Your brand is more than your logo. In a commercial context, brands are all about connecting customers to businesses. Your logo and its ability to send out the right signals about your brand and what it represents is an all-important connecting tool in your business armoury. But it’s not the only tool.

To make that logo as powerful as possible and to give it an appropriate context, it’s essential to first identify and define the heart of your brand, its purpose and its cause. This is what branding means in the truest sense.

I’d like to share with you, exactly what that means for your business. 

There are five key points to consider about your brand:

1. If marketing is how your business goes to market, then your brand is your Marketing Director, informing the focus of all marketing activity.

From the products and services through to your people, your environment, processes and support systems – it encompasses your entire business proposition! Marketing without brand clarity is like playing the lottery, characterised by the highs (when you get lucky) and the lows (when you’re not) and having no idea of what’s working and what’s not. It’s a frustrating and inconsistent approach which doesn’t need to happen. Is your brand’s proposition clear and compelling for your most valuable customers and advantaged versus competitors and reflected in all your brand does?

2. Brands are all about making the right connections for your business.

The right connections allow your business access to the right customers, the right channels, the right prices, and the right territory in the market. Is your brand set up to make the right connections? Is it better at making those connections than your direct competitors?

3. Who are your most valuable customers?

What are their needs? How does your brand address these needs, so it becomes the best solution for these people? Brands (not blands!) are defined by their actions. They stand for something clear and valuable to some and stand out from their competitors as a result. A powerful brand can clearly project what it represents and why that’s valuable to those it wants to connect with.

4. A brand is a promise, it’s not a logo.

What does your brand promise and does it keep to it every time? What is its sense of purpose and how does that resonate with your most valuable customers?

5. What is your strategy to create tribes of Raving Fans

Customers who love what your brand does for them, so they not only keep coming back for more, want more but will also, crucially, willingly and strongly recommend your brand to others.

Businesses that successfully and profitably create Brand Fans typically grow 2.5 times faster than those businesses in their market that don’t. Now that’s worth having and exploiting!

So, there’s a lot more to ‘branding’ than that all-important logo. If you correctly gear your brand to your business, it will become one of your most powerful growth enablers and you should be using it for all it’s worth.

Is your brand working as hard as it could be to take your business to the next level? We’d love to discuss that question with you and explore what more could be done – why not get in touch!