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The Secret to Managing Your Brand
A lot has been written about brand development, brand management, brand success, and brand mistakes in the past 10 years. There are consultants all over the country just waiting to take your money so they can show you what your brand should be. But the secret to brand management is something your mother and father taught you when you were still a child. They probably taught you something like this: “Remember that how you look isn’t what’s important – it’s how you act and who you hang around with that determines how people will judge you.” Or maybe they quoted Abraham Lincoln and said “Character is a tree, and reputation is its shadow.” If you substitute the word “character” for “brand,” you can save yourself a lot of money on consultants.
That’s not all there is to brand management, but it is this simple. You have to start by understanding what the character of your business is. Let’s start with a definition of character. Character is a set of qualities that make somebody or something distinctive. Obviously these can be positive or negative qualities, but why would anyone consciously choose negative qualities? Consciousness is the key to a good character. If character is not consciously chosen, undesirable aspects may be unconsciously acted out.
So you must ask yourself, what is the character of your business? What consciously chosen qualities do you want your customer to see over and over again? And how do these qualities make you distinctive? In order to be competitive, customers must be able to distinguish your business from their other options. While assessing the qualities you wish to communicate, give consideration to which ones would make you truly distinctive.
For example, if part of your company’s character is to truly be of service to your customers, does everything your company does support this characteristic? Are your return policies consistent with this message? If you own a store, are your staffing policies lined up with this characteristic, so customers get warm, professional and timely service? Does this characteristic get reinforced through the word choices and the images in your advertising? In brands, as in life, people judge us by what we do – not by what we say. This is brand management.
Think of everyone’s favorite nemesis, Wal-Mart, for a moment. The most important aspect of their company character is to offer their customers the best price always. Their brand message acknowledges that their customers not only want, but need, to get more for their hard-earned cash, and Wal-Mart endeavors to serve that need. Everything that Wal-Mart does – from the extreme demands on their supply chain to the extreme control of their store operations – supports this need to keep their costs low so they can keep their promise of low prices. Whether or not you agree with Wal-Mart’s social impact, it’s easy to see that they are demonstrating their chosen character. This is brand management.
Saturn is another good example (or it was at the beginning – GM has done a lot to damage it in the past few years) of a brand determining its character and then delivering consistently on it. Saturn decided that their character was about service. They questioned everything about the car-buying experience and changed every element that didn’t deliver on the promise of service. Saturn experienced staggering brand loyalty up until the late ‘90s, as customers responded to this characteristic in record numbers. That was brand management.
What is the character of your business? And if you’re not sure – it’s not too late! Think about it now, make some decisions, and then figure out what elements of your current business deliver on that conscious character, and which elements need to be overhauled. The elements to be considered include everything: operating policies, staff quality, service style, store layout, product selection, pricing, word choices (both spoken and in marketing materials) and tone, colors used in store design and advertising, even the fonts you choose for your print materials and your website! Your customers will begin to notice this consistent character shining through, and brand loyalty will be the result.
Sure you could learn a lot more about brand management from reading technical articles and books on branding – and a lot of that information is quite good. But if studying branding doesn’t make it to the top of your to-do list, don’t worry. You already know a lot more about branding than a lot of MBAs if you remember to treat brand as you do your personal character. Oh, plus one more thing your parents taught you. Remember that all the creativity and smarts in the world don’t count for anything if you don’t apply them with discipline.
Character and Discipline. These are the things that really matter in a brand.
© 2007, Andrea M. Hill
Originally written for Rio Grande’s “News & Product Review,” May, 2007
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Practical. Applicable. Inventive. |
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Hill Management Consulting |