Why is a brand strategy for your small business important? Why is branding important?

Awareness

Branding helps your customers to spontaneously recall your company or helps your customers to recognize that you exist.

Experience

A consistent brand strategy will help your SME to create a brand in the minds of your customers through your customers’ experiences across all your touch points. The intentional customer experience must be defined and be consistent for your customers to create your brand in their minds.

Essence

A brand strategy helps your SME business to express its promise in the simplest, most single-minded terms. However, it is not something that is whimsical as it should be rooted in a core customer need.

Personality

Your brand strategy will help your small business customers to attribute or give your brand human personality traits (fun, warmth, innovative, cool, etc.). This perceived personality of your brand by your customers is how you differentiate in the minds of your customers. Brand personality does not happen overnight. You as a small business owner should have a long-term view as to how you want your brand to be perceived by your customers. These personality traits will inform the brand behaviour through all your external and internal communications, packaging etc., and through the people who represent business brand – you and your employees.

Harmonization

A purposeful brand strategy will ensure that all your products and services, especially if you have a broad range of services or products will have a consistent name, visual identity and, ideally, positioning across all the markets that you operate in.

Identity

A purposeful brand strategy will define the outward expression of your small business brand, including your small business name and visual appearance. This is important as the brand’s identity is its fundamental means for your customers to recognize your brand. A consistent visual identity will help your small business brand to differentiate from your competitors.

Image

A consistent branding derived from a deliberate brand strategy will derive a consistent net “out-take” of your brand for your customers. This image is derived based on the experiences of your products or services and are informed impressions as to how well your small business meets your customers’ expectations.  For potential customers your small business brand’s image in their minds will be based upon uninformed impressions, attitudes and beliefs.

Positioning

A purposeful brand strategy helps you to have a distinctive position in your market place to enable your customers in your target market to identify and differentiate your small business brand. Positioning doesn’t just involve the logos or other visual identities alone, but involves leveraging and the careful manipulation of every element of the marketing mix, to deliver a superior and differentiated proposition to your customers.

Values

A purposeful brand strategy will help you define and design the code by which your small business brand lives. The brand values act as a benchmark to hire, measure behaviours and overall performance.

Architecture

A brand strategy helps your small business to define its brand architecture. In other words, it helps your business to determine how it structures and names the brands within its portfolio. This is important for a small business owner or investor having a diverse portfolio of goods, services or businesses. There are three main types of brand architecture systems:

• Monolithic – where the group name is used on all products and services offered by your holding company.
• Endorsed – where all sub-brands are linked to your group brand by means of either a verbal or visual endorsement.
• Freestanding – where the group brand operates merely as a holding company, and each product or service is individually branded for its target market

Associations

A brand strategy encompasses your customers’ feelings, beliefs and knowledge that existing and potential customers have about your SME brand. These positive (or negative) associations are derived as the sum of all their experiences across all touch points. These experiences must be consistent with the brand positioning and the basis of differentiation.

Commitment

A structured, well defined and purposeful brand strategy will increase the commitment of your customers to your propositions in the market.  If your customers’ commitment to your brand is high, the propensity for repurchase and/or reuse is very high. The level of commitment indicates the vulnerability of your SME brand and is a good indicator of the probability of poaching of your customers by your competitors.

Value or equity

Having a purposeful brand strategy will increase the long-term value of your small business through the increased brand equity derived from the sum of all distinguishing qualities of a brand, drawn from all relevant stakeholders. This will facilitate personal commitment from you and demand of you for the brand; these differentiating thoughts and feelings make the brand valued and valuable and therefore your small business more valuable.

Extension

A consistent, structured and purposeful brand strategy will help your small business to leverage the equity and values of the brand to take the brand into new business opportunities, partnerships and newer markets/sectors.