So this was the backdrop to a presentation I gave last week. I had been invited to speak about the role of brand strategy in driving business growth at a breakfast event hosted by Old Mill accountants. It’s a great subject to talk about because your brand is a great tool for doing just that. I had 15 minutes, so I focused on these three areas:
• Your challenge
• Your audience
• Your message

What I want to talk about is the first point: your challenge. Before you begin any activity you need to consider what it is you need to do, to enable your business to grow. What’s the obstacle you face? The good news is that there are only really three answers. Do you need to…

- Increase the volume of business: Are you looking for more sales? Do you just need more people to buy your products or services? (What’s the easiest way to do this? Is it finding new customers, or getting your existing customers to buy from you more regularly, or buy higher value products / services from you?).

- Stand out from your competitors: Do you need to differentiate yourself from those businesses around you. In an increasingly competitive economy this is becoming more and more important. There are no prizes for coming second. You need to be first choice.

- Reach your target market: Is the secret to your success reaching a particular type of customer, or maybe a new market? This could be exploiting a niche customer you already do some business with. Or it maybe reaching out to a sector you have never done business with in the past.

When you know what it is you need to do – the outcome you need to achieve – you can make sure you use your resources in the most efficient way possible. So if you’re serious about growing your business, you should start here. (I’ll take a look at the other two points in future posts).

If you’re interested in getting some tips on how to do any of those three things listed above, you should take a look at our online Brand Review. You answer three questions and we give you three suggestions. You might also be interested in our brand building event in May. Come and join us. It would be good to see you.

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At the moment we’re running a campaign called Exeter Together for Exeter City Council. It’s a collective purchasing initiative, offering people the opportunity to switch energy supplier and find a cheaper rate. It’s new. It’s one of only four schemes running across the country. And that ‘newness’ seems to causing a few problems. No-one knows what Exeter Together is. People are asking, “Who are you?”

In the first week of our four week campaign the canvassers out on the streets of Exeter were met with suspicion – people thought they were just another energy company trying to sell their products. Who can blame them. As consumers we’re exposed to thousands of sales messages every day. This just looked like more of the same. But those early encounters also uncovered something very important. When the canvassers explained it was a scheme backed by Exeter City Council the suspicion subsided. The residents of Exeter know who Exeter City Council is.

It’s been a great lesson in brand recognition and brand association. As a brand Exeter Together was unknown to the residents of Exeter. But Exeter City Council is a very familiar brand. So, we set about increasing the brand association between Exeter Together and Exeter City Council. We made the Council logo bigger on the press adverts. We put extra Council logos on our vintage double decker bus and the tabards the team were wearing. We strengthened the relationship between the two.

So on week two we had a different story. People had seen the ads in the paper and heard them on the radio. They came to meet the bus as it toured the city, and they brought their energy bills with them, to find out what they could save.

We started the campaign focusing on brand recognition (making sure Exeter Together is noticed), but now we see that the strength of campaign lies in brand association (making sure Exeter Together is trusted).

If you’re interested in getting the best out of your brand, do get in touch. It would be great to have a chat.
Photograph: James Millar

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Brand association is a powerful tool – just look at the success of the Red Bull Stratos event in 2012. But there is a dark side, as Nike have discovered following the arrest of Oscar Pistorius on murder charges. (And it’s not the first time Nike have found themselves in this position).

Although brand association is most visible when it involves global brands and international superstars, it exists at almost every level of business. Just look at the shirts or track suits of junior football teams in your local park at the weekend. Or look at the gaggle of sponsors logos that accompany local food or arts festivals. Many of these organisations and events would struggle to survive without this support. And for companies that want to do business with their local community, recognition of their involvement can be a valuable business development activity. Brand association, and its benefits, are part of the fabric of business.

But it still comes with risk attached – for both parties. What would be the impact if a business sponsor found themselves caught up in an HR issue that made the local press? Or how would a business be effected if an event it sponsored was accused of financial irregularities?

So what’s the solution? For a business, taking a look at your own values is a good place to start. When you know what you stand for, you can begin to look for organisations or events that share (at least some of) those values. With that platform, you can begin to build a relationship that brings benefits for both of you.

If you’d like to know more about brand values, brand association and what it all means for your business, do get in touch.

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Many of the assets we need have been supplied to us – like the logo and the colour palette (and even a video) – but our challenge is to build the messages around the brand that will make people stop and listen. To help us deliver our campaign we’re working with Attention Media, to utilise their PR expertise. The campaign runs for four weeks, from February 18 until March 17, and our aim is to reach out to the community, to explain how they could save £100 on their fuel bill.

So we’re taking a vintage double decker bus to Crealy Adventure Park during half term. Then the following week, taking it out and about in Exeter, so the people who want to save can talk to us and find out how. We’re going to be reaching out to businesses and their staff too, to help them find a better tariff. But we can’t talk to everybody face to face, so there will be editorial and advertising in the local press, adverts on the radio and a social media presence on Facebook and Twitter.

So if you live in Exeter, keep your eyes and ears open. Visit Exeter Together and you could save on your energy bill!

If you’re an organisation that wants to reach out to your ‘community’, do get in touch, it would be great to have a chat.

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The key points I covered were:
• Supermarkets (and their suppliers) have lost customer trust
We trusted them that if it said ‘beef’ on the packet it was ‘beef’ in the packet. Turns out that’s not always true. They’ve broken our trust.

• It’s an opportunity for independent retailers and food producers to fill the gap
The smaller the business, the shorter the supply chain. Smaller businesses know their suppliers and have much more open and transparent relationships.

• Independent retailers and food producers need to start telling their stories
For the businesses that can tell their story (articulate their brand), there’s an audience that’s waiting to listen, and buy from them – if they like the story.

• Supermarkets need to understand their customers
Having lost our trust, they need to understand how to win it back. But big businesses can sometimes be a bit arrogant and out of touch with their customers. (Which is perhaps why they find themselves in this position).

• Consumers are looking for an alternative
Having been let down by the big businesses, consumers are looking for an alternative. Can the smaller businesses step up and fill the gap? Have they got the skills and desire to start building relationships (rather than just selling products)? Do they understand what customers want?

If you’d like to talk me about what this means for your business, do get in touch.

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Great brands are built on passion, and they’re built from the inside out. It’s the passion of the business leader that drives success. Passion is infectious. If your staff see that you’re passionate about what you do, it’s more likely that they’ll share that passion. And with passion on the inside it’s easy to communicate that outside.

Think of Apple. Built on a passion to create products that make it easy for consumers to access technology, it quickly created a community of users who were passionate about their products. And that community has grown and grown and grown. (So have Apple‘s profits).

The problem is that ‘passion’ is a word that frightens a lot of companies. A lot of companies try to steer clear of emotion. They prefer features and benefits. Facts and figures. But customers like emotion (whether they recognise it or not). Most buying decisions are based on emotion, rather than logic. We choose what we ‘like’. In business we choose to work with people we ‘trust’, people we have ‘a good relationship’ with. Those are emotional reasons, not logical ones. If you can understand your audiences emotional need, you’ve taken a big step towards making them customers.

Take a look at this video. It’s a fantastic example of the power of emotion in communication. The victory of passion over logic.

So take a look at your business. Are you passionate about what you do? Do you communicate that passion to your customers? And do they respond?

If you’d like to know more about how to harness the passion in your business, and share it with your customers, give us a call.

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You might have seen this elsewhere on the internet. I came across it a couple of weeks ago, but it happened in 2007. It was an experiment undertaken by, Gene Weingarten, a journalist for the Washington Post, to see if people appreciate beauty when it’s out of context. So he asked world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell, to play for half an hour in a Washington subway station during the morning rush hour. Guess what… very few people paid him any attention. To be honest, I could have told Weingarten that. He didn’t need Joshua Bell.

 
 
But there’s a very interesting story here. Not so much about beauty out of context, but more about brand communication out of context.

As a business, when you want to communicate with your target market, you need to think about when and where you do it. You can have a great campaign in place, but if you try to reach your audience at the wrong time, and in the wrong place, you will fail. Your message will get lost in the crowd. All the resources you have invested in your communication will have been wasted. You need to understand your audience. You need to understand when and where they will be most receptive to your message, and therefore most likely to act on it.

A world class musician is wasted in an underground station in rush hour. But put him in a concert hall for an evening and you’ll have a full house (paying top-dollar for the privilege). So give your brand the time and the place to perform for you. It will get a much better reception (and you’ll get a much better return on your investment in it).

If you’d like to know how to get a return on your brand investment, do get in touch. It would be great to hear from you.

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The most powerful element of brand communications is emotion. If you can change the way someone feels, you can probably change the way they behave. That’s exactly what Massoud and his friends are doing with their boards. Simple messages that engage emotionally (‘Honk if you love someone’, ‘Today is awesome’, ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself’), then change their audience’s behaviour (They honk, smile, wave etc.).

Most businesses deal in emotions. You don’t always appreciate it, but it’s usually true. The role of a business is often solving a problem or challenge, by providing a product or service. That could be helping someone sort out their end-of-year accounts, find a new member of staff, or make better use of their software. Or it might be by providing a great plate of pasta, the perfect pair of shoes or a dream holiday. Whatever you do, there is a good chance that when you’ve done it, your customer will smile. There will be some kind of emotional response: happiness, relief, satisfaction, joy.

The role of your brand is to communicate how and why you make that happen, how and why you create happiness, relief, satisfaction or joy. That’s what will win new customers – and keep hold of your existing ones.

If you take a look at any successful business (and their brand), that is what they’re doing: Making people smile and generating an emotional response. (If you look at an unsuccessful business that’s their problem; not enough smiles, not enough emotion).

So take a look at your business. What will you do today to make someone smile? How will that make them feel?

If you’d like to know more about your brand and how to make your customers smile, you might be interested in coming along to one of our events. Or take a look at our Brand review and start thinking about your next step.

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It’s not hard to see why. In market research there was an overwhelmingly negative perception of Africa. Over half the respondents said the first thing that came to mind they thought of Africa was hunger, famine or poverty. 23% of people surveyed said they turned away from images showing hunger, famine and poverty. Only 1 in 5 believed they could play an active role in changing the situation. For an organisation that exists to fight poverty, through the support of the British public and British business, that’s a challenging scenario. But what’s important is that Oxfam know what people think. They know what they’re up against. They know the attitude they need to change.

The way your business – or charity – is perceived, is essential to your success. If people have the ‘wrong’ perception of you, they will probably do the ‘wrong’ thing. In Oxfam’s case, the ‘wrong’ perception of Africa could have a negative impact on the British public’s willingness to support their campaigns. For a business the ‘wrong’ perception will probably mean that potential customers will choose not to buy your products or services.

What you say about your business is really important. What people think about your business is even more important. Take a look at Starbucks. In the same Quarter that saw protests over their (non)payment of tax, their number one competitor, Costa, saw their sales rise 7.1%. The behaviour of Starbucks’ changed the way their customers thought about them, which had an impact on their behaviour. (No-one is producing figures that link those two issues, but it’s surely more than a coincidence).

So what do your target audience think about your business? If they’ve got it ‘wrong’, you need to do something to help them get it ‘right’.

If you’d like to know more about how you can do that, you should join us at one of our brand seminars.

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Any successful brand will have:

Passion. Great brands are driven by passion – a passion to do the thing that they do, and to do it well.

A great product / or service. You have to be good at what you do. A successful brand is built by loyal customers, and customers are only loyal to a product and/or service that delivers a great brand experience.

Customer focus. You need to know who your customers are. You need to be able to describe them in detail, so that you can communicate with them clearly.

A clear message. Your customers need to know that you understand them and what they want. You need to explain the benefit you bring to them. Not the products and services you offer, but the benefit you deliver. This is how you build loyalty.

A clear purpose. A successful brand has a clear understanding of why they exist – what their purpose is. It’s not about making money. It’s usually about doing something better.

If you’ve got big plans for 2013 and you want to build your brand, take a look at this list and make sure you can put a tick next to each one.

If you’d like to know more about building your brand, do get in touch. It would be great to hear from you. Or you might like to join us at one of our brand seminars.

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