From inception, your business likely had key pillars, principles and concepts that defined your operations and separated you from others — Whether called it overtly or not, this is your ‘brand.’ Those pillars might have evolved into marketing keywords, a slogan or tag line that seek to identify the strengths your business is based on. We’re not talking about the logistics of things like trademarks, copyrights or logos, but more the ‘what’ that makes your business what it is.
Over time, as businesses grow and develop, one of the greatest pitfalls business owners face is protecting that brand even as you add staff, locations and services. Customers that have relied on your business for an experience want that same brand even as the company grows or evolves.
So what can you do? Change is inevitable and below are a few different ways to ensure your company sticks with its core brand as it moves along its journey:
First, know thyself — True whether a one-person operation or a large team, the most important thing to remember is knowing what your business does. This doesn’t necessarily mean what you sell or offer, but what do you do for your customers? What need to you fill? Experience do you provide? Essential to any business is a statement of purpose as what your business essentially does and why that is important.
Know your customers — This sounds like an obvious one, but really take a look at your customer base. Where do they come from? Are you serving a specific geographic locale? A key industry niche? No business can be everything to everyone, so an essential part of protecting your brand as you make growth decisions is examining every option from the viewpoint of your customers. How will this new tweak serve them better? Is a new product line solving a problem key to your audience? For each potential evolution, look at where it fits into your existing customer base.
Expand in the right way — As an offshoot of the topic above, when you are working on a new idea, stop and look at if it truly carries your brand identity in a new way. For example, if you have built a business known for customized storage solutions, are you diluting or taking away from your core brand by adding the option to use pre-fabricated modular pieces to your project? Clients pay a premium for superior customized solutions; attempting to expand and bring in more business by taking away from that exclusive customization might end up making your company just like others in the marketplace. Instead of diluting your key brand strength by making the process faster using pre-fab pieces, investigate adding a skilled designer to your team to allow you to serve more clients simultaneously.
Use your early team members to define the culture and educate new staff — Those earliest employees that joined you from day one or early in the process are the ones most invested in what makes your business what it is — they understand and live the attitudes, mindset and principles that make up success. As your business grows, utilize those staff that know your business best to help shape the hiring and training process and act as ‘cultural ambassadors’ — and continually seek their input as training and hiring unfolds, mitigating speed bumps that can be addressed before the next phase of growth begins.
Beware the marketing creep — Your company doesn’t just lose its brand identity overnight…It’s a gradual process. As you expand and begin investigating things like new marketing and advertising strategies, look out for pitfalls that may lead you from your core. For example, solo decisions become shared across multiple committees and decision makers, outside agencies may come and go, new team members come into the fold, each potentially wanting to leave their mark. These little tweaks might be OK in isolation, but as you start putting them together, you might find yourself moving away from your brand center. Whenever examining external communication strategies, look at each element as to how it funnels back into the core brand. If the strategy drifts from the core brand, look for a different idea. That slow creep that seems like little things at the time can lead to you eventually far from the messaging that made your brand excel in the first place.
Document and plan for the future — One of the most important parts of brand continuity is future planning! While you and your current management team and employees may know exactly the way things need to run to ensure the brand identity you want, that doesn’t mean it will be that way forever. Employees leave; you may want to retire or cut back on involvement. Ensure that your brand and legacy will endure into the years ahead by documenting protocols and procedures, creating historical timelines of key milestones, writing down those core guiding principles to carry you to success in the years ahead!
