Article for Federation of Small Businesses
Your brand – a stepping stone for growth?
Most businesses want to grow. Those that are happy with their size want to maintain their strong position and keep good staff, loyal customers and reliable suppliers. A strong brand can facilitate both goals by strengthening ‘corporate magnetism’. Karen Drury of fe3 consulting, a recently formed small business dedicated to helping other companies make the most of their brand, explains more.
Many small businesses mistake the “brand” as just being advertising for their product or service, or they limit it to the look of their literature or their logo, or the type of public relations carried out for the firm. While the brand can be ALL of these things, it can – and should be – much more. The brand is a promise you make to everyone who comes into contact with you – whether they be customers, employees, your suppliers, your bank manager. Every “touch” counts in selling and communicating the kind of organisation you are, in building relationships.
Successful companies nurture the relationships on which their future depends. Brand management is the process of building these relationships to make them strong and lasting and to maintain differentiation.
Differentiation through the brand is the reason why some people would rather buy a can of Heinz baked beans from Sainsbury rather than Tesco. Differentiation creates customer preference - the product is exactly the same, it probably costs the same, but somehow, we’d rather go to one store than another. By understanding customers, knowing what they really like about your product or service, and maintaining those things, customer preference can be harvested as loyalty. Which in turn can accelerate growth.
Customers are one part of the story but they are not the only part. Modern marketing thinking now believes that showing one face to the customer and another to employees is not only insufficient, but can also seriously undermine your brand.
To make the most of your brand, your employees must understand it in terms of its promise. Customer facing staff must ‘live the brand’ at every contact but it’s not just customer-facing staff who need to do this. Your human resources team needs to understand what the brand means to be able to translate it into a people specification when they are recruiting. The research and development team needs to understand the brand so that what they produce is consistent with what the company says about itself through new product quality and service.
So – having identified that branding is a potentially major influence on all aspects of the organisation how can you develop the strength of your branding to help you grow?
There are many different models of brand development but the one being developed by fe3 consulting establishes two key dimensions of ‘corporate magnetism’ – customer loyalty and employee commitment by measuring the clarity of brand promise and the coherence of the brand promise delivery.
Corporate Magnetism™ Model
The model is effective in its simplicity but extremely powerful as a forecasting tool. This is because information about the current brand health is fed into a sophisticated computer model that allows the fe3 consulting team to help businesses predict the impact of future changes to business strategy and policy on ‘corporate magnetism’. For example, the strength of the relationship between your staff and your customers may have an impact on your need to keep staff if you want to grow revenue from existing customers. Which may in turn lead you to consider the strength of your remuneration package against that of your competitors. Creating magnetism on one area of the business (i.e. keeping your staff) may help to create magnetism in another (i.e. keeping your customers).
The model is being fine-tuned over the next few months using pilot clients. If you would like to participate in this pilot please contact: karen@corporatemagnetism.com
