Building your brand as your scale

How to protect your brand as you scale….

As a business owner, you’ve worked hard to build your brand and understand the critical value of instant brand recognition and leadership. You’ve done everything to register your brand legally, including domains, copyrights, patents, and trademarks. But as a coach, I’ve often seen slippage over time on protecting your brand, which can be costly.

Protecting your brand should be top of mind in everything you do, and it supersedes all other responsibilities. However, the specifics of these shortcomings are hard to nail down. That’s why I was impressed with the good summary provided in Sabrina Horn’s new book, Make It, Don’t Fake It. In this blog post, I’m going to share my insights along with Sabrina’s top six key strategies for keeping your brand authentic and above reproach.

1. Avoid changes that may compromise quality

As business owners, we all strive to reduce costs and improve efficiency. But every change has possible downsides, and it’s your responsibility to quantify and balance these against benefits. Don’t let your bean counters devalue your brand. Remember, the ultimate test is the potential to erode values, culture, and brand image.

2. Evaluate the brand impact of proposed market moves

The push is always on to grow your market with new geographies, new products, and new market segments. Yet every change can cause brand dilution or competition you don’t need. Always check language nuances and translation issues. Moving in or out of the wrong market can kill your brand.

3. Recognise that employee morale impacts your brand

If employee morale is down, your brand will be negatively impacted. Thus you need to see and be seen with your people and walk the talk. Don’t wait for quarterly morale surveys or feedback from HR. Ask employees for feedback, and commit to fixing problems before you feel the brand impact.

4. Never argue with customers, public or private

Pay close attention to social media and online feedback, and never respond defensively. Create and truly listen to your customer advisory council, and focus on removing opportunities for them to be disappointed. Customers, more than advertising, make your brand image in the market.

Of course, we can all agree that the customer isn’t always right, but it does your brand no good to debate the issue. The best approach is to listen and learn from them– and clarify your brand marketing, customer service, business model, or just find the right customers.

5. Accommodate and integrate multiple cultures

As you expand the business into new geographies and market segments, focus on culture inclusivity rather than trying to manage multiple subcultures. Use global online influencers and common values to seek communication across groups, and keep the focus on your brand rather than differences.

In this age of the Internet and global communication, it is virtually impossible to isolate individual subcultures and market your brand uniquely to each. Attempts to do this have resulted in more confusion than value, as well as high management and marketing costs.

6. Differentiate your brand based on a higher cause

Be different based on a unique value proposition, not just better quality or cost. Know yourself as well as your customer, and make your brand a statement that they can relate to and want to be a part of. Keep your image authentic, fresh, and harmonious, and firmly based in reality.

Building and protecting your brand is the ultimate responsibility of every director and leadership team. Don’t let the day-to-day pressures from customers, competitors, and scaling push you into shortcuts that look good on paper today but may damage your brand image in the long term.

Think Time

One activity I advocate to my clients is to build THINK time into your weekly diary. This is time for you to work 'on' the business by thinking through the answer to questions you typically would not ask on a day to day basis. A question to reflect on this week...

What is the highest leverage activity you have ever done? Does that tell you anything about how to better spend your time?

Quote of the week

“Outside of physics and the rule of law, all other rules are illusions that we’ve chosen to believe. Smash the ones that no longer serve you.” Vishen Lakhiani