Imagen Consulting

Developing a brand is much more than defining your logo or company identity. At its best, a brand is a belief system, a system that makes those who support it / buy it / use it feel as though they belong. Branding helps us understand why some products mean something to us while others – with essentially the same features – do not.

I probably have close to 25 books on branding on my shelf, but the one I’d recommend you read first is Primal Branding by Patrick Hanlon. Here’s an excerpt: “What we call primal branding is the ability to make people feel better about your brand than another. In today’s parity world, who your customer feels better about is called preference. And it is well understood that preference creates sales. As Hal Riney, the creative mind behind Bartles & James and Saturn advertising, once remarked, ‘In a parity world, my best friend wins.’”

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During challenging times, business leaders start running around looking for new marketing wonder-gigits and social media miracles, believing that, with the RIGHT tool, their marketing needs will be solved and a steady stream of qualified customers will come flooding in the door. But, as much as we wish it otherwise, there are no "shortcuts" to building trust – and trust is the key component to effective branding and marketing.

In the book Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time, Greg Mortenson tells about the process required to build trust in Baltistan (northern Pakistan). He relates a Baltistani proverb: "The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time, you are an honored guest. The third time you become family." Whether your trust building efforts require more or less than three “touches,” the idea is right on. If you want to be welcomed and trusted, you have to be willing to invest the time to be invited and known.

Take a few moments to consider how you could improve your “trust-building.” Once you have a few ideas, give yourself a deadline to put something into practice.

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Want a guide for building and clarifying your brand? Try these professionally developed and low cost ($4.95) worksheets.

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Race car drivers accelerate coming out of a turn instead of waiting for the straightaway. The concept of “accelerating out of the turn” captures some important ideas for leaders at this time. Here are a few ways that you might be able to put the idea to work in your business, practice, or organization:

1. Thoroughly evaluate your market. What areas of the economy and your market are going to be slow to recover or never recover? Which of your clients will you stand by if it takes longer to get back to their former strength? What trends were you counting on that are picking up strength or were shut off by a changing economy?
2. Reclaim your big picture, purpose and vision. Months of cutting, pacing, and wondering have left the heads of many business owners and executives spinning. Cut through the haze – remind yourself what your care about, and what you’re really doing this for.
3. Start staffing (or reassigning existing staff) strategically. Envision what your organization needs to be like to meet the challenges and opportunities ahead. Get people in place and ready.
4. Re-think and reinvigorate your brand, your marketing, and your network. People are ready for an optimistically “new and improved” version of your business. This is a great time to update a tired brand, bring your marketing message and tools up to date, and start talking with your network of clients, vendors, and other supporters.

The economy is thawing – slowly, but it's thawing. Now is a great time to be looking at national trends to see where you can begin to cultivate opportunities. Some of the best opportunities for success will be as the economy comes first comes out of the turn. Make sure you’re not caught with your foot on the brake. Start accelerating now, and you’ll be in a great position to take the lead as soon as we hit the next “economic straightaway.”

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Creating A Brand Meaning that Really Means Something

In a recent Los Angeles Times business article (July 3, 2009) reviewing a new car release from Korean car maker Hyundai, reporter Dan Neil made the following comment:

“Yes, we’re all very impressed with Hyundai’s robust sales numbers, the company’s monster 10-year warranty and the new Hyundai Genesis sedan, which was voted 2009 North American Car of the Year by a group of powerful and influential automotive journalists who were found sleeping under a bridge.

“But what does the brand mean? If anything, the cursive H stands only for a kind of predatory cheapness that undercuts Honda/Acura and Toyota/Lexus. As cars like the Azera and Sonata demonstrate, in a coldly calculated dollar-for-value comparison, you just can’t beat a Hyundai.

“So what. No one ever wrote a misty-eyed heavy metal ballad to the glory of the bargain equation. No one ever serenaded with a mariachi band beneath the window of extended warranties. Hyundai is a brand utterly devoid of romance, poetry or inspiration.”

What a great commentary on branding - especially for small business owners who compete against big-box stores and franchises without large marketing budgets and flashy websites - small businesses who, in an Internet connected world, almost always feel the pressures of price.

Irrational though it may be, we make the majority of our purchasing decisions - from cars, to coffee, to where we eat breakfast - based in large part on our emotional connection to brand. Whether or not you agree with the assessment of Hyundai’s brand, the point is that you cannot build customers/clientele through price competitiveness alone. You must do more - create an experience that sets you and your business apart…an experience that creates and embodies your unique brand.

In college, I used to eat at a local breakfast dive whose brand was based on portion size - huge pancakes, ridiculous pieces of ham, huge platters of eggs and potatoes. The dishes were cheap, the service was marginal, but the place was always packed. To go there for breakfast was an experience: you always left with a story, and people drove for miles and waited for up to an hour for the chance to be a part of it. Obviously, it was about much more than getting a meal.

What defines your small businesses brand? What do people know you for? What stories are they telling about you? Remember, “No one ever wrote a misty-eyed heavy metal ballad to the glory of the bargain equation.”

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