The power of branding lies within its ability to build relationships with customers. The recognizable colors, logos, and motifs evoke emotions that drive the feeling that a promise has been made. People crave familiarity and derive comfort from knowing what to expect when they use a product or service. When a brand resonates with someone, they feel understood. They feel heard. They feel like they have found their pack.
Transcending the superficial, branding is the ethos of a business. It evokes the mission of the company in an ever-present and tangible way. It tells the story of how the product or service is going to fulfill the customer’s wants and needs. It’s often the difference between attaining a dominant position in a sector or floundering amongst a vast sea of hungry competitors.
What is a Brand?
A brand is a set of features that distinguishes one company from another. Yes, it’s colors, logos, and fonts. But deep-branding goes above and beyond the basic visual cues to exude the company-customer promise in everything it says, does, and represents. Beyond the tactical goals of awareness that comprise a marketing strategy, branding is the essence of who the company is.
By applying distinctive features to the business, consumers know what they should expect to experience and what they shouldn’t. This is the core of developing a marketing strategy. Before deciding how to build awareness (marketing) and how to sell products (advertising), founders must establish a solid brand foundation to engrain customer loyalty.
Here, There, and Everywhere
The disconnect between brand-intention and brand-experience is harbored in both the condition of the physical space and the character of company ambassadors. All too often an incongruence exists between the brand promise and the customer experience. Performance gaps leave the customer confused at the very least, and suspicious at most. These inconsistencies erode the credibility of both the brand and the business.
Although founders are some of the best spokespeople for their startup, their employees don’t always satisfy embodiment standards. Whether it’s a customer service representative on the phone or an executive out to lunch, the spirit of the company is foundational to every interaction and transaction. The way in which people associated with a company behave can either champion or undermine the brand narrative.
Branding is also inclusive of the when, where, and how customers experience the business. The commercial space (both online and in person) should be an expression of a trademark. A clunky website for a DTC startup aimed at reducing friction, an eco-conscious business with excessive plastic packaging, or underskilled staff at a customer service-oriented company. Brand cognitive dissonance can expose itself throughout many points along the customer experience journey.
Shift focus towards reinforcing the tenants of why a consumer would opt to patronize the business and away from the classical marketing items. A steady drumbeat of brand expression and customer promise decouples revenue spikes from isolated marketing campaigns. Customer acquisition costs begin to see their declines in the wake of strong brand identities that extend beyond promotional veneers.
Go Out Into The World and Sell
Strong brands are coupled with purpose-driven capitalism and a deep desire to leave a lasting impact on the world. The struggle arises when founders must walk the razor’s edge between social impact and economic performance. Leaders, while hyper-focusing on doing good, often fail to deliver sufficient growth and profits. This Do-Gooder’s Dilemma plagues them to think that their noble mission excuses them from performing at or beyond the economic scale of their peers. Nobody gets a pass on financial performance. Without a capital engine running at peak efficiency, the company cannot meet its obligations and carry out its social mission.
Brands are developed when innovation solves a problem in a way that speaks to the values of an addressable market. A brand’s lifecycle begins with an alignment of identities and persists as the underlying pulse of every transaction. Each point of sale is an opportunity to reaffirm the commitment that the company has made to fulfill the market’s desires – both social and commercial. Organic and compounding sales growth starts with understanding that ambitious social goals are accomplished by solving the commerce puzzle. No matter how noble the mission, it’s still a business. And a business must produce sales, growth, and profitability.
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