Lessons in brand building 01
Be Careful Who You Listen To
Creating a strong brand is not a simple or trivial endeavour. Neither is it unfathomable.
This week I’m going to lay down some key principles for business leaders and brand owners to consider should they be reflecting on the current state of their own brand and seeking guidance on brand strategy.
Marketing is a broad church of disciplines. Witnessing brand owners receiving contradictory advice from people of different marketing-related backgrounds is something I have experienced many times. It happened again last week! A business owner I know was bamboozled by one brand-related recommendation from their web agency and contradicted by another from their promotions agency.
However well-intentioned, ‘good advice’ is distorted by the medium in which the ‘specialist’ operates. If you talk to a designer, they will convince you to invest it all in your logo and identity. If you talk to a digital content creator, they will say it’s all about building your brand through social channels.
I think back to the days of working with some of the big London agencies (advertising, brand, promotions…) and the astounding confidence with which they would recommend ideas, strategies and solutions…nearly all of it based on little or zero market intelligence.
So, start your thinking from within. You know your business better than anyone else. No agency or supplier should be creating anything without a really well thought-through brief. Your brand is not your logo or your website or your advertising. It is what your clients and customers respect you for, even love you for. It’s the things that you do well, the things that stand out against the competition and the things that people talk about and recommend you for. Your sources of brand power and commercial success may well have nothing to do with the historical efforts of your marketing department.
To start with, challenge yourself to answer these questions:
Do you know clearly what your sources of brand power really are?
Do you know why these factors resonate so strongly?
Use your colleagues and staff to help you. Use good primary research to get to the unvarnished and revealing truths behind these questions. Once armed with answers you are on the journey to building a strong brand. Moreover, you will be able to brief your creative and agency suppliers with clarity and confidence and judge their work more successfully. They will also work better against a tighter, clearer briefing.
The approach of Brand Compass: Clear Direction for Building Strong Brands is specifically designed for business owners or MDs and others leading strategy. The detailed guide is freely available.
