a quick guide to brand for small businesses and startups

A QUICK GUIDE TO BRAND FOR SMALL BUSINESSES & STARTUPS?BLAND TO BRAND

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a branding manual for the small fish in the ocean

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LESSON 1: FORGET THE LOGO...............................................................6

LESSON 2: IT ALL STARTS WITH THE NAME.........................................11

LESSON 3: STUCK WITH THE NAME? LOOK AT THE TAGLINE!.........15

LESSON 3: UNDERSTAND YOUR VALUES.............................................19

LESSON 5: NOW COMMUNICATE............................................................22

LESSON 6: KEEP COMMUNICATING.......................................................26

LESSON 7: INTER RELATION BETWEEN BRAND AND MARKETING...32

LESSON 8: SEE MARKETING STRATEGICALLY.....................................38

LESSON 9: CREATING LONG LASTING BRANDS..................................43

CONTENTS

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Brand is subject which everyone in business has some semblance of understanding and depending on the size and budgets that you operate on it takes on more significance. For those in the small or micro business space a ‘brand’ is really just an identity and very few small businesses apply the tricks of the trade that brand can offer to drive business growth.

WE THINK WE GET IT

“I know what looks good, so therefore i must know brand”

WRONG! Don’t make brand about what looks good.


LITTLE OL’ ME

BRAND SUCCESS

So here are some secrets that we have taken from the big boy world of

brand that small businesses can apply which they normally never think about and which help you to do brand right.

A MAP TO BRAND SUCCESS


FORGET The LOGOLESSON 1:


For some strange reason and in my experience, this ranges from small to large businesses, but people get fanatic about a logo. They will go OTT about how it looks, what image it is meant to capture and the direction of the business. Let me say this very clearly... a logo don’t mean much! In real terms. Having a great logo or a bad logo ain’t gonna kill your business.

Furthermore, you are not going to be able to communicate that your brand is young, funky, British and professional in a logo. Yes, you can communicate that in a brochure or website, but a teeny weeny little logo can’t work that hard to communicate all of that.

A slap in the face for all you logo lovers


OVERTHINKING

STOP


So what should a logo do? It should just state your brand name. Nothing more. Yes, explore font usage for that, is it uppercase, is it lower case, is it heavy, is it light. Look at colour. That’s why companies like Fiverr are great. You can get a decent logo done on the cheap.

To understand exactly what I’m talking about, take a walk down the high street or go into a shopping centre. Look at the brand identities.

Majority are simple and typographical.

Open your wardrobe and look at the fashion labels that you have. Most fashion brands really, really get brand. Just examine those logos. What do you see? Snap, it’s simple and typographical.

LET TYPE DO The TALKING


Don’t pay a graphic designer loads of dough to produce an over elaborate mark that is your logo. You are wasting your capital which you have very little of.

don’t piss away your pennies


It all starts with the name

LESSON 2:


If you are in the lucky position of being in a pre-launch phase, think long and hard

about your name. This is where your energy should really go not faffing over

a logo design. A great brand name does half the communication battle for you. A

bad name just means your other pieces of communication have to work twice as hard.

But again if you are lumbered or already committed to a name, don’t over stress it.

There is more to brand than name.

FUEL UP BEFORE TAKE OFF


While we are on the subject, a couple of dont’s. Don’t use a name for your brand because it means something to you. While ‘mango’ might be your

favourite fruit, most people in the world will not care. As is the initials of all

your business partners. That is cool for you guys, but again makes the

communication battle hard.

NO ONE CARES


Great brand names are generally emotive. They capture the essence of what you are about. They create a feeling in the mind of the consumer. And if they are really, really, good someone goes, wow, that’s clever. Get it!!!

CAPTURE THE MINDs & HEARTS


STUCK WITH the name? look at the tagline

LESSON 3:


Taglines on the whole are terribly done. A tag line fundamentally is a line of communication which when a new prospect comes across your brand will tell them what it is you exactly do. So for example, let’s say you went with the brand name ‘mango’ and you have a tag line that says ‘Making You Fresh’... that tells me bloody well nothing! What do you do? Do I need you? It makes no sense.

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On the other hand, you have a tag line that goes; ‘Mango’, ‘Brand Strategy Specialists’.

Even though the name and the tag don’t actually work well together, it at least does the job of giving me and understanding, and unless you are super fucking famous, like Nike (and your tag is a statement of your philosophy) most people when they come to your brand haven’t a clue what it is that you do, so help them out.

Don’t worry that it is a boring stale line. You have a vast array of communications to bring out all the funky lines that you want to use.

GIVE IT TO THEM STRAIGHT

DON’

T DO

THIS

DO TH

IS


The best taglines out there really help unpack the name and do the job of telling people what it is that you do. Example:

Lush - fresh handmade cosmetics.

The name creates a feeling, it is a rich word, and then the tag expounds what the name is all about.

Very, very good.

WHAT IT’s SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE


Understand your values

LESSON 4:


All the elements so far, most small business would have thought about. The one thing they normally don’t and where we make a living (not a killing, but a living) is defining

what the brand stands for. The brand values.

give yourself something to stand on


Now, those who flirt with this idea of creating a set of words that represent what you stand for typically do it terribly.

First thing we look for is preferably single word terms, no statements, no catchy phrases. Single words which boil down exactly what the hell you are about.

The next issue is that most of the values I’ve seen are uninspiring words, which they don’t really own, that doesn’t represent them well and more commonly are so over used.

Values like ‘professional’ ‘satisfied’, ‘unique’, ‘interesting’, ‘British’, ‘quirky’, ‘premium’, ‘happy’. And the one that is very current at the moment is ‘disruptor’.

That’s why drawing the values out of a company is a skilled task and why bringing in a professional is often recommended. Cha ching!!!

DON’t BE SUCH A CLICHÉBLAND TO BRAND 21 of 51

communicate

LESSON 5:Now

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Let’s assume you nailed your values. The next task is building a website. You need one. There was a point when I thought you could get away without having one, but that disappeared a long time ago.

For a website don’t get bogged down with the design of the site. You can find great looking templates online, checkout Themeforest.

Pick one.

The trick for a website is not the structure and look of the site but the content and the flow of that

DON’t GET TANGLED UP - CONTENT IS KING

content on your site. It’s like saying what makes a good brochure is the quality of the paper and whether you used debossing techniques or custom colours. All great. All nice. All not necessarily required.

It’s the content within the brochure which makes it good. Same with a website. What language you use, the heading and titles which guides a person across your site. The imagery, is it stock? Probably is. But don’t use shitty stock stuff that looks cheesy and over used.


Look to have as many communication ‘tools’ as possible i.e brochure, flyers, pdfs etc. The more you have at your disposal the easier it is to build trust with customer bases. They will see that you have already produced content that deals with the problems or questions they are facing.

SHOW CLIENTS YOU’RE A SWISS ARMY KNIFE


If you have extra budget look to create communications that are funky, quirky, memorable, especially in print formats. I’m a big believer in print as it’s tangible and harder to dismiss.

Print tends to hang around.

In most marketing efforts potential customers don’t always have a need for what your selling when you approach them. However, 6 months from now they might do, and if they receive something funky and cool from you, they will keep it to one side and when the time is right they will pull it out and think ‘I’ve gotta call these guys!’

YOU CAN’t ‘DELETE’ PRINT


Keep communicating

LESSON 6:


To build perception around your business and brand you need to keep communicating. Don’t just think that I got my website and brochure and that is it.

Wrong!

The more you communicate, the more you’ll connect, the more people will understand you, the more you will create an impression about you. This is the space that if you want people to get that you are young, funky, British and professional and they will start to understand it.

DON’t STOP NOW


Knowledge and sharing of knowledge (like I’m doing now) is great way to keep on communicating with your audience. You’ll be kept at the forefront of their minds without seeming like you are asking for something. And when the time is right that they need what you sell, you’ll already be in their consciousness.

Don’t be a distant memory


The key to any communication is repetition. The main principle on which advertising works is not the creative it is repetition. You could have the best creative ad in the world but if people can only see and interact with it once, fat chance they’ll act.

BE THE BROKEN RECORD


SHOW THEM

Every business large or small needs to acknowledge that they need to communicate regularly. Especially when you are in market and your competitors are not doing that.

It allows to be seen as a thought leader, you’ll build goodwill within your industry and be admired by your contemporaries. The more that you can invest in the production of content, with video being the best, and well-shot video not just off your phone, with some production budget, is an excellent investment.

DON’T TELL THEM YOU’RE GREAT...


While all of this goes on, the real trick is to distribute the content. To find new audiences and ways to connect. Regardless though, if you are placing your content

on your website what it does is create more avenues for people to find you, and Google likes sites which are content rich and which update regularly.

So without a shadow of a doubt it’s a win win, and I encourage whole heartedly for all business owners to change the perception of their brand by producing regular content.

IT’S A WIN WIN


Inter relation between brand and marketing

LESSON 7:


Where I see the fundamental advantage of creating a brand is that when it comes to marketing the job becomes much easier. If your brand sucks and you don’t communicate it well no matter how hard you push your marketing, it will just fail.

Similarly if your concept or product is not up to scratch winning is very hard.

DO IT WELL, BUT PRESENT IT BETTER


The analogy I often give to people is imagine that if you are going to a club to pick up a girl or a guy, think of marketing as the act of going up to someone to say ‘hey, let’s get jiggy’. So if that is the case then brand is the act of making sure when you show up you look right and you have got something interesting to say. Because if you look and talk like everyone else in that club, what will make you stand out and what will create desirability in the mind of the person you want to hook up with?

I WANT YOU BABY


That’s why we create brand values, it allows you to define yourself explicitly in a way that only you could really say. It makes you immediately unique from your competitors.

You are not competing on the products and services you sell, it becomes about the values that you trade off. You then need to follow that through with your brand communication. Your brand communication flows from your values, it becomes meaningful and highly impactful.

DEFINEWHO YOU ARE


What many businesses suffer from when it comes to communications is that they look and sound just like their competitors. Ever done the ‘what’s on our competitors website, let’s just copy and paste it.’ Or what images have they got, let’s find similar ones. You end up regurgitating what is already out there in the market, why someone wants to choose you will then come down to price. People will see you as a commodity and nothing more. Any form of cut through then becomes so hard.

NO MORE COPYCAT SH*T


Following on from our initial point. Powerful brand communication sticks in the mind. Good communiations are like glue... they stick around. Weak or uncreative communication very rarely gets recall.

This is where advertisers or agency like mine make their money.

The creative endeavour.

That’s something that can separate. However, if it isn’t built on values it is more often than not highly hit and miss as it has not been driven from a point of reference, the brand values.

KEEP IT STICKY


See marketing strategically

LESSON 8:


When most small businesses think about communications they think advertising. So they either think we can’t afford it or they say let’s do it, but typically they do it badly. That’s not just from a creative level but more on media channel selection.

THERE’s MORE THAN ONE WAY


SHOOTI like marketing that returns me a list. By that I mean if I’m doing tech branding. I can research and find a list of the biggest tech firms 10 miles from me. That becomes my market and within that market I need to

DON’t BLINDLY

becomes famous. It is not that every single tech firm in the UK needs to know me, or everyone in my locality needs to know that I do branding. Niche down who or what you want to target. Then wage war.


Strategy is a military term. So I find branding and marketing is like seduction and war. Brand being all about seduction and marketing all about going out fighting tooth and nail to win business. So as the famous saying ‘all is fair in love and war.’

ALL IS FAIR IN LOVE AND WAR


So with a list in hand I know who I want to target. This allows me to be very precise in the communications I create.

For example we might target a particular tech firm in the city. We’ll create a Facebook ad campaign for all the workers who in their profile have listed this particular company as their employer (facebook ads are great value for money at the moment and can be highly targeted). We create an ad which plays off our brand values and uses the principles of advertising for us to get the clicks we require.

Here is the clever part, they click on the ad and they come to a landing page specifically created for their company. That level of targeting works because I have started with a list and narrowed down my targets.

GET THEM IN YOUR CROSSHAIRS...

This is obviously a B2B proposition but the same is true for B2C you just have to profile your audience and look for the places that they’ll be and engage with them in a relevant way. But again don’t play the game of thinking everyone and anyone is a potential customer, create a list.

That list might be for only one user group but at least you can try and win on that, and when you do well with one audience, create targeted comms for another audience and so forth because unless you have a lot of dosh it becomes hard to communicate with wide audience bases.

Even if your product or service is for everyone, break it down into winnable battles, rather than a full on assault on all fronts which is hard to manage and hard to be successful at.


Creating long lasting brands

LESSON 9:


Our final thoughts here are for you to imagine a line or a scale where at one end you have brand communications at on the other end you have direct communications.

Direct communications is your ‘logical rational stuff’ where you tell people that you exist, where you are located, what they can buy from you, dare I say it, even offers, all a very functional level of communication.

Brand communication is the sexy stuff. It creates desirability, it is expressed through images, it seduces, it appeals to the emotions and it has serious personality. Most people do the former and not the later but every successful business needs both.

tip the scales in your favour


DIRECTThe more that you do brand communication, over time you’ll move up the scale and less and less you’ll need to do the direct stuff. I know they aren’t a small business but take Apple as a classic example, all their ads are pretty much brand communications, they create desirability, there is no where from, how much, what processer, or any of the nitty gritty stuff. Occasionally they do some direct stuff, but on the whole it all makes you go ‘that’s cool.’ And if you see it enough, it might make you go ‘I want it.’ That’s where any business wants to be. That by doing brand communication in itself you can sell the products or services you have.

the big boys don’t have to BE


To do all that your brand communications needs to appeal to the emotions.

Emotions go beyond any reason or argument. They are expressed through images and create propositions which are almost impossible to justify. You have to understand very clearly what your brand personality is all about, and again that all comes from a well defined set of brand values.

make people dream


To get brand communication is a long game. It doesn’t happen over night, but the benefits are ever lasting. If you want to grow or scale your business, your brand has to be part of that process. The benefits that having a brand can bring to a business are immense.

Firstly you can charge higher prices, as everyone is attracted by a brand. Next, you can create a barrier to the competition, as you are creating preference in the minds of consumers while alongside selling your products and services. Your immediate competitors are only focused on the ‘now’ of selling more stuff, it is a short game, not a long one.

BUILD A WALL TO SCARE OFF COMPETITION


With brand comes terms like brand loyalty, brand equity and brand personality.

The brand personality is what you want to trade off and where differentiation arises from.

Brand loyalty arises from people not just liking you, but loving you. This flows from the fact that you have a brand personality that connects with certain audiences.

Finally brand equity means that the value of your business is more than its net assets, it is the perception, feeling and emotions that surround your business, that have an intangible value.

Take Coca Cola, its listed on the stock market at value of $170bn, $90bn of which are its assets, $80bn is its brand value. That’s almost half!

an investment for eternity


Final words, I promise.

To be a true brand means that you polarize. Some will love you, some will hate you. If you want to be cool with everyone, it means really people are indifferent about you.

We are just scratching the surface here of what brand is and how it works. Hopefully it has given you some food for thought and made you realise that just because you are a small business go beyond the idea that brand is just being that tiny little logo thingie.

pick a side and fight for it


+ 44 (0) 1923 605 505 [email protected] www.blandtobrand.co.uk

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Brand Strategy & Communications AgencyUnit 6, Suite 14, Blueprint Commercial Centre, Imperial Way, Watford, WD24 4JP


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a quick guide to brand for small businesses and startups

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