As soon as you start a com­pa­ny, it has a brand, which devel­ops over time and with expe­ri­ence. The trick is to get this brand work­ing for you. If you realise the pow­er of brand­ing you will nur­ture your brand in such a way that it has a per­son­al­i­ty and becomes the essence of your company.

Cus­tomers and sup­pli­ers will have an opin­ion of your com­pa­ny, based on sim­ple things such as tele­phone answer­ing style, how quick­ly you pay your bills, how your office appears, should they vis­it. All of these deep­er, often uncon­sid­ered lev­els of com­mu­ni­ca­tion are already work­ing for you, pos­i­tive­ly or negatively.

Part II: The power of branding

If you don’t have a plan in place, you should begin to take con­trol of your brand, in order to cre­ate a more cohe­sive and pos­i­tive mes­sage, com­pa­ny-wide. Part of this is obvi­ous­ly your visu­al iden­ti­ty. But first, let’s take a few steps back in the process.

Many com­pa­nies are real­is­ing how pow­er­ful­ly a brand can work in their favour. If I say ‘com­put­ers’, you may think ‘Microsoft’ or ‘Apple’; ‘cola’ and we’re onto Coke or Pep­si. Imag­ine your brand hav­ing that sort of pow­er, not just in your cho­sen mar­ket­place, but globally.

First­ly, a ‘brand review’ or ‘brand audit’ is nec­es­sary. Take a look at what you already have in place, planned or not, and see if you can work with that or if you need to replace cer­tain method­ol­o­gy with­in your company.

Hope­ful­ly, your busi­ness already has sev­er­al cus­tomers and sup­pli­ers, so a good first step would be to find out their opin­ions on your com­pa­ny and ‘brand’.

It’s impor­tant to under­stand how you are per­ceived from the peo­ple you’re hop­ing to attract to your busi­ness. You know what you want to achieve and with whom you’d like to do busi­ness – but do they want to do busi­ness with you?

It is also vital to get employ­ees involved ear­ly in the brand­ing process, as they must be ‘on mes­sage’, i.e. sell­ing your com­pa­ny and it’s prod­ucts or ser­vices in a uni­form man­ner, across the board. It’s no good hav­ing a grand scheme of how your com­pa­ny needs to present itself, but not telling the peo­ple who are actu­al­ly deal­ing with the pay­ing customers.

By involv­ing your staff, you offer them the chance to under­stand the process of the brand review, and increase the like­li­hood that they will buy into any changes that might result from your ini­tial audit.

Define your company

Some key ques­tions to ask yourself:

1. What are your com­pa­ny’s core com­pe­tences? What are you good at, what can be improved?
2. How do cus­tomers see you (ask them!) and what do they say about you? Reli­able, good val­ue, expen­sive, cus­tomer-focused, trust­ed, etc.? What words would you like your cus­tomers to asso­ciate with you now and in the future?
3. Do you see a pat­tern in your client-base? Are you work­ing for organ­i­sa­tions, or sell­ing to cus­tomers, that you aspire to? If not, who would you like to be work­ing with?

Once you have some answers, you should be able to bet­ter define your com­pa­ny, and see if it dif­fers from your orig­i­nal perceptions.

Remain real­is­tic. Your small house fur­nish­ings busi­ness isn’t going to turn into Macy’s overnight! Remem­ber, you need to appeal to your iden­ti­fied mar­ket. As that mar­ket changes over time, your brand will devel­op and mature.

In part III – Brand Val­ues, we’ll look at the core brand val­ues, which define what your cus­tomers can expect from you.