BLAND or BRAND

I’d say 95% of the SME businesses I work with have never thought about their brand. It’s just happened organically. It started with a logo and often ended with the logo. Sadly.

No brand strategy, no brand values, no brand audit….ever. Lots of marketing, lots of Google ads, SEO, and social media posts….no brand or perhaps a pretty bland brand.

Remember in a customer’s eyes brand = value.

When’s the last time you stood back from your brand and viewed it with fresh eyes – your customer’s eyes?

What exactly is everything that makes up your brand saying about what it will be like to work with you and your business for a potential customer? What are your brand values? What are the touchpoints that people will encounter your brand across? What three words would people say about you and your business. A lot to think about eh.

Perhaps during lock-down you had time to step back from your business a little. Did you take a good hard dispassionate look at your logo, your website, the photos on your website, your packaging, your social media feeds and even your invoices and email signatures? Brand also covers your customer experiences and customer service offering.

If you didn’t have the time or take the time, block out 2 hours and do it now. It’s an exercise that I find always fascinating, sadly often depressing or sometimes enlightening depending on how seriously you’ve taken your brand up to now. Let’s hope you’re in the enlightening category for the purposes of the blog….

Did you like what you see, or have you left things to stagnate? Do you feel like you haven’t had the time nor the skills to create the brand you always wanted? Perhaps you once did when you launched the company, but have you become blind to what your brand says about your business in 2020. Or are you one of those people who reckons you or your business doesn’t need a brand. Well here’s the interesting thing…you don’t control every aspect of your brand or what the world thinks of it.

Read that bit again because people will think what they want to think of your brand.

Your brand is what people think of it.

You can control elements of it by making sure it’s consistent and systematically embed that in your company’s cultures and every aspect of everything you do.  But with so many touchpoints now for a potential customer to come across your brand do you just accept that you can’t get it right 100% of the time? Then a missed complaint on social media and bam….lots of hard work erased!

So, look at your brand strategy and every touch point today. What do you stand for? What three words do you want people to use to describe you and your business? Then go through everything you can find like a forensic detective and wheedle out the things that are letting you down.

 Do this and you’ll be ahead of the competition…trust me – so many businesses I go to see never bother to do this then are horrified when I start a brand audit and point it out to them.

So, what’s it to be…bland or brand?