7 ways brand affects your business outcomes

You probably already know your brand is more than just your logo. It’s how you look, sound, what you say, and how you behave—and it’s the story people hear, or are told, when they interact with any point of your business or organisation.

So, yes, brand is powerful. But how specifically can your brand make or break your business outcomes?

1.    Quality: Quality is a great place to start because everybody values it, even when they are budget-driven. To do business with you means your customer is hoping or expecting you’ll be up to scratch, regardless of how much you cost. Your reliability and trustworthiness shines through in the quality of your branding—its professional design suggests a lot about the quality of your business.

2.    Subliminal messages: Your brand says a lot about you that you may not realise. Just like quality, your brand communicates subtle cues on your character, your way of working or whether you are quirky, fun, classy or expensive. Like it or not, customers are reading these cues subliminally and, if your brand is giving off the wrong message, it will be damaging your business by attracting the wrong people or repelling the right ones.

3.    Clarity of offering: Does your brand say what you do? How many more customers could quickly understand your offering and start working with you if you made it easier to understand your offering, from even just a name and tagline? And when you have sub-brands, good ‘brand architecture’ helps people understand how it all fits together, clears up confusion and makes it easier for customers to find what they want in your offering.

4.    Your people: Brand is not just for your customers. Your own people respond, both consciously and sub-consciously, in many ways to your brand and draw a lot of meaning, value and purpose from what your brand is about. You can develop an ‘employer brand’ which is usually an extension of the main brand, but shaped to suit your in-house story and guide your culture, as well as boost engagement and ownership.

5.    Memorability: Your customers might think you were wonderful in your presentation or the product was great—but who are you, again? Being remembered by the experience of you isn’t enough. You have to be found by name—and brand name is what you need people to remember to type into Google or recognise when they’ve searched for what you do. If you’re not advertising digitally (and even if you do) it’s not actually ‘all about the click’. URLs still get keyed in manually, especially from non-digital advertising or other brand touchpoints, and the right name will be easy to remember and type.

6.    Distinctives: What are yours? Standing out is something every business needs to do, even if that manifests differently for each. Looking unique, showing the potential to offer something the others don’t, and being the specific solution to a customer’s needs: it all helps to sell the business. And while this sounds more like marketing, brand is key to giving marketing a distinctive story to tell.

7.    Competitor’s advantage: If your competition is doing better at any or all of the above, then you’re giving them the advantage and will lose business to them. Similarly, investing in brand will give you the advantage.

Never forget that even if you don’t see anything wrong with your brand, your staff and customers might have a different perspective. Getting an unfiltered opinion from them could help you make powerful changes to your brand and, in turn, your business.

Originally published in Queensland Business News.