Our perspective of our self tends to be very different to the views held by others. And, such is human nature, often what is most important is not what is said, but what is not said.

The nature and value of branding to a business is so very similar. Before we begin a marketing project, one of the very first questions we will address is ‘What are the brand values?’ This inevitably leads into identifying the unique selling points (USPs) from which we will draw the building blocks for our concepts and strategy. Staff internal to the business will have an approximation of how their brand or business is perceived, but not the clarity or perspective a neutral agency can achieve. At this stage, honesty is critical!

Painting a Portrait

Just as every individual has a talent set – a unique proposition, so does every business. The more those differences are accentuated through the personality of the brand, the more detached the customer proposition is from cost and competition. After all, the faceless brand can only succeed if it is the cheapest. Of course, and I am contradicting myself here, like the human counterpart, there is always a face. Tesco’s own label foods are specifically designed to look unattractive. It would cost no more per unit for the store to move away from blue and white and produce beautiful packaging but this would steal sales from the higher end choices offering the stores greater profit margins (often for the very same product!). Customers seeking value want to identify value in the packaging.

The character of your business, products or services needs to be understood and detailed like a novelist would their own characters. The greater the clarity, the less noise in the messaging. We have all met someone who is ‘full of themselves’  - loud, noisy, brash and arrogant. Do we like such people? No. The truth is, such individuals are generally expressing confusion and an inner weakness. Individuals with a clear purpose and confidence in who they are need to say fewer words. They are often understated and concise and thereby achieve far greater impact and relationship success. And so it is with brands!

Reduce The Noise!

Understanding and identifying your target market is critical to profiling your brand. Target markets are living and breathing and ever changing and so must your brand live and develop. Therein lies the value of rebranding. You are revitalizing and emphasising the core values of your brand whilst redressing it to relate to the generational shifts in fashion, taste and circumstance. As people develop and grow their relationships, so must a brand.

The clearer the personality, the less noise, the more confident the messaging and greater the impact. Successful branding ensures less is more. Now, that is good news for the marketing budget in a recession!

To sharpen the edges of your brand with limited advertising spend, consider stirring controversy, humour, strong personality and mystery. The myriad of online and mobile marketing opportunities now allow canny brand owners to stretch smaller marketing budgets much further than was historically possible.

There is also a trend towards what I term ‘brandshare’. This is where you develop a community out of your customer base and position your brand at the hub. This trend is propelled by online and mobile applications providing now near endless opportunities for connecting, sharing and discussing. For example, an increasing number of online stores such as Amazon are now selling their products through their customers’ reviews, not their own blurb. Encouraging your own customers to perceive your brand as their own and promote your own products! Can it get better than that?

Matthew Rymer