Having worked with small business owners and with corporate heads of marketing for over 13 years now, I can confidently say that there are people who claim to understand what building a brand is about and then there are people who actually understand what building a brand is about.
Many small business owners I know have a distorted understanding what a ‘brand’ should mean for their business. The first thing that comes to their mind when i speak to them about their brand is ‘colour’, ‘logo’, ‘abstract art that has some hidden meaning’, ‘shapes that say something’ and all sorts of concocted notions.
“A brand is a shorthand for what you or your business stands for“
Seth Godin
Its as simple as that. No non-sense statement, that a brand is meant to ‘communicate’ what you stand for in your absence.
As a small business, what should your ‘Brand’ mean to you?
Lets take the example that many of us know and love, what does the brand ‘apple’ trigger in your mind?
To me, the brand stands for being in the forefront of technology, sleek and minimalist design, privacy and security and no-compromise on performance.
Its that simple, apple has distilled all what they stand for into the most valuable brand on the planet. If they come out with a new product, almost everyone on the planet will instantly relate to how that product might look and feel, how it will be to use and the kind of user experience it will deliver. Thats the power of a brand.
No one should ever think of ‘colour’, ‘font’, ‘typography’, ‘palette’, ‘logo’ etc when we talk about the apple brand. You can throw those terms away for the purpose of this conversation since that is not what building a brand is about.
As a small business owner, you should take a long hard look in the mirror and tell yourself what your business stands for. You should articulate it for your customer. It has to trigger an emotion that relates to what your business delivers. There has to be substance in what your business delivers which should reflect in the brand and the branding efforts.
To give you a prescriptive idea of what a brand should mean for you as a small business owner, it should have the following
- Your brand should reflect what your business does exceedingly well
- Your brand should trigger an emotion that you want your customers to feel when they interact with you
- Your product and services must closely relate to what your business actually stands so the branding resonates
- The marketing and the emotional feeling must be consistent across time and place for branding to be effective
If you are the face of your small business, the brand that you are building should reflect your virtues. A friend of mine who runs an Industrial maintenance services company puts his face on the company’s brand name.
He used to head the maintenance department of a large corporation in his earlier career where he built a reputation for reliability and technical expertise. He carried over that reputation to his company and associated that feeling with his own brand.
This is essentially what building a brand and branding is all about. No one cares if your logo is minimalist, if you use the colour ‘orange’ or if you got a celebrity to endorse it. All people care about is if they can trust you for what you offer. Branding has been mixed up ‘creative design’ quite often.
Do small businesses actually need branding?
As a small business owner, you must make an effort to tell the world what your business stands for to evoke a feeling. A ‘brand’ is simply putting a name to that feeling. As you can see if you want to spread the word about what your business stands for, having a brand will help you communicate your substance.
Ultimately, customers will trust you once you have built a reputation over time and with consistency. What a brand will help you do is to communicate that consistency and reputation much more easily in a form that people can understand. Create the brand by becoming what you want the brand to be known for.
When you want to reach a large audience and when you want to re-engage with your customers, having a brand that reflects what you stand for is an absolute necessity. It can be ‘you’ personally as well, but you need to start treating your name like how companies treat a brand.
What building a brand is NOT – if you are a small business
The straight answer is things like colours, fonts, typography, slogans, creative visuals, celebrity endorsements is not what building a brand is about.
As a small business there are some things that you need to focus on while the rest really are just cosmetic changes that don’t really have a history of impacting business growth.
Have you ever heard of any great photos or colour palette or typography or logo that really drove growth for any business? You never hear anyone say, ‘I used the monteserrat font to create my brand design and that gave me like a sudden boost in brand awareness and recognition’. So ignore people and businesses who ask you to focus on that first. They are just plain wrong. It does not even matter if I am using an orange background to highlight this portion. Its the text that matters.
Reiterating here, if you want to create a good brand that can go the distance in the long run, clearly identify what you and your business stand for, connect with an emotion that you want to evoke in your customers and double down on that.
The other aspects are really on the fringes of branding, don’t let any brand consultant swindle money in the name of abstract stuff that no one really understands.
A large organisation I know spent nearly $150K on working with a branding agency to create a brand that no one really knows what it stands for or its purpose. The agency created a montage of abstract figures and logos that was to be put o every powerpoint presentation and brochure. No one understood why or what it meant.
Don’t be like that organisation. Don’t waste money on ‘Branding’ agencies.
Your own team and customers will be able to tell you exactly what your brand and business stands for.
What are the essential elements in a brand that a small business should build?
As I said earlier, while building a brand, the business owner should look at communicating the total essence of what the business is all about. While building a brand, a small business should look at the value it offers its customers, the area of expertise, the perception that customers have, the kind of customer service it offers and the public feedback from customers that is visible to the world. All of these put together help create a great brand.
In addition to these elements, in typical marketing spiel, there are some aspects that small business owners must include in their brand.
Brand Personality (or) Brand Identity
Brand personality or brand identity identity is basically giving a brand a ‘human’ like attribute like a ‘fun’ or ‘serious’ character. This can typically be dependent on your business and the kind of customers you serve. If your business serves consumers who are kids, it can have a ‘fun’ & ‘friendly’ character whereas, if you are selling to adult consumers, the communication can be ‘casual’ and ‘consultative’. Typically brands in the B2B space have a ‘formal’ or ‘serious’ personality.
An exercise that you can do within your company to find what brand identity suits you is to get all your team members and partners together for a brainstorming session. Ask all of them to write down 5 characters each that is triggered when thinking about your company and its products.
Find commonalities in what everyone has written and put the favourite 5 to vote among everyone present. Once you get the votes for each of the top 5, you as a business owner should use your judgement on the top 3 on which brand identity makes the best sense for your business.
While doing this exercise, make sure to have a really diverse group, including customers, partners, suppliers and family members so that you get an authentic sense for how your brand is perceived in the community. Create an open and friendly environment where all opinions are valued.
Many business owners will actually be surprised to see very a different brand identity emerge in the way that your company is actually perceived by various stakeholders, both positive as well as negative. Go with the flow since this exercise will also educate you what you are doing right and where you need to improve.
Brand Purpose
The purpose of a brand is basically is ‘raison d’etre’ or its purpose of existence. Why does your company exist? You could have started your business as an avenue to pursue your passion, or you could have set up a business because you were laid off, or you started your business because you saw an opportunity to make a lot more money than what you earned at a workplace.
Whatever the real reason might be, you need to look in a little bit deeper. Look at what your company does, even in the most basic services like logistics, where your daily job is to move goods from A to B, when you dig a little deeper, you can find a real meaning in the business. This meaning is what your customers will pay you for.
For example, in a trucking business, the meaning can be ‘I solve the biggest problem of on-time and safe delivery of my customer’s “blocked money”‘. This translates to the purpose of being ‘responsible’, ‘reliable’, ‘trustworthy’ and so on when you understand that you are not just moving goods, but you are actually ‘responsible for the customer’s money blocked in the inventory’.
As you dig deeper, you will get to know at its most basic level, what is it that customers are looking for, they are not just looking for a product or service. They are looking for an unspoken need that needs to be fulfilled. The purpose of your brand should be to fulfil that unspoken need.
This purpose should be reflected in every action that you and other representatives of your company does. Be it sales, customer service and even back-end roles need to understand this purpose for you to be able to ‘create’ your brand.
Brand Voice
A business’s brand voice is basically the style in which all your business spoken, written and unspoken communication happens. To put it simply, its the way the business would interact with other people if it were an actual person.
As a small business, its not as critical to spend too much time and energy focusing on brand voice. Instead, look for your brand purpose and brand personality, your brand voice should automatically be taken care from there on.
One element to be taken seriously in your brand voice is the kind of engagement and responses your business puts out on social media. Keep the tone, language and mannerism consistent so that your audience and customers know what to expect.
For now, the only important thing that you as a small business will need to keep in mind from a brand voice perspective is to keep it consistent across whatever you do.
How to build a small business brand step by step?
As I mentioned earlier, it is absolutely necessary for a small business to build a brand so that people recognise what the company stands for. Brand building is a reflection of the core ethos of the business, the reason for its existence and what it should mean for customers, employees and other partners.
The 4 steps that I am outlining below should be done as a group. The group must include long term employees and key partners like a long term supplier or a distributor. The group must also include customers if they are willing to give you time in the initial phase where you are deciding what your business stands for.
I would strongly recommend against using any agency at this stage as they will just ruin it for you.
Decide what you stand for as a business – What is your brand identity?
As I spoke about earlier in the ‘Brand Personality’ section, to establish your brand identity get a team together for a brainstorming session on what everyone feels the reason for existence of the business is. You will need to dedicate about 4 -5 hours on this session. As a business owner you must be willing to accept different points of views since the team will be contributing from their own experience and perspective.
Use the brain storming session to pick the 3 most popular ideas and then you as a business owner must decide on what is best suited for your business. What you also may want to keep in mind is that if there is a disconnect between what you hear from the team as your brand identity and what the reality is, then you have a lot of work to be done at your end to bridge the gap.
Draw a line around your target customer – Your business is meant ONLY for them
You have to be extremely picky about who your ideal customer is after you have decided your brand identity. As a business owner, you must define multiple layers of nuances that define the perfect customer for you. You then need to stubbornly stick to serving that customer in the best possible manner.
To illustrate this, I will refer to a talk given by Seth Godin where he illustrated this with an example of a business that offers Piano coaching lessons.
The business offered ‘Professional’ Piano lessons where the outcome would be that students graduating from the class could perform professionally in a concerto. The classes would be extremely rigorous, it would limit the creative freedom of the students. They would be needed to practice for hours on end and have a regimented practicing schedule.
With such a set-up, they were practically closing doors to parents who wanted their children to have creative freedom while learning to play the piano or those parents who did not have aspirations for their kids to perform at a concerto.
The business was extremely clear on their target customer. They shut the door to everyone else. This ensured their success and their brand actually stood for something worthwhile. This is exactly why segmentation of your market is extremely critical to get your branding right.
Drawing a symbolic line around who exactly is your target customer is a great way to build a ‘halo’ around your brand, which then acquires customers who aspire to be a part of the brand. This also builds a moat around your business where no-one can easily replicate what you stand for.
Apple has done exactly this at a monumental scale.
Your marketing communication must reflect your brand identity
This is where the execution of your brand strategy actually happens to bring your brand identity to life. Marketing is actually the execution of what your brand is all about and how it reaches your target audience. Think of it this way, your ‘Brand’ is the concept and ‘Marketing’ is how you teach that concept to your audience.
The most critical aspect of marketing is the communication style, content and tone. This has to be consistent and must reflect what your brand stands for. In crafting the communication, it could make sense for your business to hire an editor to make sure that everything falls in place. Another good way to ensure that your brand resonates with your target customers is to have a tory telling approach. A good brand story will help customers connect with an emotion and associate that emotion with your brand.
The key here again is consistency.
Some of the best practices that i have seen work well for small businesses is to follow the approach below
- Start with creating long form content for your business that can be used in blogs, emails and other materials – build consistency here
- Transfer that long for content into shorter bits and pieces for presentations, flyers and other shorter forms of written content including email marketing and email newsletters
- Use the long form content to create visuals, infographics and shorter posts for your social media channels
- Let the long form content dictate how you make your audio-video marketing collaterals
I have suggested that you start with the hardest first since long form content takes time and it gives you the opportunity to reflect and fine tune over a period of time. This is also the type of content where a good editor can work their magic.
Once this content is produced, its basically translating the same message in different forms and formats which is relatively easier to do
Design brand elements to reflect your beliefs – start your brand’s journey
The last step is also in the final legs of execution where you use the right set of colours, design a logo and write a slogan to actually put your beliefs on paper.
Many websites and so called ‘experts’ ask you to start from here, but this is really the end. Your design, logo, colour and tagline don’t really matter if they are not based on sound beliefs for your business.
If you are wondering if there are specific guidelines here on what will really work, my view here is keep your design elements reflective of the industry and your audience.
What I mean is you cannot have cartoonish design elements if your company is into investment banking or legal services. Keep your audience in mind. Keep the design sober if your industry is known for such design elements. Get all your creative juices out of your audience appreciates that.
The only recommendation I have here is ‘Don’t over think it’ and ‘Don’t overpay for it’.
How much should building a ‘brand’ cost a small business?
In reality, there are a lot of branding agencies out there who make a hefty sum by giving ‘brand’ consulting or ‘Branding packages’ to small business owners. The only advice they give is to follow some abstract artistic guidelines.
A brand is a living and breathing representation of how your business and its employees behaves with customers, with partners and with society at large. You cannot pay a price and get that in order over night. It takes effort, it takes employee commitment for your business to build a brand and get recognised for your beliefs.
You need to deliver on your lofty promises and you need to maintain the high ideals that you put out in your brand purpose. Once you effectively put these to practice and do it consistently over time, maybe several years, you will realise that you have built a brand that stands for something.
You cannot put a price on that. No ‘branding package’ can deliver that for you.
How much should a Logo, colour scheme, design matter in small business brand?
Oftentimes small business owners ask my opinion on what their logo looks like, if the colours on their brochure looks good and so on.
My personal opinion is that it does not really matter if you as a business cannot ultimately deliver on your promise or beliefs.
However, there is a school of thought which says, colours have an influence on how people make decisions and the kind of emotions some colours trigger in their customers. You may see a lot of business and finance websites and businesses use deep blue shades. You may also see a lot of software businesses use the shades resembling ‘orange’.
There could be some truth to it.
The colour-emotion wheel is something I picked up from an Adobe webpage on building a brand since I thought it to be a useful representation of how some emotions are connected with colours.
As a small business owner you could some more research on how colours really affect customer decisions and then go ahead and implement these in your marketing collaterals.