
Companies who have a wide, general audience will often end up chasing customers or half-heartedly serving them because there are too many types of people to cater to. If you narrow your customer base to a very specific, targeted demographic, you’ll be able to better understand their needs, focus all your time and effort on them, and deliver better customer experiences.
3. Do you have a strong positioning?
When your customers think about your company, are they able to immediately form a clear and vivid picture of what you do and what you’re about? Are you an online shop that sells home goods or a premier destination for refurbished mid-century modern furnishings? Do you see the difference? The former could be describing any number of stores, but the latter will conjure a more specific picture of your company.
Positioning is essentially the impression your customers have of you, so you better make sure it’s not only desirable, but memorable. Everything about your brand, from your slogan to your customer experience, should reinforce this positioning.
4. Is your position in the market unique?
While having a strong positioning is crucial, it’s not enough. It also needs to be unique. Going back to the online furniture shop example, you could make the business even more unique by only sourcing the mid-century pieces from Denmark, only offering pieces for under $1,000, or only specializing in a certain type of furniture, like dressers.
5. Are you specializing enough?
Speaking of specializing, just like choosing a target audience to cater to, it’s strategically better for your business if you specialize in one service or product that you can excel in rather than a variety of services or products that are just satisfactory. It may feel counterintuitive to offer less, just like it feels counterintuitive to decrease your customer base, but ultimately, mastering one area of expertise is what takes companies from succeeding in their sector to a global household name.
6. Do you have a purpose?
By that, we don’t mean your service or product, but a purpose higher than making profit. For example, do you make locally sourced, all-natural juices using 100% recycled bottles because you believe humans should decrease our carbon footprint and make sustainable packaging the norm? Do you design electronics that are fully functional for the hearing and visually impaired? Do you donate one pair of pants to someone in need with every purchase?
Of course, it’s not absolutely essential for a business to be socially or environmentally conscious in order to succeed, but brand purpose is increasingly becoming a powerful differentiator for consumers. In today’s oversaturated market, that could make all the difference.
7. Do you have a cohesive identity?
So you’ve hired a designer to create a logo and website for you. These are two very important components in your overall visual and verbal identity, but they need to align with every other touchpoint. Not only should every single piece of visual reference in your brand, from the color of your banner to the design of your kiosks to your social media feed, be cohesive, but all text should too — if your visual identity is fun and upbeat, don’t make your backstory dry and serious.
8. Do you deliver a consistently memorable experience?
Even if you said yes to every question up to this point, if you can’t answer yes to this question, then your brand is still not quite there yet. It doesn’t really matter how strong your brand is if you can’t deliver it consistently. That means making sure your customers get the same outstanding experience every time they interact with your brand, whether they’re browsing your website, searching for an item in your online shop, calling customer service, or using your product. Consistency is what drives loyalty and, ultimately, what gets customers flocking to you and not the other way around.
Hopefully, now you can see crystal-clearly why branding is so important for the success of your company. “Brand” is not just another word for “company” and “branding” does not only entail making your company’s marketing materials look more slick. Your brand is the entire foundation for how successful your business will be, and branding is something you should put first and above all else.
And if you’re still not convinced, then perhaps you’ll heed the advice of a guy named Steve Forbes, publisher of a little business magazine called Forbes (you may have heard of it), who said very matter-of-factly: “Your brand is the single most important investment you can make in your business.”
Image: Flickr user Daniel Bago