This chapter gives you a look at when and how to brand and why branding is worth every bit of the effort it involves.
To brand or not to brand, that is the question. Or at least that’s the question that hangs in the air until people who aren’t quite sure about whether they really need a brand hear this truth: More than any other quality – even more than strong financial statements, great management, or terrific product or service ideas – brands are the key to winning long-term growth and success.
By building a brand, you cast a strong, clear vision of what you stand for. Without a brand, you blur into a dime-a-dozen, one-seems-just-like-another category called commodities. In a sea of similar choices, branding differentiates and elevates your offering, paving the way for awareness, preference, selection, and profitability.
If you can think of even one way your offering is meaningfully different and better (not just different, but meaningfully different and better!), then you have at least one reason to build a brand that moves it into the prestigious realm of people, products, businesses, and organizations that stand out as distinctly different, preferable, and more valuable than all the others.
Branding to avoid the budget-busting commodity trap
Warren Buffett, widely regarded as the 20th century’s most successful business investor, sums up the formula for business success in four frequently quoted words: Buy commodities, sell brands.
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✔ Brands are the opposite of commodities. A commodity becomes a brand when those in the marketplace understand and value compelling characteristics that make it different and better than others in its category. Branding is a powerful tool that differentiates an offering in ways that develop consumer preference and deliver pricing power – the power to raise prices without losing business.
Airline tickets, laptop computers, and strawberry jam start out as commodities. All competitors address basically the same need in basically the same way, and if customers see no reason to choose one over the others, they simply opt for the one with the lowest price. Yet every day, customers make conscious decisions to buy the offering of one airline or computer manufacturer or jam maker over the others because of the unique attributes they trust to be true about their choice. Maybe they’re won over by the frequent flyer club options, service or warranty program, organic ingredients, or any of a zillion other distinguishing characteristics – the brand promises — that they understand and believe are worth premium pricing.
As proof that brands lift offerings out of crowded commodity categories, look at the following examples:
When you build a brand, you develop value, trust, preference, and the potential for higher prices and profit margins.
Branding to cast your vision
Your brand reflects the vision of the good that you aim to achieve. Just as the images on a country’s flag symbolize the core of what’s important to that culture and nation, your brand reflects the core of what’s important to you and your organization. It’s the banner that signifies what you’re passionate about, your fundamental values, what you aspire to achieve, and the promise on which you stake your reputation.
A well-defined vision is important whether you’re building a personal brand or an organizational brand:
✔ If you’re developing a personal brand, your vision clarifies the qualities and characteristics for which you want to be known. It keeps you on track and steers the presentation of an authentic, well-aligned voice and presentation in all personal communications, whether online and offline.
✔ If you’re developing a product, business, or nonprofit brand, your vision defines – for every person in your organization – why you’re doing what you’re doing and the ultimate good you want to achieve through your success. Establishing a clear vision keeps your entire team on track and makes branding an almost-transparent process. You don’t have to tell people why upholding the brand promise is important. By understanding the long-term vision you’re working to achieve, the brand promise becomes a commitment that’s caught, not taught, throughout the organization. Chapter 6 guides you through the process of putting your brand into words.
Great brands stem from the beliefs, personalities, and values of those leading the brand. They result in a brand culture that’s authentic and heartfelt.
Branding to win trust and increased value
Instinctively, you’ve proven the influence of brand trust thousands of times over. Think of the last time you reviewed job applicants, or scrolled through screen-after-screen of shoe choices, or scanned reviews for movies playing in town. You had to make a choice, and chances are good that you opted for the offering you thought you could trust. Branding, or lack thereof, led to your selection.
If you viewed all the choices as similar and fairly risk-free, you probably let convenience or low price tip your decision. That’s because no single offering inspired your trust or presented distinguishing benefits, so you went with the quickest, least-expensive option. (The section on commodities earlier in this chapter has more on the topic of undifferentiated offerings.)
But if, after scanning all your options, you settled on an offering that took you out of your way or caused you to pay a little or a lot more, your decision was likely based on a sense that the one you selected was worth the price or the trouble because you believed it wouldn’t let you down. That trust, almost certainly, was the result of good branding.
You can build a brand for a product or service, a small or huge company, or a nonprofit organization. You can build a brand for yourself, called a personal brand, which is a brand category so hot that we’ve given it its own chapter (Chapter 4). In this section we give you an overview of all the kinds of brands you can build.
Product brands
Products are tangible, physical items that you can hold in your hands or see with your own eyes before you make the purchase.
If a product lacks any perception of distinct quality or value, it’s known as a commodity (think salt). When a manufacturer wins awareness in the marketplace that its product has characteristics that make it different and better than others in the product category, that commodity turns into what’s known as a consumer brand (think Morton’s). (Refer to the preceding section for more on commodities.)
Branding is a powerful way to differentiate a product in ways that create consumer preference and premium pricing.
Service brands
People buy services sight-unseen. Unlike tangible, three-dimensional products that shoppers can see and feel and try out before buying (or at least look at on your website), people buy services purely based on their trust that the person or business they’re buying from will deliver as promised.