Strong Brands Build Strong Businesses—How’s your brand?

Ask ten small business owners “What is a brand?” and typically you get a listing of actual brands, “Coke, Mercedes, Nike.”  The question, however, wasn’t name a brand but rather, “What IS a brand.”  For most people—even longtime business people—defining a brand is quite like the famous Supreme Court Justices’ definition of pornography, “You just know it when you see it.”  Unfortunately, branding is too important an element of business success to leave as some amorphous concept.  In fact, branding is one of the single most powerful tools for building a strong business.

Specifically, building a powerful brand builds a strong, salable business.  “Salable” because the business brand is so recognizable to a market segment that the brand, by itself, has value.  What this means is that the brand becomes more important than the business owner or operator.  And, as Michael Gerber, famous entrepreneurial trainer and business consultant says, “The goal of any business is to build it and sell it—for a profit!”  Without a brand, very often the business owner is the only one that can make the operation a success.  Therefore, a business with no brand often becomes a ball and chain around an owner’s neck versus a vehicle for financial freedom.

Every business owner or operator that wants to improve their likelihood of success needs to understand what a brand is and then, more importantly, go about building a strong brand.  According to the book, Brand Driven, “a brand is the sum total of every experience a customer has with a company or product—a sum total that customers begin to think of as the promise of the brand.”  What they meant by this very broad definition is that every single aspect of a companies business, from physical facilities to customer service, to product or program development, to management, to sales and marketing, helps to either define or dilute a brand.  Therefore, if all aspects of a business are not working towards the same objective, a true brand can never be created.

For example, if your facility advertises a beginner friendly environment for new exercisers but then doesn’t offer appropriate equipment, programs or services that deliver on that promise, the “brand” you were trying to create in the consumers mind would be diluted.  Similarly, if your facility is known for one-on-one attention and, because of new competition you decided to offer a less-expensive membership that didn’t include any one-on-one attention, the brand would be diluted.  Unfortunately, these type of diluting experiences happen too often in all businesses.  Of course, it’s not that a business intentionally wants to give the customer an incongruent message that potentially dilutes or damages their image or brand; it is simply that they don’t necessarily see the problem because they were reacting to an opportunity or crisis situation that arose without a clear “end product” in mind.

What is meant by an “end product” is that a business must clearly know what they want to be known for.  This requires identifying three things:  One, the businesses 5 core values; two, their vision statement, and; three, their mission statement.  Answering those three questions is probably the most critical aspect of creating a branding platform to grow a business upon.

Core values are those attributes that everything your company does is filtered through.  For instance, one of Healthy Inspirations is “caring.”  As a result, any time we are considering a new program, a policy or a marketing campaign, we ask ourselves, “Does this create or convey that we care?”  If the answer is no, unless it meets our other 4 core values, we probably won’t move forward with that idea.

A vision statement is a sentence that sums up where your company wants to be in 5-10 years.  Healthy Inspirations vision statement is “To be a household name in healthy weight loss by 2009.”  As you can see, the statement is short but clear, allowing employees to easily remember the vision and members and prospects to easily understand.

A mission statement, often confused with a vision statement, conveys the process by which a company intends on achieving their vision statement.  With the earlier example, Healthy Inspirations will achieve becoming a household name in healthy weight loss by “Inspiring women to change their lives.”  Like core values, everything a company does should be filtered through their mission and vision statements.  Therefore, anytime our company embarks on anything with the program, we must ask ourselves, “Is this inspiring?”  Having a clear set of core values, a vision statement and a mission statement gives a business a clear direction of where they are going and a filtering system by which to evaluate all future business decisions.

Once a business is clear on their direction, hence what their intended brand will convey, the next step is evaluating all the literal aspects of the day to day operation to make sure the brand is correctly being supported.  Physical facilities are a big part of branding.  Think about McDonalds, Starbucks or any other national chain.  When you walk into their facility—even if you didn’t see any signage—you would know what business you were in.  Every piece of furniture, ever machine, every decoration reflects their brand and is consistent from location to location.  Of course, color schemes and signage are consistent as well.  Even if you have one facility, the physical aspects of branding are critical.  If your surroundings don’t reflect your brand, their will be an immediate inconsistency within the minds of prospects and customer.

The next areas to evaluate are programs and services.  If one of the businesses core values is “education,” but a decision is made to cut out new member orientations in an effort to bolster personal training, a major brand inconsistency would happen.  Look at each member program, each customer service policy, all member materials and employee training guidelines to ensure that the brand is being supported, not diluted.

After the nuts and bolts of facilities, programs and services, the final area to evaluate is marketing materials.  Of course, marketing materials are critical to both the creating and support of a brand because you can have wonderfully branded facilities, programs and services but if your marketing materials aren’t conveying the right branded message, disaster looms.  Sadly, although critical, marketing is the area where most fitness operators make their biggest mistakes.  This happens for several reasons.  First, lack of clarity as to what their brand really is.  Two, lack of professional marketing services monitoring the brand, and; three, lack of a pre-established marketing plan, which results in knee-jerk marketing decisions and last minute materials being developed.  Although there are dozens of minor details involved in branding marketing materials, two critical areas are logo and advertising design.  Let’s discuss both.

A companies logo, referred to in the graphics world as an ID (identifier), is one of the most identifying aspects of the brand.  Without even a name, one sees the “swoosh” on an item of clothing and knows that the brand is Nike.  Certainly Nike has spent millions, if not billions of dollars creating such logo awareness, but they wouldn’t have been successful if they didn’t follow some basic branding principles.  Is your logo unique or is it the result of clip art that was easily available in the early days of the business?  Is the logo up to date (modern) in terms of look?  (Look at a brand like Coka-Cola and you will see font and slight design progressions over the years.)  Do the colors reflect the brand being created?  Is the overall design and font of the logo appealing to the market you are trying to reach?  Do you consistently use the logo—including the font—in all your materials?  If, because of the size or design, it is impossible to always use one format, do you have second and third layout options that are used consistently.  For example, because of the size of our name and the ID, Healthy Inspirations have 4 different logo layouts, but all are consistent and convey the same image.  If you answered “no” to any of these questions, you may want to hire a professional graphic designer.

Once there is brand consistency with the logo, the next area to evaluate is the marketing materials.  Oh, sure, the logo is part of the marketing materials but there is much more that needs to be consistent with the brand.  Whether it be a newspaper ads, brochures, flyers, note cards or even business cards, there needs to be a consistent design theme throughout.  Secondary colors, secondary and third level fonts, borders and even placement of where a logo goes all are important.  Any branding expert will tell you, “If you take five ads and put them in front of the consumer while covering up the logos, will they know which one is your company simply by the design elements?”  If the answer is “no,” then you’re not branding your materials.

Building a strong brand is an often overlooked but critical part of building a strong business.  This article was meant to provide you with a very cursory overview of the topic but also provide you with some specifics that you can immediately go back and use as part of an evaluation.  If you facilities, services and marketing aren’t conveying the brand you want, or if you aren’t even sure about what brand you want to convey, now is the perfect time to begin the process.  Begin educating yourself with branding books and involve your management team in the process.  In the end, not only will you have a better product but you will have a more valuable and salable business model.