What is a brand?

I’d noticed there was a ton of confusion about what a brand is—especially among small businesses wanting to create marketing plans...

So I wrote an in-depth article about Brands in 2020 and thought I’d give a little taste here.??

?? For me, a brand is the personality of a business. 

It’s the first thing you think of, or how you feel, when you see a logo or hear its name.

In fact, you can use the word “personality” as a direct substitute for “brand” to instantly clarify its meaning.

So think of your business as a person. What attributes make up its personality?

• What’s its name?
• What does it wear? (i.e., design)
• How does it communicate? (i.e., brand positioning)
• What are its core values and what does it stand for? (i.e., brand promise)
• With whom does it associate? (i.e., target market)
• Is it well-known? (i.e., brand awareness)

This personality varies dramatically between businesses. Toyota and Rolls Royce both produce functionally the same product, but their answers to the above are very different.

To help you get started, I’d love to send you a copy of my How To Build A Brand worksheet. Just comment “worksheet” ??.

Which brings me to brand awareness.

Some small businesses look at the flashy advertising campaigns of well-known brands like Apple, Coca-Cola, Nike etc. and get caught up thinking that they also need to spend time, money, and effort building brand awareness. That’s putting the cart before the horse.

THE BEST WAY TO BUILD A BRAND

Let me ask you a simple question: What came first, the sales or brand awareness?

The sales, of course.

It’s true that as a company gets bigger, brand awareness feeds sales. However, don’t look at what they do now as big companies. Look at what these businesses did to get big in the first place.

When they were small, they certainly didn’t put huge amounts of money into their marketing with flashy ads on social media and brand-awareness campaigns. They hustled, they closed deals and they sold their products.

If Apple, Coca-Cola, and Nike didn’t concentrate on sales to begin with, they wouldn’t exist today and, certainly, there would be no awareness of them.

So that’s why I tell small business owners, “The best form of brand building is selling.” ??

If a brand is the personality of a business, what better way is there for someone to understand that personality than by buying from you. ??

When all is said and done, branding is something you do after someone has bought from you rather than something you do to induce them to buy from you.

In the same way that you get a sense of someone’s personality after you’ve dealt with them, so too it is with your business and its personality.

If you’re in the startup phase or a relatively unknown small business, then you’ll want to focus on direct response marketing to build sales momentum.

FOCUS ON CREATING RAVING FANS

Unless you’re Nike, Google, Microsoft, or another big-name company with a massive advertising budget, I’d say don’t invest in branding (in the traditional, mass-marketing sense—like hiring a brand manager, dumping tons of money into brand strategy, market research, etc.). 

Your focus should be around creating raving-fan customers. If you do this correctly, your brand will build itself.