Brand Building Tips for the Entrepreneur or Aspiring Entrepreneur

Brand Building Tips

I am pleased to announce that we have another guest contributor, Kehinde Adewole, a branding and marketing expert with over 15 years’ experience in multinationals both locally and internationally. She is also the creative director of an affordable fashion label called All About Prints. She would be providing us brand building tips for entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs. My take home from this article is that the CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE is key.  Enjoy.

"A lot of people talk about it. Yet very few people understand it. Even fewer know how to manage it, including the leadership team. Still everyone wants it. What is it? Branding, of course - arguably the most powerful tool since the spreadsheet."

To build a successful brand, one must connect the rational and the emotional, the theoretical and the practical, the logical and the magical to create a sustainable competitive advantage. Brand experts remind us that the ultimate moment of truth for all brands is the customer experience. Brand owners and stakeholders must realize that the "customer perceptions trump our own perceptions."

The morale of the above is plain and simply what branding is all about. Companies or brand owners don't define a brand; the consumer experience is what a brand is all about.

What a brand isn’t

Let me start by telling you what a brand isn't. A brand is not a logo (Nike), a corporate identity system (trademarks), nor is it the product (Louboutin, Coca-Cola Bottle, Guinness or any of your favorite brands.) In fifteen years of managing brands, marketing professionals talk about managing our brands, but what we usually mean is managing our products, or sales, distribution, and quality thereof.

What a brand is

To manage a brand means to manage something much less tangible. A brand is an aura, an invisible layer of meaning that surrounds the product. A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or a company. It's a GUT FEELING, because in the end the brand is defined by individuals aka "Consumers, Shoppers, & Customers," not by companies, markets, or the so-called general public. Each person creates his or her own version of it. While companies can't control the process, they can influence it by communicating the qualities that makes this product different than that product. When enough individuals arrive at the same GUT FEELING, a company can proudly say they have a brand.

In other words, a brand is not What YOU say it is, it's What THEY say it is.

I hope the above clarifies what a brand is and isn't? To compare a brand with its competitors, we need to know what makes it different. Brand management is the management of difference, not as they exist on data sheets but as they exist in the minds of people. The ideas of brands have been around for decades but because our culture and economy has moved from an economy of mass production to an economy of mass customization, our purchasing choices have multiplied.

In today's society, our choices are based on symbolic attributes. What does the product look like? Where is it being sold? What kinds of people are buying it? And finally who makes it? I love my favorite brands because of the degree I feel towards the products or service, rather than the assessment of its features and benefits. This determines whether I buy my favorite brands or its competition.

Five discipline of Brand-Building includes following steps:

1. Differentiating your band

2. Collaborating your brand

3. Innovating your brand

4. Validating your research & key findings

5. Cultivating your brand.

Each of these steps is relative to key successes of some existing brands today. Customer experience should be the end result of any brand owner who wishes to remain a Brand.  Any brand can be charismatic and even yours. The strategy and creative team must work together to build charismatic brand such as Google, Nike, Amazon, Nordstrom, and many more.  

In conclusion, it is important to remain focused when differentiating your brand.  Like building a cathedral, building a brand is a collaborative project.