Very often within this industry we segment marketing and branding; it is very much a service of two steps. You find your brand, then you market it through a new shiny website proudly displaying the new logo you have slaved over for months. Then you promote relentlessly via a social media campaign involving tweeting, posting, pinning and circling till the cows come home. The point is it’s just not that simple. The lines between where brand end and marketing begins are blurred to say the least.
There are so many ways to create brand presence with a real difference. It is very much about doing everything perfectly. Sorry… were you expecting me to say just join twitter and get some press releases out there and all will be well. That is just not the case. It’s hard work. It’s about building up a preferential attachment within your market which will make your customers or clients think of you rather than your competitors. You need your brand to become almost a Freudian slip. When people hear your industry name they instantly think of you and the key things you do.
An example of this is Coca Cola. I say the brand name and instantly think five or six icon campaigns that I am sure you all will know and love. That truck that light up all of our Christmas’, not to mention the famous winking Santa which creates childlike excitement even in the most cold-hearted of grown ups. The recent ingenious ‘share a Coke’ campaign, which gave a new life to what we associate with the brand, breathed a new type of sentiment. This new sentiment wasn’t seasonal, or in relation to a sporting hero swigging the stuff, it was about each and every one of us (well except if you have a silly name like Rionne). This campaign was a trigger for not just sales, but a mass wave of social media interactions and product placement money couldn’t buy and all simply by stamping Dave on the side of a regular bottle of fizz. This is true branding down to the letter, it isn’t simply the logo we buy, nor the product. It is an idea we buy that sits in our hearts and minds without us ever knowing how it got there.
These are just a few general examples, not even mentioning how the different ranges of the product are marketed in silo campaigns. Take Diet Coke for example. I can’t look at a can without imagining a single bead of condensation running down the side and a tall, dark handsome man in a white t-shirt that is certain to come off in one scenario or another created by a gang of ogling women. We have been completely boxed in girls; its all a trick – empowering women to turn into the predatory stereotype and gang up on one poor, extremely good looking man. Not to mention the accompanying music, which I am sure we have all sang a little intoxicated at some point – admit it ladies. Yet we are the market that will buy the calorie free pop and this is all for us. Further proving the point is the designer brand partnership campaigns such as the Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Jacobs edition. Again, all just preferential attachment. Now I have an additional reason to buy the product due to the designer status and for those who previously didn’t have that strong an urge to these brands associated will surely do so.
Well the point is these are the real things which make brand. The things we can recall in an instant. Marketing, design, advertising, endorsements all do this. Not just one single means to market.
I hear you say: “What does this have to do with my business, I am b2b and don’t sell a product”.
Give me some time I am getting there. Consumer product brands are brilliant at this art, but so are those within the world of b2b. It is a matter of creating a real difference and positioning your service in a way that you are surrounded by positive connotations; whether it is selling the service, the business vision or yourself.
There are two crucial exercises that must take place to really know what your brand truly is. How can anyone else know if even you don’t know what makes you truly different.
Firstly, there is a matter of competitor and industry analysis. Look to your left and see what is it that makes your USP any different to the competitors whom sit level pegging with you. The likelihood is you will find you are not that different at all; your USP is far from unique. What the difference is will be your customers understand you and your way of doing things. It is crucial that you lace every part of your marketing with this message. Whether it is in a 140 character tweet or a 60 page white paper report. The essence of you and your business must leave a lingering taste that people can easily recognise. The things which make you stand out from the crowd and areas of your business that you are miles ahead must be the messages which people know within a flash. What makes you the best? Is it price point? Being the industries most friendly? Or is it having a high success rate for clients? This must be articulated as your company point of view.
The second step in the process is knowing what your core values are: what is the essence of you and your work. This is often found not in your own head or in the original business plans, but in the minds of staff. They know your vision and feel the presence of what truly makes a difference between your business and the company next door. You will find common themes and sentences which summate what the essence of your company personality is. When you have this, and only when you have this can you really go to market.
With these findings you can develop a colour palette which shows the traits of persona of your service and company. This can be through logo, website or any means of marketing and communication correspondence. You now should know what the company voice is, what tone it adopts what it’s humour is… if your brand was a living, breathing human being would he or she be a thoughtful introvert or a spontaneous extrovert. Know this, and then be that person. Everything down to your email signature should be an extension of this individual.
Once you have this personality it is a matter of using a variation of tools to express who you are. Have great and compelling content. When I say content this isn’t just written content but what your office looks like; it all has to marry up. A potential client must get the same feel from a Facebook post as they do entering your office space and being handed a cup of tea. There are often examples where companies do one and not the other. They will have a wonderful team and staff presence that once they get a meeting and have a client in front of them they fall instantly in love with the brand, yet the breadcrumbs that show this personality and lovability are just nowhere to be seen. Equally, many a company falls foul of doing the opposite. They have a fantastic social media voice as they recently employed a graduate guru that has taken the beast by the reigns and got it trending. Potential clients who interact then get curious and want to see what is happening behind the keyboard and find a pretty standard business, not quite as enthusiastic as the social media person. They are left somewhat disappointed.
A good example of having brand nailed is on our doorstep in the form of UKFast. They have a real sense of who they are from staff to the collateral they send out. Not to mention how they have created a space which defines who they are as a company. I find myself using the term UKFast green for the paint they have on the walls when I see it in another location. You know you are doing something right when you have a pantone people are calling ‘your’ colour. It’s all about an experience of brand and they have that done quite beautifully. I recently spoke to Chris Marsh who told me:
“We want to give customers and visitors the VIP experience when they deal with us over the phone or in person. This is a massive part of our brand moving forward for the future in a competitive service industry.
We’ve always believed in our abilities to stand out, so by making our contacts feel appreciated and understanding them gives us the advantage.”
Karl Barker from Cube3 commented:
“A brand means profits. If your brand isn’t directly linked to the commercial imperative of profits then your business will not be maximised.
Many businesses behave as though their brand is a result of what they do – they manufacture a brand as a requirement, often a requirement they fail to focus on, something they’re expected to have.
Truly successful businesses recognise that they are a brand first and last and what they do is a result of how they define themselves. It’s the why that defines the what – not the other way around.
And why you’re in business is ultimately to make profits. That doesn’t mean branding is a purely capitalist construct – profits can mean donations, recruiting volunteers, any positive result.
The point is – most of our peers see branding, the ‘why’, as a ‘soft art’ while we see it as a ‘hard science’ based on insights and strategy, commercial analysis and profiling audiences based on their propensity to buy. Once you understand who will want or need your product or service or conversely how to adapt your product or service so it’s wanted or needed then you can fashion the softer creative skin because people seldom buy superficial, the creative must drive them to a brand that has depth (authenticity, credibility, honesty).”
At Neil Walker Digital Group we try to tease out who you are. It’s not just a matter of jumping straight to campaign. There is a process of understanding your business, what have you done to date to be proud about? What makes you a game changer in your industry? I can only get so much from analysis tools; granted I can find an insightful overview of any industry using our software with a click of a button. But that doesn’t tell me what your ‘share a Coke’ will be. I get unquantifiable value from meeting all levels of staff and finding what is the true persona of a company. Then we can create impeccable content and a real hard hitting campaign to convey that message; but only once everything before has been taken care of. So when people ask me what brand is, I ask them to tell me about you – then I can provide the answer.
No campaign is the same. It’s a matter of taking the key components of and delivering a consistent message through the channels at hand. This can involve staff training, so they can grow to be an extension of the brand through their own social media profiles. Creating interesting content will scream who you are, how your service applies to different audiences, and of course ensures that someone who has never heard of your business can find out what your brand stands for within a matter of seconds.