The interesting thing about a brand is that the moment you decide to build one, it can become the thing that gets you up in the morning. It is the pile of light that fuels your passion, the thing that the world would miss if you weren’t here. It is your magnetic north.
Having a brand is an important part of building a business, especially for a small business. It helps you distinguish yourself from others, stake out your territory in the world, understand your audience and your connection to them. Ultimately, it can become the thing that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
But what exactly is a brand? Where does it live? Is it your logo, your business cards, your signage, your flyers or the advertising campaign you run?
The answer is not quite that simple.
What Is a Brand?
These things may all be manifestations of your brand, but your brand largely lives in the hearts, minds, and experiences of your employees and your customers.
You and your team are what hold the brand, and your customers carry their own perception of it in their hearts and minds. A brand doesn’t live in a logo, a business card, or a sign. You can’t simply point to something and say, “That’s the brand.”
A brand is built through everything people experience and associate with your business.
That makes the choices you make every day incredibly important. How you handle returns, how you bake your recipes, the methods you use, the processes you put in place, and the way you treat your customers and employees can all become part of what your brand stands for. These details become part of your secret sauce the things that collectively shape what your brand is.
Who Needs a Brand?
Having a brand is an important part of building a business, particularly for a small business. It helps you distinguish yourself from others and stake out your own territory in the world. It helps you understand your audience, your connection to them and what makes your business different.
A strong brand can also bring everything you do together. Your products, your people, your customer experience, your communication and the way you operate all become part of something bigger. It can be the thing that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
And here’s the important thing: you don’t have to be a large corporation to have a brand.
Whether you’re starting a small local business, building a growing company, launching a new product or running an established organization, you already have a brand; even if you haven’t consciously built one yet.
The question isn’t really whether you need a brand. The question is whether you are going to actively shape it or simply let people decide what your business means for themselves.
Building a Business Means Making Your Own Choices
Building a business is really hard, and people will often think they know what’s best for you. Everybody in your life your family, your neighbours and your co-workers may have an opinion about how you’re supposed to run your business.
But the truth is, nobody knows what’s best for you.
Your responsibility is to put in the time and energy to learn what it is you’re trying to do well enough that you’re not leaving anything to chance. You need to understand your business, your customers and what you’re trying to achieve before you can truly understand the brand you’re building around it.
If you’re hoping to learn about branding, that means you’re already driven. You’re already asking questions. You’re saying, “I don’t know everything, and I’m going to turn to a resource that might help me get there.”
That willingness to learn is important in every facet of your business. Whether it comes to your finances, your hiring practices, your legal requirements or the way you serve your customers, give yourself the opportunity to think about your business in a dynamic way.
Having worked with venture-backed startups and some well-known corporations, I can tell you that none of them have the secret recipe. I can tell you that none of them have the secret recipe. They don’t necessarily know how to do this better or faster than you. They simply take the time to ask questions.
And that’s what I ask you to do: ask yourself those open-ended questions, get a lay of the land and understand your business deeply.
Get to a place where you don’t have to reference a book, turn to your notes or search for an answer every time someone asks you about your business. Get to the point where you just get it.
Branding in the Digital Age
In the digital marketing age, branding has increasingly moved onto the internet and the internet is very fast and dynamic. Brands can be built and destroyed just as quickly.
The temptation to aim for “overnight success” is understandable, but it isn’t necessarily a good goal for a brand. A successful brand should be built over time. A slow, gradual build-up gives you the opportunity to reach more people, build trust and create something that lasts, rather than becoming a flash-in-the-pan fad that’s here today and gone tomorrow.
Of course, even a brand that has been built slowly and carefully can fall in an instant if you’re not careful. The digital world gives people more ways than ever to discover a brand, but it also gives them more ways to share their experiences with it good or bad.
And to get to the point where your voice becomes big, you not only need to be good at getting found you need to have a differentiator.
Being visible is only the beginning. When people have countless choices in front of them, there needs to be something that makes your brand worth noticing, remembering and choosing.
That differentiator doesn’t have to be something nobody else in the world has ever done. It can be the way you approach your business, the experience you create, the values you stand for or simply the particular way you do things.
This is where the work of building a brand becomes even more interesting.
How Is a Brand Defined in the Digital World?
If a brand is able to identify what makes it unique, its differentiator, that becomes its calling card. It is how people recognize the brand and, often, the first thing they judge it by. That’s why consistency is so important.
No matter which channels your customers choose to interact with your brand, your website, blog, email, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, X, Instagram or whatever tomorrow’s technology may bring, they should all demonstrate the unique experience that your brand represents.
For example, let’s look at Southwest Airlines. They are not necessarily the best airline in the world, nor are they the cheapest. But what they deliver to their customers is a distinctive experience.
One experience I remember was when I reached my seat on a Southwest Airlines flight and opened the overhead luggage compartment to put my bag away. There was a flight attendant right inside the luggage compartment, welcoming passengers onto the flight.
It was an experience I had never had with any other airline I had travelled with. And that’s what makes it memorable. The next time I fly Southwest, I find myself looking forward to the surprises I might get and the experience the brand will create.
If you look at Southwest Airlines’ branding and marketing communication, from the experience on their flights to their social media, much of it is built around this same idea. That experience is reflected consistently throughout the company’s communication.
When creating your own brand, you should strive for that same consistency.
Visually, a brand should use consistent elements across all channels, such as its logo, colours, fonts, tone and the way its message is communicated. But design consistency is only the first step.
The more important thing is to set expectations for the experience customers will have every time they interact with your brand online. That experience should transcend individual channels, and even the internet itself, so that it becomes instantly recognizable as yours.
A strong brand isn’t simply something people see. It’s something they come to recognize, expect and experience.