Developing Your Unique Brand

Developing Your Unique Brand
The Importance of Perception

How is your business perceived by your target market? What unique attributes do customers and prospects associate with your business? Do you know?

A brand typically includes two elements: sensory elements - which include your company name, logo, colors, and other graphic or text elements, and intangible expectations - which are the perceptions associated with a product or service that arise and reside in the minds of everyone who comes in contact with your business. In this article, we will focus on the intangible expectation element of a brand.

Providing Value

You have the ability to define and communicate a brand message that will influence how you and your firm are perceived. Without a clear brand message, your target market will make their own assumptions about who you are, what you offer, and what your business represents.

For your business to grow in a consistent and repeatable pattern, your customers, prospects, employees, and the community must positively associate you and your business in their minds with something that offers a unique value. For owner/producer businesses like financial planners, or real estate and insurance agents, their very livelihood depends on making the time to strategize, communicate, and deliver on a unique brand promise. Even if you work under the umbrella of a large national brand, the key to growing your business in a local, relationship-driven environment is to be perceived as a unique provider of value.

Developing a Branding Strategy

Building your identity as a unique brand takes work, but it is work that any business regardless of size or industry can do, and do well. First you must explore what your unique value is to your customers, then crystallize it to help you focus on the one or two most important attributes, and lastly communicate your brand message to all those who need to hear it. We’ll look at each of these steps in turn:

Explore

In this first step you need to examine your assumptions about what your customers, employees, and community are thinking. What unique value do you provide for your customers? Maybe it’s personalized solutions; maybe it’s faster or more responsive customer service; maybe it’s low prices and no hassle set up. But you need to be sure. You need to find out from your customers directly. Surveys or phone interviews are a great way to gather this information. Try asking three of your customers, or your employees, a few simple questions to identify:

• The value you provide to customers (hint: it is not a product or service)
• The number one compliment you hear from customers
• What you do better then anyone else, especially your closest competitors

Crystallize

After receiving input from a few different sources you need to analyze and define the unique value attributes that were identified. Focus on just one or two key elements of the feedback and use those attributes to develop your unique brand.

For example, a financial advisor determined that his unique value to clients was personal attention and service. How did he know? Simple -- he asked his customers and employees. One client said that she valued the extra time and effort he spent explaining the details of investment options with her, while his office manager told him that clients said that they liked his individualized service and advice, most especially the fact that they can meet face-to-face with him rather than have an impersonal five minute phone call.

Communicate

Now that you have determined your unique value attributes, you need to follow through by actively and consistently communicating them. Your unique brand should be integrated and broadcast in all your marketing communications as a means to guide people’s decisions to do business with you. It is important to note that, because your brand is based on how you and your business are perceived, the marketing messages that you will create should serve to reinforce these intangible elements of your unique brand. It is also important from time-to-time to evaluate the unique value that you and the business provide to your target market to ensure that it is continuing to positively impact them and, if it isn’t, you will need to go back and reevaluate your branding strategy.

Growing the Business

Effectively developing your own unique brand identity is critical for growing your business sustainably and profitably. Further, as your business expands, having a defined brand will allow you to build on the strengths of your businesses and more easily leverage that unique value in new markets.

Clearly, developing a unique brand requires getting information from others, working to understand that information through objective analysis, and then effectively and consistently communicating your message through your marketing channels and other customer touch points.

What branding strategies have YOU employed that either were – or were not – successful? We encourage you to share them with the Community!