What’s your brand’s ‘stock value’ and how do you keep it high?
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The majority of small businesses have never created, or maintained, a formal marketing plan and budget. Even many mid-sized companies have a ‘spray and pray’ approach to marketing that often goes something like this: “Well, sales are down this quarter and we need to do something fast. My buddy Bob said he ran an ad in this trade magazine and his business got some leads. Let’s run ads in that magazine, pronto. Oh yeah, and my high school daughter says she’ll make us a TikTok video!”
Everyone knows the word ‘brand’ when it comes to marketing. But do you really know what a brand is and how it works? It appears to have an infinite number of definitions, meanings and connotations depending on who you ask.
This is the definition I use, because the analogy helps clients understand how their brand functions in the world.
Your business’s brand operates like the value of a public company on the stock market.
A brand, like the stock market, isn’t static. It’s a complex system comprised of many components that is continuously being influenced by a variety of factors. Its value fluctuates over time, just like a publicly traded company.
A brand is always being shaped by three primary factors:
Factor One: The Hard Facts of the company’s actual performance, such as hitting revenue and profitability goals.
Factor Two: Public Perception, which is influenced by many things, including news stories, industry rumors and customer reviews. Factor Two, Public Perception is usually more influential than Factor One, the Hard Facts!
Then there’s Factor Three, Brand Strategy. Brand strategy is your secret weapon for influencing Factor Two, Public Perception. Brilliant brand strategy empowers a company to move the needle of public perception away from the negative toward the positive.
Every organization has a perceived brand value, whether or not it has a brand strategy.
Every business has a brand – naturally and by default – with an ever-changing ‘market value’ that’s primarily generated by other people’s perceptions, and secondarily generated by actual facts. Your brand’s value is largely influenced by what people say about your company when you aren’t in the room.
So the question is: do you want your brand’s value to be determined by other people’s opinions, or do you want to have a say in how your brand’s value is perceived? In order to have a say, you need a smart brand strategy as well as the commitment to execute it in perpetuity.
The purpose of brand strategy is to influence the external narratives that outsiders are constantly creating about your business. It’s the art of influencing what people think about your business so that it is perceived more the way you want and less the way you don’t want.
A really good brand strategy personalizes your brand, makes it relatable, makes it memorable, inspires fandom, cultivates loyalty, breeds enthusiastic advocates and allows your organization to be more easily forgiven when it makes mistakes.
The 3 steps to develop a brilliant BRAND STRATEGY that has the best odds of ‘beating the market'!
STEP ONE is taking the time for proper CUSTOMER AND COMPETITOR ANALYSIS.
The foundation of a good brand strategy requires a commitment to identifying your TAM, SAM, target audiences, competitors and industry trends. This includes developing buyer personas and a competitive analysis so your team understands how you stack up against competitors: what are your strengths and weaknesses versus competitors? Do they reveal any gaps in your products, pricing, delivery or service that you need to improve?
STEP TWO is crafting your BRAND IDENTITY with defined visuals, messaging and customer experience.
Visual identity comprises the ‘look’ of your brand. It includes your company and product logos, color palette, fonts, commonly used images and other design elements that are all used to create a consistent visual aesthetic across all communications. Companies use what’s called a ‘brand book’ or ‘visual style guide’ to keep visual identity on track.
Message identity is the ‘language’ equivalent of visual identity. Instead of a ‘brand book,’ and is housed in a written document that we call a ‘brand message platform’ (or messaging framework). It’s the foundation underlying all written and verbal expressions of who you are, how you solve your customers’ problems, why you’re the best choice, and what you stand for in the world. Messaging is often overlooked because it’s easier to create fun logos and color palettes than it is to do the deep work required to craft great messaging. But it’s THE key to a great brand and powerful marketing.
Creating your desired customer experience involves identifying and documenting how you want your organization to leave people feeling after every interaction with your company. This can be captured in a few words, e.g., ‘confident, relieved and empowered,’ The bigger challenge is defining HOW you will shape every aspect of your company to consistently evoke this experience. It’s a big task, but is absolutely transformative when done right.
STEP THREE is planning how you will COMMUNICATE YOUR BRAND IDENTITY across all touchpoints.
So, now you have fully developed buyer personas, a clear brand position against your competitors, and a brilliantly created brand identity comprised of a defined visual aesthetic, message platform and customer experience goals.
What’s next is to determine HOW you are going to communicate your brand identity across all company touchpoints. The goal is to create clarity and consistency across all communications. The more clear and consistent your brand is, the more people will be able to remember your brand, relate to your brand and rely on your brand. It’s stock value goes up.
Examples of how you communicate your brand:
Marketing ensures all communications are aligned with visual, message and customer experience guidelines.
Sales teams are coached to include ‘key messages’ from the message platform in all sales communications.
Customer service receives training on how to intentionally create the desired customer experience for people in all verbal and written interactions.
When you’ve completed steps one through three, you will have a solid BRAND STRATEGY that will help keep your company’s stock value high amidst market fluctuations, changing customer sentiment and industry volatility.
When you invest in these steps, you are creating long-term value for your brand. Companies on the stock market that are regarded as a good long-term value share the common trait of delivering above-average performance consistently over time. They strategically invest in continually improving their companies. You can do the same with your brand.
A smart brand strategy is like getting everyone at your company to ‘sing the same song’ about your business. Just like a song that’s getting heavy airplay on the radio, your ‘song’ will be so catchy that it becomes memorable and sticks in people’s heads.
The three-step process to build a brand strategy includes many sub-steps and requires time and dedication to do it right.
If it seems daunting to do it yourself, consider hiring a branding expert (hint... that’s us) to guide you through the process and ensure that your brand’s stock value is more resilient to external narratives, empowering your business to influence and increase its own value over time.
I’d like to hear from you: how would you rank your company’s market value?
