6 Reasons You Need a Company Brand?Strategy
“We don’t have a brand,” a startup founder told me. This was a fast-growing startup that had found its market fit and was expanding primarily through word-of-mouth.
“You have a brand,” I told him, “and if your product is growing through word-of-mouth then it’s a strong brand.”
Every company has a brand and brand image but not every company is investing in enhancing this image. In fact, the aforementioned startup company was relying its whole business and growth on a brand that they were not knowingly moderating. While it seemed to work for them at the time, there was a lot of value to be captured from brand curation. Especially in cases like this — brand management can bring significant added value to the whole company.
Most companies can benefit from word-of-mouth marketing but it’s the company’s job to make its brand easy to talk about, easy to share and recommend by others.
If you’re single and looking for a partner to start a relationship with, it’s a heck of a “feature” to be a professional chef who loves cooking both at home and at work. Yet, if it is the only value that you bring to the table for the potential relationship, it’s a bit lacking. What you want to do is to have many supporting stories that make you unique and memorable, and that would help your friends advertise you to their friends (your potential partners). In addition to being a great chef, you would want to bring out your passion for travelling, your sense of humour, your love for pets, and other smaller “features” that help you create and support a complete “brand” story.
The primary obstacle for sales was booking new meetings and building trust around the?brand
Similarly, having a great product that people talk about is great, yet there is much more value to be generated from supporting stories that might click with different people. As an example, you might showcase your passion for the environment by donating a portion of your gains to environmental causes, you might want to have a specific sense of humour or unique marketing copy, or visuals that resonate with your target audience. You might have a special working environment or employee benefits that differentiate you from others. And finally, especially if your company or product is shared in stories that happen offline, you want your brand name and web domain to be memorable. In the offline setting, you also want to be aware of the common misspelling that might occur with your brand name and even register similar misspelt domain names to redirect them to your website.
So let’s look at some of the main business functions that strongly benefit from having a holistic company brand strategy.
1. Sales
One of the most obvious benefits of a strong brand that comes from the brand strategy is sales and growth support. If your brand is well-known and/or well-perceived, it boosts your sales and growth efforts significantly. I have seen this firsthand working in a company that had a strong brand awareness in one target market but not in others. In the market where the brand was well-known, the obstacle for booking sales meetings with potential B2B clients was non-existent. Instead of explaining who you are, sales representatives could easily book meetings and go straight to the point with their offering.
However, sales in other target markets looked quite the opposite — the primary obstacle for sales was booking new meetings and building trust around the brand. Only after the connection and trust had been established, could the sales representatives go forward with their offering. Brand awareness in those markets would have saved a lot of time, effort and resources, as well as brought in new leads that were missed due to a lack of trust towards an unknown brand.
2. Employer?Branding
The strength of the employer brand is a good indicator of the strength of the company brand. Do you need to pay above average salary to attract talent or is there a line behind your door for open positions? No matter the economic environment, there will always be companies on both sides of the spectrum — on which side do you want to be?
Applying for a job and deciding on a new career path is not a small decision to make — it is considerably more meaningful than deciding on a product to buy. That’s why employer brand is much more telling than company brand in other domains. People generally do their homework before applying for a job.
Focusing merely on the external brand will eventually create a mismatch between what the company wants to look like versus what it actually is. This mismatch can prove?fatal
This also means that fixing or boosting a company’s brand image is much more challenging than merely writing sweet legends or adding pretty imagery. Enhancing the employer brand means enhancing the whole company brand and culture in a meaningful way. It means changing the brand identity internally before deciding on external communications. A nice brand without substance does nothing to enhance the employer brand.
3. Expansion
There are many ways to expand to new markets and a variety of go-to-market (GTM) strategies. However, supporting the GTM strategy with a strong brand strategy can help significantly reduce costs and risks related to expansion and entering new markets.
Brand awareness campaigns can be launched months or even years before the actual expansion campaign and potentially serve as a test pilot to see the initial market response, market size and readiness for the company’s offering. This is a common strategy for mitigating risks and costs compared to a full-blown expansion initiative.
领英推荐
When IKEA enters a new market, it often starts by opening a distribution centre instead of a full-size IKEA store. Supported by a local marketing campaign, this enables them to assess the local market demand and brand awareness. Software companies like Netflix, Uber, Stripe and others invite their users in new territories to sign up for when they decide to expand to their country. This will help these companies figure out the size of the demand as well as expand their brand awareness months before the actual expansion campaign.
4. Being Prepared for?Crisis
Living in uncertain times with rapid changes, we need to be prepared for disruptions in our daily working routines as well as our public image. Private companies are increasingly expected to take a stance against immorality and being passive is often the riskiest strategy of them all as it can be easily interpreted as going against public opinion.
Nestle, one of the world’s biggest food companies, experienced this firsthand when they were reluctant to take a stance against Russian aggression in Ukraine when most other western companies had decided to leave the terrorist state after the war had begun. As a result, Nestle lost a number of its employees and was devastated by public opinion, eventually being forced to suspend selling its products in Russia.
Company brand strategy helps align the values and the underlying principles of what the brand stands for. This enables the whole workforce to be better prepared for disruptions by having a clear understanding of how to act and react decisively in times of crisis.
5. Employee Productivity and Satisfaction
A holistic brand strategy is not only focused on the external image but also the internal view of the organisation. Focusing merely on the external brand image without internal communication will eventually create a mismatch and potentially deep gap between what the company wants to look like versus what it actually is. This mismatch can prove fatal for organisations — it can be impossible to recover from such deep brand mistrust.
Brand strategy done right, will, however, include employees in the process to define the internal company culture before the external one. Companies need to visualize their internal organizational DNA before they start designing the external one. This process will critically evaluate the positive as well as the challenging areas of the company culture and the unified story that connects each and every employee toward a shared vision.
Going through this process will help create a strong foundation for the externalization of the brand image but it will also help create a unified workforce that feels empowered to give their best working in a company culture that resonates with their personal beliefs and ambitions.
6. Coherence and Communication
In addition to employee productivity and satisfaction, a well-defined brand story and vision support communication and coherence among the workforce. Without a strong brand strategy, teams and individual managers create their own written and unwritten rules on how to prioritize business decisions, how to solve complicated challenges, what is the strategic direction and where are the ethical limits.
Creating a unified company-wide internal brand strategy helps solve these mismatches by creating a clear mission and vision statement and company brand book that clarifies and verbalizes the key elements of the company culture, social responsibility, long-term strategy and vision. This is especially essential for companies that have recently split or merged, who have grown rapidly over the past years, or who just haven’t reviewed their brand image and strategy before or for a long time.
_____
Company brand image often gets its deserved attention only when things go bad — if people in the organisation start to feel the pain from a lack of clarity, unity or vision. To let things get that far is a dangerous and expensive strategy. It is considerably more efficient to be proactive in managing your brand strategy and becoming the curator of your own story.
Having been there myself building brand strategies for small startups as well as within large corporations, I’m happy to be of help to your company and be the honest external facilitator for creating your company brand strategy whenever you might need it. But better yet — before you need it.
_____
Need help with your company brand strategy? My Brand Strategy Workshop is designed to solve your specific needs in an efficient format. See more and book a call with me on ehasoo.com