Tag: small business brand experience

What is brand delivery?

brand delivery

Once you’ve created a great branding strategy, it’s time to express it in everything your business does – marketing, design, customer experience, everything.

Giving customers what they expect

One of the most important requirements of brand delivery is consistency. Be sure to reference your brand pillars and promises often to make sure you’re communicating them appropriately every time. When your brand has a distinctive personality and fairly consistent set of attributes, you’ll create and emotional bond and loyalty with your customers.

Consider some of the strongest brands in our society and what they represent — Volvo is known for safety, BOSE for its sound quality, and Apple for its innovation. Some brands have even developed so strongly that they become everyday words, like Google, Band-Aids, and Kleenex. While developing your brand, envision how you want it to be perceived in the marketplace and communicate that through all of your marketing efforts.

Add products and services strategically

Successful brands are often stretched too far, into unrelated or irrelevant markets, or undesirable variations of the existing product or service. Tread carefully – failed expansion efforts can dilute your brand and have a negative effect on identity and reputation. Examples include Jell-O’s launch of celery- and tomato-flavoured gelatines to be used in salads, Pepsi’s launch of PepsiAM — a cola to drink in the mornings, and Colgate’s launch of dinner entrees. Eeeew.

So how can you add products or services while remaining true to your brand? Consider Virgin, one of the largest and most well-known brands in the world. This company has expanded into many industries that are unrelated. However, Richard Branson, the company founder, has been very careful to ensure consistency and personality between these very different brand extensions. Although the company has expanded into completely unrelated industries, the Virgin brand has remained recognizable and successful.

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Defining your small business’ brand experience

In a recent post, we talked about brand pillars and why they’re so important to have in a small business. Because branding is a multi-layered thing, we also wanted to touch on the topic of brand experience.

What is brand experience?

A brand experience is just what it sounds like – every possible interaction between a customer and your brand. This can include several factors:

  • The brand’s performance  – If it meets customers’ needs and performs better than other options available.
  • The brand’s treatment – The way customers are treated when dealing with the small business.
  • The brand’s community –  Whether or not a small business has a connection to its broader customer base.

Of course, as with many things related to branding and marketing, the feelings and emotions of the customer come into play. And for good reason, too – would you want to keep up a relationship with a small business that consistently made you feel dumb, or like a nuisance?

The brand experience is designed to encourage people to return to your small business gladly, to meet the needs and desires of your customers, and to increase customer satisfaction. Take time out to imagine your small business from your customers’ point of view – in what ways do you want to be treated? How do you want your questions answered? If you do have any complaints, what actions do you want your small business to take? Make sure your brand experience is consistent, while keeping up with customers and meeting new and emerging needs. It’s the culmination of all your hard work in developing your brand, so make it good!

What tips do you have for defining your small business’ brand experience?

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