What is Your Brand Essence

I’m working on a branding project for a client of mine, that has led me to spend time on the phone with the company’s executives, partners and customers to delve into the secrets that underlie the company’s brand. So this blog post is once again on the topic of branding.

 

You’ve heard me say that a company’s brand is not defined by the product you make or the market you are in, but rather by the collective behaviour and personality of the company. To use branding language, your brand is defined by intangible qualities associated with your company and/or your services/products. To apply some more extensive criteria to the definition of brand, a strong brand should (no must be):

 

1. Unique
2. Relevant
3. Honest
4. Consistent
5. Longlasting

 

Your brand should be defined by your uniqueness. What defines your business in terms of the competition? (hint - don’t think product feature – remember this must be intangible). What is the one thing you do that trumps the competition every time? If you can put your finger on that, you have likely identified what it is that makes you unique.

 

It’s one thing for a company to claim quality as an intangible brand characteristic, but if the product continuously breaks, or the service is poor, then it is an untrue claim. The brand characteristics you identify must be honest and true, and hold up to the scrutiny of partners, customers and employees.

 

If you portray inconsistent message or image across your various communications channels, then you have fragmented and garbled your brand message. It’s ok to evolve, but avoid changing your logo and tagline as often as you change your socks. Consistency on all fronts is key to brand resonance.

 

Maytag knows a good thing. The Maytag repairman, the symbol for reliability – the company’s brand essence – is into his 40th year of service. Ivory Snow has stood for purity for more than 100 years. Branding your company and product requires long term thinking and sticktoit-ivness.

 

So I’ll leave you with this exercise. Think about what your company and/or product stands for. What do you do better in an intangible way than any of your competitors. Are you more reliable? Are you more simple? More innovative? Is your service above reproach? These are the clues to your brand essence. Now use this and express your brand in six words. Now do it in two words. And here’s a crazy notion – try it on yourself to establish your personal brand.

 

For all my start up clients, found this really good blog on marketing basics for new companies. Some very good advice & very reflective of the work we do together:

 

http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/9008/Startup-Marketing-Tactical-Tips-From-The-Trenches.aspx

 

 

 

Service Makes the Brand

After more than two years of running my consulting business off a spreadsheet, I decided to get with the times and recently adopted Freshbooks a Cloud-based estimation and invoicing system. Cool tool, I am quite loving its ease of use. But even cooler is the service I’ve received since becoming a customer. My experience with Freshbooks has served to reinforce my personal philosophy as a marketing consultant that if you thrill and delight your customer, your customer service becomes a basis for competitive differentiation and the foundation for a strong and enduring brand image and reputation.

Freshbooks ‘gets’ the audience they serve – the creative small business owner, with limited resources, limited time, and limited patience. Support has been quick and accurate. I’ve had a welcoming email, and phone call offering a helping hand anytime I need it. And they even sent me a t-shirt, accompanied by a personal hand written note. Let me say now, that these things matter. Customers appreciate, and will remember great over the top service. And they’ll not only give you their loyalty, they will tell others about you, and gladly serve as a reference for your business in the future.

Make great customer service one of your governing principles. Trust me, your business will flourish as a result.

Focus. Focus. Focus

I have been thinking and talking a lot about bowling alleys lately. And I’m not talking about ten pin and funny looking shoes, but rather the marketing and sales strategy set out in Geoffrey Moore’s book, Inside the Tornado. Moore’s theory is in my mind, one of the most compelling marketing strategies I have seen for small companies or start ups with limited resources, and I fully grant to him all the credit here for this thinking. Many of the clients I work with today are in these strata of development, and I often find myself coming back to Moore’s theories and recommending to my clients these three words – focus, focus, focus.

With great apologies to Mr. Moore, let me summarize in my own words my understanding of a bowling alley (or niche marketing strategy):

Take inventory of your customer successes and double down where you have had success. This requires (shock and awe!) listening to your customers (easy peasy – bet your competitors aren’t doing it). Interview them. Understand their business, their industry, their regulatory environment. Get a handle on the reasons they began looking for products like yours in the first place. Intelligent niche marketing is not about feature function wars, but about understanding the customer’s problem and uniquely solving it. This is the fodder for your marketing efforts and fuel for your sales team. Then look for prospects of similar profiles and show them you’ve done it before and how.

Position your product or service (my background is technology so I will use that frame of reference) as a unique solution to a business problem. This requires you to have a sound understanding of the challenges in a particular market segment, understand the consequences (financial, reputational or otherwise) of failure, and position your offering as something unique and better than your competitors. In my last company we had great success positioning our technology as a remedy for Sarbanes Oxley compliance. We took the time to understand the pain IT staff were experiencing in meeting SOX compliance, the regulatory requirements and kinds of IT controls necessary to meet COBIT standards, and then mapped the capabilities of our software as a remedy to this problem. We also understood the consequences of non-compliance. This background knowledge + positioning drove a lot of business to our door.

Aim your focus and messaging on a distinct market niche – in Moore’s words – a beach head segment. This might be a type of buyer – for instance IT operations groups, or a vertical market – financial services, or better yet, a combination of the two. In the example cited above, we learned all we could about the IT organization and the influencers surrounding SOX compliance. This led us to build messaging and positioning for CFOs, CEOs and CIOS as well as IT auditors, external audit firms, IT control advisors. We also leveraged our own CFO as a credible thought leader on this topic.

Play where you have experience. I see too many companies chase a segment because they think they can solve a problem there – or worse, spread themselves too thin trying to position themselves too broadly. Customer experience and reference accounts are absolutely critical in executing a bowling alley strategy. Enterprise buyers of software systems – especially IT shops -- tend to be pragmatic in their decision making and somewhere in the buying cycle they will want to speak to references. By focusing on a particular segment, you and your sales guys are given the opportunity to deeply understand the challenges and pressures of that sector. This allows your sales teams to lead a deep discovery with their prospects uncovering hidden business challenges beneath the surface. And finally focus on a particular niche is fertile soil for (the nirvana of marketing in my humble opinion) word of mouth marketing as happy users of your product migrate between companies, attend local networking meetings and generally talk amongst themselves. Can you hear the other bowling pins falling?

Critical mass has a fly wheel effect. You have established your company as a thought leader in a niche segment. And you have built up a solid base of customers and reference accounts. This in itself will create a gravitational force that will bring prospects to your door.

Don’t think this is a forever thing, or misunderstand this means you are only a vertical play. Nice marketing is about focus. It is about acquiring deep understanding and the development of expertise to enable true enterprise solution selling. It does not mean you cannot opportunistically sell into other segments or refuse business. It’s just about turning up the volume in one particular area. It’s about solving a clear and present problem that is acute in that nice better than your competitors. And it’s about building that reference arsenal and knowledge that drives leadership in a segment.