Building Your Brand

Every one of my clients wants a great image or brand. A few have good ones. Even fewer had one before I met them. How’s yours?

Everyone knows of a brand, but you don’t really care about them, unless your loyalty to the brand is fierce. Examples include loyalty to a sports team, to a product you are a personal fan of (like Starbucks), or just as a fan of their message. I have a friend whose daughters are in love with Empire Carpet. They go around singing that stupid jingle all the time!

Sometimes, great brands weaken. Sometimes they die. Pop quiz…do you know what the 57 in ‘Heinz 57’ stands for? Before ketchup and steak sauce, Heinz was known for pickles. They had 57 different types of pickles. They chose to go after the ketchup market and took their focus off of their cash cow, the pickles. It nearly bankrupted the company. At least the ketchup thing worked out.

As a business owner or manager, what you care most about is your brand. Your company’s brand, your product’s brand, and your personal brand. But, you can learn lessons from the big ones that fail.

The answer to building a brand hangs in the balance of all the things you do that are not brand building.

The answer lies within these critical reputation-building areas:
1. Quality of product.
2. Availability of product.
3. Ease of doing business with you.
4. Friendliness and helpfulness of sales and service people.
5. Enjoyment of product.
6. Continuous improvement in each of the five areas listed above.

Many people (especially advertising agencies) believe that the best way to establish your brand is advertise. They are partially right. Reputation is much more powerful than advertising. And word of mouth advertising is much, much more powerful than advertising.

Why don’t companies reinvest a piece of their advertising budget and create reputation-building actions they could take in order to solidify the brand and make any advertising pay real dividends?

The old concept is: Advertising brings brand awareness. The question is: What kind of awareness?

For example, if I see an ad on TV with a guy walking by a row of cars and he is yelling, I see the image, and it creates a thought or a statement. The question is: What do I say or think when I see it? Does it cause me to act? Does it cause me to ignore, mute or change the channel? Will it create a good feeling or a bad one? Will I recall a good story or a negative incident? Or will it be nothing?

When we see any brand or advertising image, we will think or say one of the following five things:
· Something great.
· Something good.
· Nothing.
· Something bad.
· Something real bad.

So the challenge, from the chicken and the egg series, is: which came first, the advertising, the brand, or the reputation?

ANSWER: It doesn’t matter. In the end, without reputation and word of mouth, your advertising message is only words.

Ask yourself where and why you bought your last car? Or where and why you go to the stylist you go to get your hair done (if you have any). Or doctor, or dentist, or mechanic, or, or, or…

What if companies spent as much money delivering great service as they do trying to tell everyone how great they are. Maybe they should cut their advertising budget in half and invest the other half in hiring and retaining employees that provide outstanding service to your customers.

I’m big on branding, and creating a great brand, but I am bigger on reputation. If the reputation is there, the brand will be bigger than the ad.

The best way to build a brand is build a reputation that attracts customers. Take the actions necessary, invest in the people necessary, and invest in the quality necessary to get the brand to build itself through the words and testimony of others.