Your brand is your reputation.
BRAND DEVELOPMENT establishes it.
What is a brand?
A brand answers the question who are you? When thinking of a person, it includes your name and what you look like, but we would all agree that we are far more. When asked who are you, of course we respond with our name, but when pressed, we might start describing what we do, what our values are, our interests, our family, and more. This full picture of our identity is critically valuable to us, but especially as it becomes known to others. Once known, our identity begins to represent our reputation. We all wish to have a good reputation: friendly, trustworthy, honest. Individually, we do our best to establish and maintain our reputation. When it is harmed, we earnestly try to reestablish it. All of this is relevant when speaking about the brand of a company. At a glance, we identify a brand by name or a logo. But this is not what makes a brand valuable.What makes a brand valuable?
To understand this, the story of the Nike logo is a great example. Back in 1971, a graphic design student named Carolyn Davidson created the logo we now know as the Nike ‘swoosh’. She was directed by one of the Nike founders, Phil Knight (her accounting professor) to create a logo that would represent movement, and selected one of Carolyn’s designs inspired by the wings of the Greek goddess Nike.
The original nike logo
Brand Development
Brand development is the strategic process of making a company distinguished. Making our company’s image, products, and services identifiable among our competitors. It is about communicating our brand to our target market, and then continually managing and strengthening our reputation. Just like with personal relationships, communicating our brand successfully makes others ‘want to be your friend’. In the business world, this translates to establishing customer loyalty. So how does a company create and establish a brand?Do the research
Know thyself
The book Good to Great, by Jim Collins (read this!), argues that a company should be like a hedgehog. A hedgehog has one move it does really well. It doesn’t run or hide or even try to be clever. When it is in danger a hedgehog rolls itself into a spiky ball. Every single time. It has one effective move it has perfected, and it sticks with it consistently. Too many companies try to be all things to all customers and end up doing a bunch of things poorly rather than one thing really well. The research shows that companies that take the time to determine their own Hedgehog concept outperform their market rivals ten fold. Every company should establish a concept for their business that sits in the middle of 3 questions:- What are we deeply passionate about?
- What can we be the best in the world at?
- What drives our economic engine?

Know thy customer
When trying to make friends, it is important to find common interests. This means determining what is important to the other person, and seeing how that fits with our own values. It is the same with a company. Instead of telling customers what they need, we need to ask “what do our customers want”? Then we determine how to deliver those desires. Identifying this helps us create a brand strategy. To do so, we might ask questions like:- What is our company’s personality?
- Who is our target customer?
- How do we make our customers feel?
- Why do our customers trust us?
- Who are our competitors?
- What makes us different from our competitors?
- What problems do we solve for our customers?
Determining Our Target Audience
Now it is time to identify who is most likely to buy our products or services. Who are these people? What do they have in common? The more clearly we identify our customer, the easier we can determine how best to attract them to our brand. Reaching your target audience may involve creating content for them, delivering targeted advertising, or communicating directly with them through interviews and surveys.Brand Positioning
Brand positioning means establishing a distinctive place for our company in the market. It ensures we are distinct from our competition. This is done by creating a marketing strategy that attracts customers in a unique and distinct way. For example, more than 100 years ago a soda company established itself as the ‘original’. It offered a product entirely new for the time: cola. It established its brand as unique among beverages, and still holds a position as the ‘original’ Coca-cola. Positioning a brand in a target market means determining:- What your customers want
- Your brand capabilities
- Your competitors brand positioning
Brand Messaging
Once you know your brand well, you are in a position to communicate it well. It should be possible to communicate the entire essence of your business in one tagline.
Brand Taglines
Promoting your Brand
You probably started reading this thinking that it was all about logos. Not so. But now that we have a full understanding of brand management, we can talk abou the tools that communicate a brand well.Logo
Your logo is a concise, simple, holistic representation of your company. It should be eye-catching and memorable. It should be unique and informative. It should be used liberally so that it becomes recognizable.Website
If your logo is your face, your website is your head. It allows you to communicate with your customers through content and visual media. We use mirrors to ensure we don’t have something on our face: we want to look attractive. In the same way, our website speaks volumes not only through what it says, but how it looks, and how it works. In every way, we want our website to reflect the unique good impression we are trying to establish with our brand.Marketing Materials
Marketing materials might include business cards, greeting cards, signs, displays, sell sheets, mailers, and displays. Once you have determined effective methods of reaching your customers, it is important to have appropriate materials to give your company credibility and reach your target audience directly.