BRANDING

Exposing the branding myth

It’s commonly held that branding a product or service is the exclusive domain of large companies with big marketing budgets. This is a myth. If you sell something, you have a brand. Moreover, you can have a brand without any of the things normally associated with brands – fonts, colors, graphics. How can this be? Because a brand is the sum of all your customer interactions or “touches”.

There is a touch when a customer sees your ad, there is touch when a customer gets your bill, there is a touch when a customer steps into your retail outlet or office. Successful organizations with strong brands are aligned so that each of the touch points usually leads to a positive experience. Less successful organizations do one of the following:

• deny the importance of branding, and end up with default branding – the branding that naturally develops through your customer interactions
• confuse the customer by presenting a brand that has nothing to do with the customer’s actual experience
• constantly change their brand identity, a costly strategy because brand awareness is lost with each change
• obsess about the minutia of a letterhead design, but won’t spend even one day a year on the marketing planning that is a must to create a brand that is highly valuable because it generates all-important repeat business