Not Just Pretty | Building An Effective Small Business Brand

Why define your brand? Part 2

(Continued from last post)

2. For greater personal clarity around your business.

Taking the time to define your business brand - and to actually write that definition down - can help you to have more clarity about what your business is all about, your path in your business, who you want to work with, and how you can help them.

Just like the previous point, this not only helps when creating your brand, but it also helps you to be more clear when writing your marketing materials, deciding which marketing opportunities are right for you, running your business on a day-to-day basis, and even feeling like you have a purpose and vision in your business.

This is also especially helpful for solo entrepreneurs. Since they're working alone in their businesses, it can be easy to feel unclear about where their personality stops, and where the business begins. Defining the business's brand early on can help to make the difference more clear, and can help make your business seem more like its' own, separate entity instead of just an extension of yourself - and this separation can help gain you more credibility in the clients' eyes and to gain a bit more sanity for yourself by separating your work from personal life.

It can also be easy to want to change paths if the "going gets tough", especially if you haven't committed to your business's brand definition. But, that can be confusing and disorienting for your clients, and can make them feel unsure about working with you. If you've thought through the process of defining your business and written that down, then you'll be less likely to change paths on a whim and more likely to create a brand that your clients can trust and count on.

Why should you create a brand definition?

First of all, a quick answer to "what the heck is a Brand Definition"?

A Brand Definition is made up of four elements. These four elements map directly to the needs and concerns in your client's mind:

Who You Are: Is your company a good fit for their style and personality?
What You Do: Do they want and need what you do?
What Makes You Different: Should they work with you instead of someone else? Are you really good enough for them to give you their big pile of hard-earned money?
Who You Can Best Help: Does what you say make them feel comfortable to actually hand over a pile of money? Does what you're selling actually work for their specific business and situation?

Why should a small business go through the preliminary branding work of creating a brand definition?

Isn't all that branding and positioning stuff for big companies like Coke and Nike?

This is a big question. And one that would take a while to write up in one shot, so I'll answer it over several posts. I'll number the thoughts/ answers to try to help keep track of them.

1. Creating a Brand Definition up front in your business creates a solid foundation for not only your brand designs, but all of your business, marketing and client communication efforts.

In other words, once you know who you are in your business, then you can stick to it - and be consistent with one message, voice, look and communication style throughout all of your materials. And, you can create all of your materials from this single perspective - which leads to a stronger brand, less client confusion, and usually, more trust overall from your clients.

A lot of small business owners present an inconsistent brand/ message/ persona to their prospects and clients either because they're still trying to figure out who they are in their businesses, or because they think that they're tailoring their business description to the person who they've just met.

So they morph from persona to persona, depending on who they think the prospective client is, or what networking event they're at. Instead of appealing to more clients, this can confuse them - imagine that you're talking to a business owner at a Chamber event, and they describe their business one way, and then the next week you see them at another mixer and they say something different - wouldn't that be disarming?

I know when I see this in action, I wonder if I'm losing it a bit. Next, I wonder if the person I'm talking to really knows what they're talking about.

Instead, define your business clearly, at the beginning of your business, and stick to the definition as closely as possible. You'll create a better overall impression with the people you meet.

Initial Call Website

Here are some screenshots of another website I just launched:

Home page:

Inner pages:

This site included designing a brand identity, designing the website, coding a cross-platform drop-down menu using CSS, Flash design, process illustration, and a white paper design.

Paradise Valley Spas - Website Design and Coding

I actually completed this site a while ago - but realized that it never made it into the portfolio!

This is a website for a local chain of spa stores. I like the waves of their Visual Vocabulary at the bottom of the site, which also appear on the business cards, letterhead and trifold brochure. These waves are so unique that they make their materials stand out.

I also designed the logo for this project.

Learning Links - Website Design and Coding

I helped this nonprofit organize and refine their design ideas for this website, and then coded the site template in HTML in such a way that they can build the site out themselves, and maintain it going forward.

Fossum Creative Logo and Business Card

I designed the logo and business card for this copywriting company - and even wrote the tagline (Copy that turns your customers on)!

INS Brochure Business Card

A really stand-out business card that answers the question "What services do you provide" for this networking company.

Read more about brochure cards here:
http://www.elf-design.com/services-stand-out-brochure-card.html

What does the process of creating (or enhancing or modifying) a brand involve?

My process for designing a brand identity for a small business consists of the following:

Step 1: Define Your Business/Brand
In order to create designs that communicate about your business, you first need to know the story that you're trying to tell. This story consists of 4 components:

• Who You Are: Your business's personality. To a lesser extent, this also includes your business's plan and path - how you're planning to grow, the change you want to make in the world, etc.
  
• What You Do: The services and products you provide and how you deliver those.
  
• What Makes You Different: First, you have to figure out who your competition is. Then, figure out what differentiates you from everyone else in your field.
  
• Who You Can Best Help: Your target audience, but for many small businesses, this also encompasses the people you enjoy working with, can produce the best results for, can reach easily, and who have a need for and budget for your services or products.
  

Step 2: Design
The entire point of creating a brand identity for a small business is to communicate the first 3 definition elements (who you are, what you do and what makes you different) to the people you can best help.

How do you do this?

• By using the universal symbolic definitions of shapes, the personalities of the fonts you choose, and the psychology of color in your choices for your logo and design elements.
  
• By carefully selecting photos and illustrations that communicate your brand personality.
  
• By creating a Visual Vocabulary that has meaning to your target audience.
  
• By taking your personal preferences out of the design process - you may love seahorses, but it's very likely that having a seahorse as your logo would not communicate the right message about your business to your best customers (unless you're an aquarium-supply shop, possibly).
  
• By not reinventing the graphical wheel - again, you want graphics that have meaning to your target audience, so it's actually better to not try to make something that's never been seen in any form before. You're going for understanding and meaning first, then uniqueness.
  

These are the first two steps. After this, there's always the next steps of creating more marketing materials to continue to connect with and reach out to your target audience, but first, concentrate on doing these two steps thoroughly and well. By taking your time here and doing these steps, you'll create a brand identity that will be a more effective tool for your business moving forward - and you may not find yourself having to redesign later.

How do you roll out a new brand identity without alienating existing customers?

This is an often-overlooked question.

The first step in rolling out a new brand identity and avoiding alienation of your existing customers is to tell your current and past customers about the change. After all, how would you feel if you went to the website of a company that you'd worked with, or purchased something from, and it looked completely different than you remembered?

Whenever this happens to me, I wonder if I'm in the right place - and I usually wind up looking around the site for familiar-sounding bits of text, or going back to Google and searching for the right website. Which winds up taking more time and being a frustrating experience - especially if I was on the right site in the first place.

When you change your brand identity, make it a point to announce the change to your past customers. Send them an email or a newsletter at the very least. Mailing a postcard or making a nice announcement can make it seem like a more formal launch. You could even have a party. Just do something to make your customers aware, and make sure that whatever you do is a good match for your brand's personality (i.e., don't be too formal or playful about it, depending on what the feel of your new brand is like).

If you really want to make your best customers feel like a part of the change, then why not make them a part of the design of the new brand?

A small business's brand will be more effective if you design it with your target audiences' - and best customers' - design preferences in mind. You want to create designs that resonate with them, that speak to their souls, and that tell your business's story to them at a glance - in their visual language.

During the design process, it can really help to have a few of your best customers on-board, helping out by providing input and feedback into the process. Send them your new brand summary, so they know what they're evaluating the designs for (in other words, don't just send them a bunch of logos and ask them which one they like - because appealing to their personal preference is very different than creating designs with meaning). Then, send them the various logos, and ask for their input. They'll usually feel honored to be a part of such a big decision, and be happy to provide feedback.

How much should a small business expect to spend modifying a brand identity to stay competitive with the "big guys"?

This is actually kind of a strange question.

What's so weird about it is that most small businesses (again, I focus on working with one- and two-person businesses) shouldn't be trying to compete with the big guys.

I recommend that small businesses niche their services and products, and focus on being good at a small subset of activities in their specialty, or niche the subset of customers who they work with - or both.

If you're well-defined and well-niched, then competing with the "big guys" shouldn't be so much of an issue.

Also, the amount that a small business needs to spend to stay competitive and to market their business annually depends on a lot of factors, like:

• How established the business is
  
• How big their customer list is
  
• How they choose to market (for example, writing articles and emailing them to your own newsletter list is less expensive than taking out a full page ad in a magazine)
  
• Their business goals for the year (the marketing spend for a business trying to gross $150,000 a year will probably be different than the spend for a business trying to gross $1.5 million)
  
• What exactly the business is, and how the industry as a whole tends to market
  

This is just a small fraction of the factors that influence marketing and branding costs.

But, the more clear you can be on your business's brand personality, service and product offerings, competitive situation and differentiators, and target audience, the less you can usually spend trying to market (because, if you define these 4 factors well, then your marketing and branding should be more effective overall!)