Business Progress Through Branding
For many small business owners who hear the word “branding,” the temptation to sneer is hard to control. They roll their eyes, sigh, and when given a chance will tell you just what they could achieve with only a tiny fraction of a big corporation’s branding budget. But the harassed owner – worrying about clients who have not paid, dashing between meetings and working late into the weekend to keep on top – cannot afford to neglect his or her business’s brand.
What brand? Well, every business, whatever its size, has one. “Smaller companies tend to think branding is something big companies do,” said Temi Abimbola, senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Central England. “But branding is not advertising. You do not have to advertise like big companies to brand. Every company has a brand, which is as good as their market presence. It’s how you make people consider you.”
“Branding is simply an integrated strategy of individual marketing techniques you can use to communicate to a targeted market about what your product or service can do for them. It’s an umbrella strategy that helps guide the rest of your marketing,” explained Kevin Clarke, a Utah-based small business brand and marketing consultant. “If you line 10 competitors against the wall, how will a customer choose? You have to do something to make you stand out, to be different, to be special.
“Negative or positive, everyone stands for something. Maybe they don’t know or don’t care, but yes, they have a brand identity,” he added.
So, the good news for small businesses is that the brand is already there. It lies in the staff, their expertise and conduct; in the product and its qualities; in the name, the logo, the marketing. It is just a question of finding its essence and letting that guide future decisions.
The even better news is that this doesn’t have to cost the earth. “I’d be lying if I said we never thought about branding,” said innocent drinks’ Dan Germain – who admits his brand manager job title is as much tongue in cheek as a description of his work – “but our major focus, at the beginning and always, is on getting the product right. If you get the product right it makes branding easier. We never sat down, had a meeting and said, ‘So, what about branding?’ ”
Yet innocent drinks certainly has a strong brand. The UK company, founded in 1998, makes pure, fresh fruit juices and smoothies. “Being innocent informs everything we are trying to do,” said Germain. “We wanted everything to be innocent – paper from sustainable resources, a fresh tone on our labels, vans painted like cows, staff games in the park, going into the country to help pick elderflowers for our juice.”
“It’s not necessary to spend millions on brand consultancy, nor very practical for a small company,” agreed Caroline Plumb, founder of Fresh Minds, a recruitment agency. “At Fresh Minds, we thought about which firms we really admired and then looked at their branding for inspiration for ours. Imitation is the highest form of flattery.”
At this point the branding experts flinch and say that not every company has branding intuition like innocent drinks or Fresh Minds — both finalists, incidentally, in Shell LiveWIRE’s UK Young Business Start Up Awards competition. You still don’t need to spend a lot of money or hire professionals to brand your company. Educate yourself and learn how to keep your business brand consistent in order to differentiate yourself and grow your business. It’s fun to come up with ideas and develop your business and it can be even simple once you learn some branding basics. Best of all, once you do it once, you just keep repeating it with every product or service you have. That’s why Magnetic Look created Magnetic Branding for Startups, program for starting and existing businesses to help them create, set their business right from the beginning, get it up and running as fast as in 5 weeks. Visit Magnetic Branding for Startups page for more information.
Once the brand ethos is in place, it all boils down to communication: getting the brand message across. And nothing beats the freest advertising and communication of all – the mouths of your customers. “In the context of small to medium enterprises, the sorts of companies that do spare parts, repairs or provide consultancy services to other companies, choice is based on reputation, past experience and word of mouth or recommendations,” said Abimbola. When you successfully communicate your brand, customers will spread the message fast.
“Simple ways to reinforce the brand can be inexpensive,” added Fresh Minds’ Plumb. “At Fresh Minds, we print stickers with our name and logo which go on the front of all correspondence we send out. It’s a small thing but it shows our attention to detail, as well as helping clients recall our name. Think about the brand across all channels. To us our brand is friendly but consummately professional, and we try hard to ensure we always interact with our clients in this way.”
Before you know it, “small” can become “medium,” and “medium” can turn to “large.” But branding is not synonymous with growth – and many small business owners do not want to transform into large corporations. Branding is not just about growth, but how someone nicely said it growth depends on the relationship with customers and branding develops a high degree of loyalty. It can run broad and deep and cause growth and profitability.
“If a company is so busy they don’t have the time to take on anything new, I’d still tell them to investigate the subject — branding can only bring enhanced value and longevity to the business,” said Clarke.
“There will always be attrition,” added lecturer Temi. “People no longer buy products or it becomes obsolete. There’s need for constant renewal just to maintain a company. And I’ve never met a small business that doesn’t want to get bigger.”
At the end of the day, branding is about staying ahead of the competition — and competition will always be there, not matter what niche or market a company operates in. “It is amazing how many people know that the economy relies on small businesses,” concluded Temi. “But people don’t know that competition affects them. An economy where we didn’t have brands no longer applies. Just as competition is hotting up in large industries, it’s hotting up for the small ones too.”
Related posts:
- Women Entrepreneurs Use Branding For Business Success
- How To Be Competitive With Your Branding
- Benefits of Business Branding
- Some Challenges of Business Branding
- Branding your StartUp
