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The woman who just called you about refinishing her hardwood floors has likely done at least one of the following over the course of the day. In fact, it's likely you've done one or more as well:
• Heard the name of a car and immediately thought of a specific value that differentiates it—Volvo means safe, Pontiac means young and sporty, Mercedes means luxury.
• Purchased a new product or service based on name recognition and trust in a certain company.
• Said a brand name to describe a category of products—asked for a Coke or offered a Kleenex.
Be it a family, a general contractor or a property management company, your customers make their buying decisions in a world awash in brands and branding.
But what is a brand? While you can find many complicated definitions of the term, I prefer to keep it simple: A brand is the perception that a specific audience has of a business, organization, product or individual. In a sense, the brand answers the question:What do I want my customers to envision when they think of my company?
An ideal brand does three primary things:
1) It communicates a positive, accurate and credible image of your company in terms of benefits to the target market.
2) It differentiates your company from competing companies.
3) It gives the target market a reason to do business with your company instead of your competitors.
Wood flooring contractors are small and mid-sized businesses with small and typically inadequate marketing budgets. But that doesn't mean a contractor can't use branding to boost sales. If you're spending money on marketing—even if it's just for business cards, a simple Web site and Yellow Pages advertising—you might as well enhance the effectiveness of this investment by focusing on delivering the one message and creating the one image that will help your company, i.e., the brand.
A brand consists of several elements, all of which work together to create an impression in the mind of everyone who comes into contact with your company:
- Company name
- Logo and visual identity
- Company colors and other visual elements that are always present in all company communications
- Theme line
- A set of three or four messages that you always want to convey when you communicate about your company.
No organization can expect to establish its brand in the marketplace overnight. But, once a brand has been established, it is equally difficult to dislodge it. For that reason, it is never advisable to attempt to establish a position that a competitor holds in the marketplace. Rather, you must forge your own, recognizable place in the market.
There are two parts to the branding process: You must create the brand and then communicate the brand to your target market—your customers and prospects. It's the same process for a billion-dollar company as for a small business, but because the small business has fewer resources, it must approach the process in a different way from the multinational behemoth.
Creating the Brand
The first step in developing the elements of the brand is to learn about customer expectations, competitors' branding efforts and your corporate culture.
Large companies sometimes spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on focus groups, sophisticated surveys and computerized name-generation programs when developing a brand. As a small business owner, however, you probably can't afford such a budget. Here are some low-cost ways to do consumer research:
• Define in writing your target market or desired target market. Is it limited to one part of town that has its own peculiarities, e.g., 90-year-old homes or new, luxury townhouses? Is it primarily home ownersor builders or a mix? How upscale are the customers or the homes?
• Conduct a short survey of customers. Ask 10 or12 customers in each important market segment a few basic questions such as:
1) Why did you select our company? (Some answers: quality, reputation, most organized, references,technology, liked the salesperson)
2) What did you like most about working with us?
3) How important were factors other than price in making your decision?
4) What initially attracted you to the company? (Ad,flyer, friends)
The results of this survey should be distilled to one page.
• Collect all the material that your competitors use, paying closest attention to their names, theme lines and logos.
• Have a short meeting with your staff to discuss what they think are the strengths and weaknesses of the business and what they think customers think about your company. The results of this meeting should be summarized to one page.
• Scan magazines and select logos that you like. This information will guide you in creating the basic building blocks of the brand, your logo and theme line (we assume you already have a company name). The objective is to develop a logo that appeals to the target audience, differentiates your company from competitors and reflects your company's style.
The logo is the core of the visual identity, and it's your first tangible step to creating your brand. There are five types of logos:
- Logotype. The name is written or drawn in a special or unique way or in a special or unique type. Examples: Coca-Cola, Xerox.
- Monogram. The name is simplified, usually as an acronym. This simplification is for identification purposes only and does not affect the legal name of the company. Examples: IBM, TRW, NASA.
- Typograph. A graphic shape or image is added to the name. Examples: The three Adidas stripes, the Pepsi bottle cap, the French's Mustard flag.
- Pictograph. The use of a familiar image drawn in a special way. Examples: The Merrill Lynch bull, the CBS eye.
- Symbol. The creation of an interesting shape that symbolically suggests the company and its activities but does not have a direct relation to them. Examples: The AT&T ball, the Mercedes Benz three-pointed star.
Whatever the type, all successful logos have one thing in common: They are all sleek and simple, without too much detail. Detail may not reproduce well on a business card or the third time a document is copied or faxed.
More importantly, the public has come to expect logos to be sleek, and when they're not, most consumers will think the company is less professional. A logo with a lot of detail cries out, "I'm an amateur," and, even though it maybe only the logo that's amateurish, in some deep, TV commercial-driven recess of the customers' minds, they will wonder if the company also is amateurish. Or, perhaps they will think the competitor with a simpler, more graphic logo is more professional than your company.
After you have developed your logo,you must create your theme line. A theme line is a short, frequently clever phrase that distills the benefit you provide your target market. The theme line is used in conjunction with the logo as the primary firm identifier in advertising and brochures. Through repetition in marketing material, the theme line reinforces the association of an organization with the position. "When it absolutely positively has to be there" and "Bringing good things to life" are examples of theme lines that immediately call to mind both a consumer product and a value linked to that product.
Good theme lines tend to be short and specific. If your theme line describes many products or services, it usually will be less effective than if it only describes what you offer. Thus,"quality workmanship" is less effective than "quality hardwood workmanship,"because companies in many industries can provide quality workmanship.
Communicating the Brand
Many large and small companies make the mistake of allocating substantial resources to creating a brand and few resources to communicating it. A company can employ a broad range of marketing vehicles to communicate a brand: brochures, cards and stationery,Yellow Pages and other print and online directory advertising, promotional items like pens and key chains, sponsorship of nonprofit events, Web sites, emails, and print, broadcast, online and billboard advertising.
While it's impossible to discuss every aspect of marketing communications, here are some general guidelines I've developed through 25 years of advising small businesses on brand communication:
- Know your budget and stick to it.
- Unify all marketing by placing your branding elements on all marketing material, no matter what.
- When evaluating marketing vehicles, try to ascertain how much it will cost to make one impression on each person in your target market with that vehicle. That way, you can compare vehicles and determine which one is most cost-effective for your company. But, be very careful to measure the people reached in your target market, not all the people reached by the vehicle. For example, if you buy a radio spot for $100 that reaches 5,000 people one time, but only 1,500 people in the only neighborhood you serve, you are paying 6.6 cents per impression ($100 divided by 1,500).
- In today's world, you must have a Web site, as well as a small brochure and business cards. Many consumers, especially upscale consumers, and virtually all businesses use Web sites as a primary means to gather information when making any major purchase.
Getting It Done
A hardwood flooring contractor can use several resources to create and communicate the company brand. My advice is to use the combination of resources that most cost-effectively obtains your marketing objectives:
• Do it yourself. The question is, are you the right person? Probably not to design a logo, no matter how adept you are at combining clip art with words to create electronic Christmas cards. But, you might be able to conduct the research that should go into branding. And, you probably can write down your basic messages—the three sentences that you want customers and prospects to remember about your business.
• Hire a young professional still in or just out of school. Be it a designer or a copywriter, the young professional is hungry, has the software, databases or other necessary tools and will work for cheap. But, will you like what will be a product of inexperience?
• Hire an established professional or agency. The seasoned professional or agency has solved the problem before and has a great deal of experience translating business needs into creative solutions. But, will you have to pay more? Is it worth it? It might be worth the money to have an established agency create a logo, which is an original work of art. But the young professional will charge a lot less to take that logo and paste it up into letterhead or incorporate it into one-page flyers.
If you decide to use an agency, size doesn't matter, as long as the agency is willing to provide you with only those services you need at a price you can afford. You also want to make sure that the agency assigns a seasoned professional to your business and not a young professional just hired.
Whether working with a young professional or an established agency,make certain that the product can be adapted and used in the future. For example, if a designer creates a logo and you intend to create one-page flyers that use the logo, stipulate that you must obtain the logo in a format that you can import into whatever software program you are using for the flyers.
Consumers aren't Pavlov's dogs salivating at each mention or sight of a brand. But over time, consumers connect a company and its primary brand identifiers such as the logo and theme line with a specific value or message. That connection is a powerful force that will increase the effectiveness of your marketing, lead to greater recognition among your customer base and result in more sales for your company.