Is your brand working FOR or AGAINST you? Find out how to decide if it’s time to create, nurture or demolish your brand.
1. BRANDS THAT NEED TO BE CREATED:
If you’re someone who’s just developed a new skill and want to start a business from it… or if you’re someone who’s worked for one or several different companies and have gotten the confidence to take your skills independently, or if you’ve found a great product line that you want to import under your own business but don’t know quite how to market it… these are all great reasons why a new brand would be created. If this applies to you, then you want to start by focusing on some key elements to develop this brand – your mission statement, tagline and your company name.
A brand strategist may be of help to you here. Creating a brand from scratch can be quite lucrative. There are basically no rules until you create the rules, compared to owning a franchise for example, where rules are provided to you. With a brand developed from scratch, everything you start, everything you communicate, everything you develop including the person that you are, and the way you structure the business, that’s all based on your brand. And how strict you are with what you deliver as a product or service is going to determine how people perceive your brand.
Really, the first impression is the only impression you’re gonna have when you’re first starting out. So you have to make sure it speaks to the right audience.
2. BRANDS THAT NEED TO BE NURTURED:
Maybe you’re someone who already took that leap of faith and created a new brand, and you have hit the ground running, and you didn’t have the time to focus on really developing those brand elements because you were doing what was more important than anything else when you start a new business – and that’s, you know, making that money! Providing customer service. Making sure that the company survives. You probably got busy very quickly, or maybe you experienced a very long drought and had to start clicking on all cylinders… sometimes the brand elements take a back seat.
Making that decision to give your brand the care that it deserves, will assure your clients that you are moving forward. When your clients see that you are also taking care of your own business in addition to theirs, you’d be surprised how much more business you’ll get. For example, letting people know that your values have changed or been re-focused, will tell your clients what direction you’re heading in.
There are a lot of times when you’re starting a new business that you’re taking any and all clients, and you realize that there is some work that you don’t want to do or don’t have time to do right off the start. So at some point along the way, actually taking that time to give the brand some attention and making some changes, even subtle changes, and echoing them throughout all your marketing, you’ll start noticing that your clients will start communicating that back to you. You’ll find out more about what your clients need and want and what they don’t. That can be the start of even better brand communication. That’s good business. Nurturing your brand, giving it a face lift, will do that.
3. BRANDS THAT NEED TO BE DEMOLISHED:
This is a very touchy subject. There are times where you may want to be the value-based brand. Sometimes you can fall into that rut of putting your products and services on really big sales, all the time, just to try and get some sort of interest. You’ve fallen on some down times, or maybe you just didn’t know what on earth you were doing when you were starting out. And things just haven’t gotten better. The clients you have dictate that. They just want to keep getting deals and don’t see value. You can’t keep doing deals for the rest of the life span of the business. If this happens to work for you, then, “keep making yo paper boo boo”. If you want to upgrade your clientele, and get unstuck from getting the same clients over and over, wanting too much for too little, you may need to just demolish the old brand. This is a lot to deal with especially for those in the creative fields. But if you want to move yourself forward, and want to do something else, you have to start from scratch.
This time around you’ll know better, you’ll know exactly what you want and what you’re looking for. When you do something new, the clients that did see your value will actually follow you, and you’ll get rid of all the riff-raff. Re-branding is a great way to let people know you’re moving to the next level.
When we first started our branding and graphic design business 16 years ago, we had wonderful clients that were super nice, lovely to work with, and really taught us a lot. But we weren’t charging nearly enough – we really knew nothing going into it. At some point, it just wasn’t enough anymore. We needed to make our business sustainable and viable for years and years to come. A re-brand was exactly what we needed. And with that, many clients followed and many didn’t. We stepped into quality clients that provide us with inspiring and creative work, more under our creative control. We now provide better service and a better product. We’ve turned ‘quicker is better’ into ‘quality is better’. We haven’t looked back.
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