What’s your brand? Part II

In part 1 I spoke about the visual aspect of your brand. This time I am going to talk about why your brand is actually a whole lot more than just your logo.

Ultimately your brand produces an unconscious emotional response from your target market. It is this emotional response which plays a key role in determining if they will chose to approach your business or not.

This is partly based on familiarity (i.e. visual recognition), however it is also based on a deeper level of understanding of what your business does, how it does it, and the kind of experience they will have when they engage with your business.

You want your customers to have a strong and positive understanding of your business and the messages you choose to communicate to them. It is your job to ensure that this is reinforced every time a customer interacts with your business.

This then broadens out the notion of branding to include areas such as:

- signage
- uniforms
- quality of interaction between staff and clients
- presentation of staff
- follow through of customer service commitments
- pricing
- business reputation (including word of mouth)

Some of these areas will require an investment of money to address, however many are areas which can be easily addressed and improved ‘in-house’.

Spending the time to recognize what is the branding of your business, and then identifying areas where you can improve  or more effectively communicate this, is a simple yet highly effective action to improve the sales of your business.

“This article was written by Tracy-Madonna Wylie, Business Manager, Nutbirdz Strategic Marketing, and printed in the My Marketing Companion column of the Fraser Coast Chronicle in 2008.”