Think of your brand as an asset residing on your balance sheet that encapsulates the virtues of your business. Some of those virtues are linked to features and benefits of your products or services, while others are associated with the merits of your sales execution and the satisfactory customer service you provide. The totality of these subjective associations, impressions and practical interactions
To summarize, your brand is more than your logo or how your website and business letterhead look. Each of those elements deserve your attention, but no one asset captures the entirety of what your brand means to your customers. To do your brand justice requires that you think purposefully about how it impacts other business decisions.
Few other factors are as crucial to your success or as fundamental to your identify as brand. As the bedrock of your business strategy, it deserves careful cultivation. Interbrand, a brand consultancy that publishes an annual appraisal of top performing brands, stresses the importance of providing employees with a clear sense of your brand’s mission. “Clarity about what the brand stands for is the condition for growth. A well-crafted, well-communicated, and shared vision of what the brand stands for, who it is targeting, and how it should be experienced is a foundational cornerstone that will ensure the whole business is pulling in the same direction to support growth objectives.”
In light of the importance brand plays in your business’ success, consider completing a brand exercise that challenges you to define the discrete elements comprising your brand identity. What ideals or value commitments shape your brand personality?
Sometimes it’s difficult to manage a brand-engineering exercise internally. If you’re struggling to pinpoint your key differentiators or define your business objectives in ways that appeal to external audiences, consider recruiting the aid of an experienced brand consultancy.