Building your brand increases your business’ value
People often ask me how developing a brand will help their business. As a concept, I think it may be easier to see why big companies create brands and the benefits of it. But it can be more difficult to understand why it’s relevant to your specific business or organisation. Or why you should invest the time or money in building your brand.
Luckily I found this brilliant blog post earlier this week from Seth Godin (marketing guru) which explains it perfectly. I won’t repeat his full post as you can read it here. However, he explains the hierarchy of value and how this affects consumer choice.
I’m going to use this hierarchy to show you how having a clear brand framework can help you build more value into your business. Value that your customers or ideal clients will pay more for.
(And if you don’t know what a brand framework looks like, find out here).
Here is Seth’s value pyramid.
At the bottom is FUNCTION. Function is basically making sure your product or service does what it’s supposed to. If 2 businesses offer exactly the same function, customers will usually choose the cheapest. And it does make sense – if both work, and offer nothing else, why would you pay more?
So, if you don’t want to have to rely on being the cheapest, you need to offer more value. You need to offer more than just doing what your business is supposed to. And this pyramid shows you what that more value means.
The first step in adding more value is providing CONNECTION. This is all about building an emotional relationship with your target customers. That means showing that you understand your customers and reassuring them so they trust you.
People will pay more for what you offer if they connect with you. And building your brand can help you increase this connection with your customers.
If you create a strong brand personality, it will call out to the people you will most connect with. If you define your values and live by them, it will help your customers trust you and they will know that you’re the brand for people like them.
Back to our pyramid. What if there are two businesses that offer equal connection? Then STYLE is what sets them apart. And again, developing your brand can help.
If your branding is attractive, appealing and stands out to your customer and you create a brilliant experience to back it up, it creates even more value in the eyes of your customers.
(Obviously this is as well as, not instead of, connecting with them).
Are you with me so far? Ok, good.
So at the top of the pyramid is NOW. Now is about offering something that is new, exciting, never been seen before and/or totally current.
So how can your brand help you offer the now, the latest thing? By using your purpose as a filter and inspiration for innovation.
It’s not about chasing trends that are irrelevant to you or technological advancements that don’t make sense (e.g. Apple and their headphone jack fail). If you can tap into why you exist, it will help you offer what you do best in a new and exciting way.
If you want practical help with defining your brand as well as tools and techniques to help you deliver it, get in contact and let’s see how we can help.
