In business, your brand is the crux of everything you do as a company. Whether you are a sole trader or a large corporate employing a 200-strong team, everything always comes back down to your brand. Why is this? Well, broadly speaking, your brand acts like the personality of your business, so defining this right from the outset can set the tone of what you do, how you carry things out, how you are seen by your customers and how you ultimately reach your goals.
As a side note, I should explain here that ‘brand’ and ‘branding’ are two separate terms… Your brand is your business by definition, and your branding is what you use to portray that, such as logos and colour palettes. If we created an analogy to compare it we could take a person; their ‘brand’ would be their personality, ethics, values, and goals, while their ‘branding’ would be the clothes they wear, the car they drive and the house they live in. Branding is the projection of the brand.
Where to begin?
Bearing all of that in mind, I think we can agree that your brand is pretty vital to your business, so it is important to spend some time thinking about this, but where to begin? I great place to start is by creating both a vision and a mission statement as these will help you to define your brand and clearly communicate what you stand for. If you’re already an established business, there’s no harm carrying out this exercise too, because it may highlight that you have veered away from your original brand ethos, which is something that can often happen due to a change in customer demand, for example.
Think about what you want your brand to mean and what you want your customers to believe about it, compare this to what your brand actually means and what your customers really feel about it. If these line up, great stuff! If not, it could be time to reassess your brand and whether it needs a realigning to make it work for both now and the future.
As you can see, there’s a lot of ‘thinking work’ that goes on behind the scenes to ensure that you are communicating what you stand for in order to reach your long-term goals. At HI Marketing we can point you in the right direction by helping you to understand what you want your brand to mean to both you and your customers, and then creating a unique marketing communications plan to ensure that the correct message is being portrayed.
If you’d like some advice on how to define your brand, as well as help putting together a strategic marketing strategy, just give me a call at HI Marketing on 07805506477, or drop me an email at hayley@hayleyironsmarketing.co.uk.
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