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Branding Your Business

Branding Your Business

© 2002 Elena Fawkner

If you think only big corporate names need to think about things
like brand names, think again. Your brand says a lot about you
and your business, and that's as true for a one person home-
based operation as it is for a multinational conglomerate. In this
article we look at how creating a strong brand for your business
can help you set yourself apart from the pack and lay the right
foundation for the future growth of your business.

WHAT IS A BRAND?

Your brand is more than just the logo on your letterhead and
business cards or your business name. It is your corporate
identity. An effective brand tells the world who you are, what
you do and how you do it, while at the same time establishing
your relevance to, and credibility with, your prospective customers.

Your brand is also something more ethereal. It is how your
business is perceived by its customers. If your brand has a high
perceived value, you enjoy many advantages over your
competition, especially when it comes to pricing. Why do you
think people are prepared to pay stupid money for items of clothing
with the initials "CK" on them? Perceived value. Perceived value
as a result of very effective brand promotion resulting in very high
brand awareness.

Now, I'm not saying we all need to rush out and start creating
brands that are going to be recognized the world over. Most of us
simply don't have the time or other resources necessary. What I
am suggesting, however, is that it is possible for your brand to
dominate your niche.

WHY DO I NEED TO CREATE MY OWN BRAND?

=> Differentiation

We touched on this in the previous section when we looked at
what a brand is and how it can be used to increase the perceived
value of your products and services. The main reason for creating
your own brand is to differentiate yourself from your competition.
New websites are a dime a dozen. So are home-based
businesses. You need to constantly be looking for ways to set
yourself apart from your competition. Your brand can do that for
you.

=> More Effective, Efficient Marketing

Another good reason for creating your own brand is to make your
sales force (even if that's a sales force of one - you) more effective
and efficient.

Imagine if you didn't have to spend the first 50% of your time with
a new prospect explaining who you are, what you do and how you
do it. What if your brand had already communicated that for you?
You can spend 100% of your time focusing on sales rather than
educating your prospects about your business

Another benefit of branding is that the efforts you expend increasing
your brand awareness through promoting and marketing your brand
to your target market automatically transfers to your products and
services. So, even when you're advertising your brand, you're
indirectly also marketing your products and services.

HOW DO I CREATE MY OWN BRAND?

OK, so you're convinced you need to create your own brand.
Where on earth do you start?

We saw earlier that your brand needs to say who you are, what
you do and how you do it. It needs to do all these things at the
same time as establishing your relevance to, and building credibilty
with, your prospective customers. Needless to say, it is absolutely
essential, if you are to build your own brand, that *you yourself*
have a firm grasp of who you are, what you do and how you do it.
If not, you're going to have the devil's own time getting that
message across to anyone else, let alone establishing your
relevance and credibility.

=> Write A Mission Statement

So, let's start by creating a mission statement. What is the
mission of your business? Obviously you're in business to make
a profit. But making a profit is a byproduct of a successful
business. Focus instead on how you choose to achieve that profit.
What are your core values?

A good place to begin thinking about your mission is to put
yourself in the shoes of your customers. Put yourself in their
target market. Let's say your business is web hosting. If you're
in the market for a web host, what things are important to you?
Different people will be looking for different benefits but you can
bet that they want their website to be accessible to site visitors so
reliability will be high on their list. Price is also likely to be high
on the list as is 24/7 technical support. What about add-on features
such as unlimited email aliases, cgi support and what-not?
These things will be highly important to some and less important
to others. So focus on the benefits that are likely to be highly
relevant to the majority of your target market. Let's settle for our
purposes on reliability, price and technical support.

Your mission statement might read something like this: "I strive
to earn a fair return on my investment of time and money by
providing affordable webhosting with guaranteed 99% uptime and
24/7 telephone technical support". That's a pretty general
statement and if you decide to focus on a particular niche of the
webhosting market, such as small business, you may want to
more narrowly focus on that group in your mission statement.

Now that you've written your


mission statement, you can begin
thinking about creating a brand that reinforces and supports your
mission. So, getting back to the fundamental questions of who
you are, what you do and how you do it, you can now begin to
think of your business in these terms. You're a webhosting
provider, you host websites of small businesses and you do that
by offering cost-effective webhosting solutions, guaranteed 99%
uptime and 24/7 telephone technical support.

When you create your brand, you need to keep the who, what
and how firmly in mind but also use the brand to establish your
relevance to your target market and build credibility with that
market.

Let's turn now to the nuts and bolts of creating your brand.

=> Describe What You Are Branding

List out your business's key features and characteristics, your
competitive advantages and anything else that sets you apart
from your competition.

Using our webhosting example, you'll focus primarily on the
objectives from your mission statement namely, reliable, cost-
effective webhosting solutions supported by 24/7 technical
support.

=> Identify and Describe Your Target Market

Decide whether you want to target the entire webhosting
community or only a segment of it such as small business
websites. Describe your market.

=> List Names that Suggest the Key Elements from Your
Mission Statement

The key elements from your mission statement were reliability,
cost-effectiveness and customer service. List names that are
suggestive of these elements. Let's use Reliable Webhosting
for our example. (I don't claim to be a creative genius.)

Don't limit yourself to real words, though. A coined name with no
obvious meaning is a perfectly legitimate name provided it conveys
something about your business. You will find coined names easier
to trademark and secure domain names for too - a definite plus!

=> List Tag Lines that Reinforce Your Mission Statement

We'll use: "Outstanding reliability and technical support at a
price your small business can afford". I know, I know. You can
do much better, I'm sure.

HOW SHOULD I USE MY BRAND?

=> Create a Logo for Your Brand

Your logo is NOT your brand but your logo should allow your
brand to be instantly recognized by those familiar with it. To
this extent, your logo helps create and reinforce brand
awareness.

The logo you create should be able to be used consistently in a
variety of different media. It should be suitable for corporate
letterhead and business cards, as well as for your website and
corporate signage (if any). You do NOT want a confusing
mishmash of logos and banners and heaven knows what else.
Everything you produce needs to use the same, consistent
style of logo so that, over time, your logo becomes synonymous
with your brand. Instant recognition is what you're going for here,
so don't dilute it by using several different logos for different
purposes.

=> Consistent Usage of Company Name, Logo and Tag Line

Going back to our webhosting example, putting the brand name
and tagline together, the physical manifestation of your brand
will be:

RELIABLE WEBHOSTING
Outstanding reliability and technical support at a price
your small business can afford.

To establish brand awareness, this branding needs to be used
consistently and frequently in everything your produce, whether
that be letters to clients, business cards, brochures, quotations,
invoices, advertising, promotion, on your website, on the front
door of your principal place of business and on your products.
And don't forget to be consistent in your use of color schemes.
These can be powerful brand reinforcers.

=> Marketing and Promotion of Your Brand

Once you've created your brand, you need to market and
promote it, in addition to your products and services. This is
how you establish your credibility and relevance to your target
market. You can hopefully see why your brand needs to be
suggestive of your mission statement. If, at the same time as
you're selling your products and services you also push your
brand, your brand becomes synonymous with your products
and services. And vice versa.

A properly descriptive brand and high brand awareness amongst
your target market will allow you to more easily introduce a wider
range of products and services when they're developed without
having to start by again selling who you are, what you do and
how you do it first. Your brand has already presold YOU. Your
job then is to sell your products and services.

------

** Reprinting of this article is welcome! **
This article may be freely reproduced provided that: (1) you
include the following resource box; and (2) you only mail to
a 100% opt-in list.

Here's the resource box to use if reprinting this article:

------

Elena Fawkner is editor of A Home-Based Business Online ...
practical business ideas, opportunities and solutions for the
work-from-home entrepreneur.
http://www.ahbbo.com


About the Author

Elena Fawkner is editor of A Home-Based Business Online ...
practical business ideas, opportunities and solutions for the
work-from-home entrepreneur.
http://www.ahbbo.com


 

Brand - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The brand, and "branding" and brand equity have become increasingly important ... From the perspective of brand owners, branded products or services also ...
en.wikipedia.org
 
Branding - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Livestock branding, the marking of animals to indicate ownership; Human branding, ... Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branding" ...
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AllAboutBranding.com : Home
Provides resources and opinions on branding. Includes brand development, management and communications.
www.allaboutbranding.com
 
brandchannel.com | branding resource produced by Interbrand | brands
An international online exchange and resource about brand marketing and branding.
www.brandchannel.com
 
Branding Company Corporate Branding Internet Brand Identity ...
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www.brandidentityguru.com
 
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Branding and positioning news and opinion.
www.brandingblog.com
 
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Big companies understand the importance of brands. Today, in the Age of the Individual, you have to be your own brand. Here's what it takes to be the CEO of ...
www.fastcompany.com
 
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See all blog posts tagged with branding on Technorati.
www.technorati.com
 
Mozilla Branding
The purpose of this document is to describe mozilla.org's branding strategy during and after the release of what has generally been called Mozilla 1.4. ...
www.mozilla.org
 
What Brand Are You? A branding viral by The Design Conspiracy
What Brand Are You? has since been picked out as Site Of The Day by the likes of the Financial Times, Yahoo, USA Today and BBC News, and has received more ...
www.whatbrandareyou.com
 
Julie & Company: Affordable branding, web design, graphic design ...
Julie & Company creates stellar branding, integrated marketing, advertising, web design, web development, Flash, trade show booths - all at affordable ...
www.julieandcompany.com
 
Forty Media - Web Design, Web Development, Branding, Great Websites
a professional web design agency based in Phoenix, Arizona.
www.fortymedia.com
 
Branding - Yahoo! Small Business
Find information to help grow your online business with business plans, Thomas Register, news articles and more.
smallbusiness.yahoo.com
 
Lexicon
Lexicon Branding appears on KTVU News; Lexicon Branding creates Ridgeline for Honda, Viiv for Intel, and GameTap for Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. ...
www.lexicon-branding.com
 
Branding and Usability
We're finding that a site's usability can dramatically affect branding. ... There are two basic techniques for branding: direct experience and indirect ...
www.uie.com
 
iMedia Connection: Research & Metrics - Branding
Majority of marketers feel branding opportunities -- online and offline -- aren't ... IAB case studies prove real-world power of online in branding mix. ...
www.imediaconnection.com
 
Small Business Marketing And Branding
Small business marketing and branding advice and how-to guides for small business owners. Learn how to start and grow your own successful business.
smallbusinessbranding.com
 
Beyond Branding
Beyond Branding, published in hardcover in 2003 and paperback in 2005, presents innovative business models for the survival of 21st century organizations.
www.beyond-branding.com
 
 

 

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