|
You Are Your Brand
Written By: Ron Franke | ![[Email]](http://www.ceboa.com/images/email.gif "Email Ron Franke") Ron Franke
|
As an Independent Business Professional you are the product, you are the service, you are the package. You are the relationship with your customer. You're the point of contact and the resource for the service. You are the picture of happiness when things go well and the picture of a nightmare when things go bad.
It doesn't matter whether you are a business professional working for some company or you own your own business, you are a brand. It's important to realize that what you do and how you do it affects your business. Once you recognize that you are a brand, you can take charge of your brand and define how your customers perceive you as a brand.
A definition I found somewhere sometime back states that a brand is the perception in the mind of a consumer about a company and its products and is based on messages, images, and actions presented by the company and the relative benefits as perceived by the consumer. Your brand is this abstract notion cobbled together by your customer based on their experience of you, and experiences about you. The difficulty in controlling a brand is that a brand lives in a customer's head. However, managing your brand is not entirely out of your control, you can influence a customer's perceptions, and in some cases change their mind regarding your brand.
Defining your brand lays the foundation for your business, opportunities, and profitability. I believe that your brand foundation is comprised of five key elements, your:
- Mission and reason for being in business.
- Unique value that you bring to your customers that is not provided by your competition.
- Core business values, customer relations, quality, and integrity.
- Depth in offered products and services, and the unique benefits they bring to your customers.
- Target market and target customer profile.
Understanding the key elements of your brand gives you the ability to target your desired customer and markets more effectively. You will be better able to position your brand for your customers with more focused messaging and advertising.
You, as a branded independent professional, are a little different than is a traditional product brand. Unlike packaged products, your brand itself doesn't really benefit from a relationship with some organizational brand. You have a single brand and can't create a family of brands - individual items delivered during the course of your service don't lend them self to branding. As a service provider you can't easily introduce new models with new features as a way to stimulate repeat sales, even though you can add to your practice by providing additional service options within your practice area since each service option flows back into the same single brand as perceived by your customer.
So here's the idea. Think of yourself in terms of a brand. You are not an anonymous person walking about in the world unnoticed. As you move about you convey your brand, and, your observers are building your brand in their mind.
Your brand needs to resonate with your target market and customer. Because of this you need to have a pretty good profile of you customer's personality, associations, expectations, common experiences, needs, and desires. Thinking about your brand means thinking about how it resonates with your target market and how it compels them to buy your products and services. Some common things to think include, how you:
- Present yourself, your attire, your demeanor, your overall style
- Arrange your office, it's color, content, and orderliness.
- Communicate and conduct your self in meetings.
- Interact with staff and others.
- Package your products and services.
I'm certainly not suggesting that you obsess over every detail of your appearance, office, business practices, and surroundings. I am, however, suggesting that these things do come into play when your customers make a purchase decision. To be successful, your brand must match the expectations your customer has of service providers in your profession.
It is always a good idea to polish your brand from time to time. By making little improvements here and there to influence the perceptions that your customer has of you and will ultimately help them formulate their choice of your brand over another and lead them to a decision to purchase your products and services.